The Versions of Vincenzo Viviani’s Library

Abstract

In 1702 Florentine mathematician and engineer Vincenzo Viviani (1622-1703) signed the end of a 234-page manuscript that listed nearly 2000 titles of works in his library. The material spanned manuscripts, incunables, and print volumes published through 1702. Since Viviani had fashioned himself as the final student of Galileo Galilei (1564-1643), the manuscript was used in the late-nineteenth century as a source for re-identifying editions of books in Galileo’s library. Using the manuscript, the digital library of Viviani’s collection created by the Museo Galileo in 2021, and a tabularized edition of the manuscript, this article provides an overview of the library and explores the strengths of each type of source for learning more about Viviani’s books and for understanding him as both an intellectual and bibliophile. The authors argue that the comparative approach offers a way to access features of the collection that are not revealed by any representation in isolation, and we advocate for future web-based projects to integrate digital surrogates of the primary source material and make the underlying data available to facilitate this kind of research.