Reading Dürer in late sixteenth-century Padua: Matteo Macigni (ca. 1510-82), his library, and the annotated Institutionum geometricarum (Paris, 1535)

This article contributes to the history of material culture and intellectual biography by definitively identifying the Paduan scholar Matteo Macigni (c.1510-82) as the author of the annotations found in a 1535 copy of Albrecht Dürer’s Institutionum geometricarum. The attribution rests on bibliographic and palaeographic sources. By analysing this discovery, this research recovers Macigni’s identity as a key, though understudied, figure in the Republic of Letters, shedding light on the specific intellectual milieu of the late sixteenth-century Paduan Studio. Macigni’s annotated copy – alongside his annotated copy of Daniele Barbaro’s La pratica della perspettiva – demonstrates his profound and systematic engagement with theoretical geometry and its applications in architecture and optics. This study illuminates how Macigni, a professor, private teacher, and affiliate of the Accademia degli Infiammati, treated Dürer’s theory not as a historical artifact, but as a living text to be mastered and integrated into the evolving Italian tradition. The rigorous, empirically focused environment Macigni championed ultimately served as a vital antecedent that would, toward the end of the century, favour the pivotal appointment of Galileo Galilei at the Paduan Studio.