Introduction

Francesco Piccolomini (1523–1607) studied at the University of Siena, where he also began his distinguished career as a professor of philosophy (1546–9), before moving on to teach first at Macerata (1549–50) and then at Perugia (1550–60). For almost forty years (1560–98) he taught at the University of Padua, the most important centre of Aristotelian studies in Italy, attaining the senior chair in natural philosophy in 1565. Through his courses on the Physics, De anima, De caelo and De generatione et corruptione, he achieved considerable eminence and renown (not to mention a salary higher than that paid to any previous philosophy professor). His fame attracted students from outside Italy, though the bulk of his audience was composed of young men from the Venetian patriciate. Torquato Tasso, who heard Piccolomini lecture at Padua, described him as ‘a veritable sea and ocean of all learning’. Surprisingly, the first work to be published under his name, A Comprehensive Philosophy of Morals, appeared when he was sixty years old and dealt with a subject, ethics, on which he never lectured. In 1596 he published an equally encyclopedic work in his own field of natural philosophy, followed in 1600 by a philosophical dictionary, containing some 120 terms. After his retirement in 1598, he returned to Siena, where he continued to produce works on Aristotelian philosophy; his commentaries on De generatione et corruptione and De anima came out in 1602, and on the Physics in 1606, the year before his death.