Lorenzo Magalotti
[1] Magalotti started off as one of the most ardent followers of Galileo Galilei[2] but was increasingly distressed by the personal rivalries among the individual members, which constantly undermined the academy's dedication to collective research.
The astronomers of the Cimento succeeded in providing the first sustained confirmation of Christiaan Huygens's discoveries: Saturn's rings.
On 20 May 1660, Lorenzo Magalotti had replaced Segni, and a few years later he wrote the only publication of the academy, the Saggi di naturali Esperienze ("Essays on Natural Experiments").
Alessandro Marchetti, Marcello Malpighi, an anatomist, and Antonio Vallisneri, a physician, Vincenzo da Filicaja, Benedetto Menzini, both poets, Francesco Redi, a "microbiologist", Viviani, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, a physicist, and Carlo Renaldini, an astronomer regularly attended its meetings.
Members performed numerous experiments, in the fields of thermometry, barometry, pneumatics, the velocity of sound and light, phosphorescence, magnetism, amber and other electrical bodies, the freezing of water, etc.
The Norman astronomer Adrien Auzout, inventor of a device for measuring planetary diameters, arrived in 1668, fresh from a quarrel with Jean-Baptiste Colbert and armed with a letter from Magalotti, who by then had become Leopoldo's main talent scout abroad.
As early as 1664 he had been appointed to the commission charged with supervising the decoration of Palazzo Pitti and from then on, until his death he made a point of getting to know all the practising artists of the city.
In 1665, he held a wide-ranging interview with the Jesuit missionary Johann Grueber that became one of Europe's chief sources on Tibet for much of the next century.
Magalotti had met Sir John Finch and Henry Neville, he had improved his English and with his boyhood friend Paolo Falconieri, an architect, he made plans to visit Northern Europe.
The duke took his lodgings in a house at Keizersgracht, keen on keeping a private life, living with the Tuscan merchant and slave-trader Francisco Ferroni.
Johan de Witt saved Cosimo from a boring conversation with some Amsterdam burgomasters and introduced him to some nice-looking young ladies.
The duke paid a visit to Gerrit van Uylenburgh, who owned part of the collection by Gerard Reynst.
Dutch scientists and collectioners Franciscus Sylvius, Frederik Ruysch, Jan Swammerdam[13] and probably Theodor Kerckring and Nicolaes Witsen showed them their cabinet of curiosities.
He was shocked to see how much money the English spent on cock fights and how much mess was still leftover from the Great Fire of London.
A lecture demonstration by Robert Hooke, as well as a warm reception by the secretary, Henry Oldenburg, quickly overcame their initial disappointment in finding the society somewhat less formally organised than they had expected.
[21] Because Cosimo's wife, the beautiful, vivacious, headstrong and thoroughly spoiled Marguerite Louise d'Orléans was as intractable as ever, he headed on 18 September, from Livorno for another journey to Spain.
From Barcelona they travelled to Madrid where he spent a month; It is supposed the 8-year-old Carlos II, by then hardly able to speak and walk, received him in a private interview.
Its learning was hopelessly out of touch with the rest of Europe; its religion consisted largely of elaborate processions, gaudy reliquaries, and fables.
The Prince and his court left the Portuguese territory from Caminha on 1 March, travelling on a ship that would take them to Galicia, Spain.
[29] Count Magalotti visited Exeter, and wrote of over thirty thousand people being employed in the county of Devon as part of the wool and cloth industries, merchandise that was sold to "the West Indies, Spain, France and Italy".
Falconieri presented to the Royal Society in London and to Charles II of England, copies of the newly printed reports of experimental science in Florence, Saggi di naturali esperienze.
[32] In England he made a number of good friends, including Isaac Newton; among the over one hundred distinguished persons who came to call on him was Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, who became his correspondent.
He met Coenraad van Beuningen and the liberal Charles de Saint-Evremond, whose essays and poetry Magalotti was to study so attentively in later years.
For instance, Cosimo aspired to convert England, northern Germany and India to Catholicism, batter the Ottoman Empire by land and by sea, and establish permanent commercial relations with Persia.
He visited Brussels, Cologne, the United Provinces, Hamburg, Copenhagen and Stockholm in 1673/1674 as a Tuscan ambassador to the Imperial court of the Holy Roman Empire in Vienna.
