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BALDI, BERNARDINO(b. Urbino, Italy, 5 June
1553; d. Urbino, 10 October 1617), mechanics.
After a classical education by private tutors at
Urbino, Baldi studied mathematics with Guido
Ubaldo del Monte, under Federico Commandino,
beginning about 1570. At Commandino's suggestion
he translated the Automata of Hero of Alexandria into
Italian, but left it unpublished until 1589. He also
translated the Phenomena of Aratus of Soli and wrote
didactic poems on the invention of artillery and the
nautical compass, but did not publish them. In 1573
he enrolled at the University of Padua, and when it
was closed shortly afterward because of plague, Baldi
returned to Urbino. He was with Commandino during
the latter's final illness in 1575, and obtained from
him an account of his life. Baldi's studies at Padua
centered on philology and literature, but he obtained
no degree.
In 1580 Baldi went to Mantua in the service of
Ferrante II Gonzaga, who in 1585 secured him the
post of abbot of Guastalla. He then put in order his
biographies of some 200 mathematicians, a work
conceived during the writing of Commandino's biography
and completed in 1588-1589. About that time
he also wrote his principal contribution to physics, a
commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Questions of
Mechanics, posthumously published in 1621. In 1589
he published his translation of Hero's Automata,
prefaced by a history of mechanics.
Baldi visited Urbino in 1601 to compile materials
for a life of Federico di Montefeltro, and in 1609 he
resigned his abbacy to enter the service of the duke
of Urbino as historian and biographer, remaining
there until his death. A vast work on geography on
which he worked in his later years remains unpublished,
although many of his poetic and literary compositions
were printed in his lifetime. His final scientific
contribution was a translation of Hero's
Belopoeica into Latin, accompanied by the Greek text
and by Baldi's Latin Life of Hero (1616). Brief extracts
from his lives of the mathematicians were published
in 1707, and about forty of those biographies
have since been published in full. Most of the work,
however, remains in manuscript.
Except for that of Henri de Monantheuil, with
which Baldi was certainly unacquainted, Baldi's commentary
on the Questions of Mechanics was the most
important work of its kind to appear up to that time.
He was probably influenced in his ideas on the continuance
of motion by the earlier commentary of
Alessandro Piccolomini. His account of dynamic
equilibrium in spinning tops was superior to that of
G. B. Benedetti, with whose principal work he appears
to have been unfamiliar. The most significant aspect
of Baldi's approach to mechanics lay in the development
and application of the concept of centers of
gravity, particularly with regard to stable and unstable
equilibrium. It was the opinion of Pierre
Duhem that Baldi drew his chief ideas from manuscripts
of Leonardo da Vinci. Duhem accepted the year
1582 for the original composition of Baldi's commentary,
as given by Baldi's first biographer. That date is,
however, inconsistent with passages in Baldi's own
preface and in the text of the work, which imply the
year 1589. The latter year is also supported by textual
indications that Baldi's principal inspiration was
drawn from Commandino's translation of Pappus and
from Guido Ubaldo's commentary on the Plane Equilibrium
of Archimedes, both of which were published
in 1588. The influence of Baldi's work was doubtless
diminished by its delay in publication until after the
Archimedean ideal had largely supplanted the Aristotelian
among students of mechanics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. ORIGINAL WORKS.
An essentially complete bibliography
of Baldi's published works is given in Pierre