Tommaso Baglioni

Tommaso Baglioni is connected to two other works on astronomy, printed at a time when his status as printer was less irregular, but his cultural network maintained the same reputation. Those works were Cesare Cremonini’s treatise on the motions of the heavens and Giulio Cesare LaGalla’s response to the Sidereus nuncius. The rebellious, Venetian Cremonini’s association with Baglioni is less surprising than LaGalla’s. LaGalla was born in the southern province of Salerno, near Naples, and was a professor of Aristotelian philosophy at the Collegio Romano and la Sapienza who published all of his several other works in Rome. Suddenly a narrative worthy of investigation develops around Lagalla’s connection to Baglioni in Venice, brokered through considerable effort on behalf of his social network, particularly so soon after the 1606 expulsion of the Jesuits from the Veneto. The choice of printer places much emphasis on the value of that association for the dispute and perhaps reinforces historians’ suspicions that LaGalla desired to leave Rome. Modern scholarship has rather unquestioningly listed Baglioni as the printer; seeing him in this Galilean network brings to light the potential value placed on him that has not survived in correspondence or other documentation.

Gephi rendering of books in Galileo's library connected to Tommaso Baglioni.

Gephi rendering of books in Galileo’s library connected to Tommaso Baglioni.

This is one instance where examining a visualization of this print network can indicate paths of research that merit further attention, but putting the books into a database to use with a software application like Gephi has also brought to my attention to the kinds of books for which specific information is not detailed enough to allow a title to be counted in this way.

All books in the collection

Works of astronomy

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