In 1610, shortly before moving to Florence, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) told his new patrons at the Medici court that he had finished a new book on the motions of animals. Unfortunately, Galileo’s text did not survive the hurdles of history. Still, his reference to this monograph reveals the liveliness of animal motion research almost a century before the publication of Giovanni Borelli’s De motu animalium (Rome, 1680–81)—the most famous early modern work on the topic. As it turns out, Galileo was not the only one interested in these questions. The anatomist Fabricius d’Acquapendente (1533–1619), Galileo’s senior colleague at the University of Padua and the mentor of William Harvey, had also been writing on the topic. At around the same time, a significant book on the architecture of the Temple of Solomon was published by the Jesuit mathematician Juan Bautista Villalpando in Rome. Strikingly, it also contained new ideas about animal motion. Using printed and manuscript sources from early modern anatomy, mathematics, and architecture, this talk will map the knowledge and networks behind the interest in animal motion in the time of Galileo. By intersecting the worlds of art, science, and medicine, this talk will show that the early interest in animal motion played a foundational role in the mathematization of nature well before Descartes.

Dr Nuno Castel-Branco is a Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He completed his PhD in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University in 2021 after earning a Master’s in theoretical physics at the University of Lisbon. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His first book, The Traveling Anatomist: Nicolaus Steno and the Intersection of Disciplines in Early Modern Science, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in the summer of 2025. He is currently working the ideas and networks behind early modern interest in animal motion. His research has appeared in journals like Isis, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, Annals of Science, and Renaissance Quarterly.