Antonio Nardi (1598 – c. 1648) was a Tuscan man of letters known for his geometrical work with Galileo Galilei and his disciples, Michelangelo Ricci and Evangelista Torricelli.
[1] It was there that he likely came into contact with Galileans like Benedetto Castelli, who held a chair in mathematics at Pisa and was a longtime friend and supporter of Galileo.
In the 1630s, Nardi became active in a group of Castelli's students in Rome that included Evangelista Torricelli, Michelangelo Ricci, and Raffaello Magiotti.
Nardi, along with Torricelli and Magiotti, wrote a number of letters to Galileo praising his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and faulting its detractors after its publication in 1632.
[3] This plan appears, however, to have fallen through when Galileo died in 1642 shortly after the death of Nardi's other patron, Cardinal di Bagno.
Ms. 130 represents the culmination of Nardi's work, combining his geometrical material with subject matter from almost every field of learning from theology to philology.
[5] What is strange about the work, however, is that it seems to lack any kind of organization, jumping indifferently between ruminating on Aristotelian philosophy and commenting on Montaigne's Essays.