Alessandro Piccolomini

Alessandro Piccolomini (1508 to 1579) was an Italian humanist, astronomer and philosopher from Siena who worked to bring Latin and Greek scientific and philosophical treatises into the vernacular. A member of the Sienese Accademia degli Intronati, he helped found the Infiammati Academy at Padua in 1540 and lectured there on philosophy, while also writing comedies, a hundred sonnets and many translations from the classics. His Sfera del mondo and De le stelle fisse of 1540 followed Ptolemaic theory, and the second contained what is generally regarded as the first printed star atlas, with Roman letters marking the stars as a forerunner of Bayer's Greek letter system. In his Trattato della grandezza della terra e dell'acqua of 1558 he opposed the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic view that water was more extensive than land. He translated and commented on Aristotle's Poetics and paraphrased the Rhetoric, proposed a calendar reform for Cosimo de' Medici in 1578, and from 1574 was titular bishop of Patras and coadjutor archbishop of Siena.