Bernardino Baldi

Bernardino Baldi (1553 to 1617) was an Italian mathematician, poet, translator and priest, born at Urbino in the Marche into a noble family. He studied at Padua until the plague forced him home, became tutor to Ferrante Gonzaga, who gave him the rich abbey of Guastalla, and held office as abbot for twenty five years before returning to Urbino, where in 1612 the duke sent him as envoy to Venice. He completed the oldest biography of Nicolaus Copernicus in 1588. He is said to have spoken about sixteen languages and to have written upwards of a hundred works, mostly unpublished, showing his abilities as theologian, mathematician, geographer, antiquary, historian and poet. His Cronica dei Matematici, lives of mathematicians from antiquity to his own time, was conceived in emulation of Vasari's Lives, and his book On Automatons appeared in Venice in 1589.