Abstract

The brief life of the Accademia del Cimento (1657–1667), the first known society with a purely experimental programme,11 Over the period of a year and a half in 2020–2021, I had the honor to join the European-funded research group Tacitroots under the direction of Professor Giulia Giannini, at the Università Statale di Milano. My task was to research the instruments of the Accademia del Cimento through the lens of social and cultural history. I therefore approached these instruments as cultural products, investigating the agencies that shaped them: specifically, I was interested in the processes involved in their design and construction. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101025015. is entangled with the most surprising advancements in the history of scientific instruments of that century, from the telescope to the microscope, the thermometer to the barometer, the hygrometer to the pendulum as a time-regulator, and more. The making of instruments at the Florentine court shows the interaction of princely, scholarly and artisanal actors. This paper explores this collaboration and shows how the supposed “invisibility’ of artisans depended on their proximity to the academicians and princes, who mainly communicated verbally with them, directly or through middlemen. The visibility of artisans increases proportionally to their physical distance from the Court. In this essay I unveil the identity of the artisans of the Cimento and, finally, attempt to attribute five instruments (some lost and others still extant) to specific makers, shedding light also on relations between the artisan and his patron.