16 Facts About Scipione Chiaramonti

Scipione Chiaramonti was an Italian philosopher and noted opponent of Galileo.

The Chiaramonti family was noble and wealthy, claiming to have originated in Clermont and moved to Italy in the fourteenth century.

The son of a doctor, Scipione Chiaramonti studied at the University of Ferrara, lodging first at the house of Cardinal Alessandro d'Este and later associating with the circle of Cardinal Curzio Sangiorgi.

Scipione Chiaramonti spent a short period in Faenza where, in 1598 he wrote a treatise on mathematical problems in artillery; in 1601, he was hired, at annual salary of 340 scudi, as "interpreter of natural philosophy to the academy of Perugia" and received an annual allowance of 400 ducats from Cardinal Alessandro d'Este.

Scipione Chiaramonti was highly regarded by the Cardinal's half-brother, Cesare d'Este, Duke of Modena whom he served as mathematician and advisor, and who took two of his sons, Virginio and Niccolo, as his pages.

Scipione Chiaramonti was for a time in the service of Cardinal Cinzio Passeri Aldobrandini.

Just as Galileo sought to interpret the phenomenon of comets in a way which supported Copernican heliocentrism, Scipione Chiaramonti explained it with the intention of supporting the traditional geocentric model.

Scipione Chiaramonti was such a determined defender of classical astronomy that he rejected even the Tychonic system, which was by then commonly accepted among Jesuit scholars and other astronomers who did not agree with the views of Copernicus.

In contrast, Scipione Chiaramonti's standing in Church circles continued to rise, and he served as a consultant to the Holy Office in Cesena.

In 1627 Scipione Chiaramonti was elected to the chair in philosophy at the University of Pisa with an annual salary of 700 ducats, where he remained until 1636.

In 1628 Scipione Chiaramonti published another attack on both Tycho and Copernicus, De Tribus Novis Stellis.

Scipione Chiaramonti's purpose was to refute arguments that these were actual stars rather than sublunary events.

Scipione Chiaramonti is explicitly named in the "Dialogue", and Salviati says that as he is not present to answer his questions, he invites Simplicio to respond in his place.

One of his judges was Cardinal Francesco Barberini, nephew of the Pope, and Grand Inquisitor, to whom Scipione Chiaramonti had dedicated his Difesa.

In 1635 Scipione Chiaramonti published a work of political philosophy, Della Ragion di Stato which examined at great length different possible definitions of the terms 'reason' and 'state' and considered the dilemmas of statecraft and morality.

Scipione Chiaramonti's wife died in 1644; there is an account that at the age of eighty he remarried to a much younger wife, but the consensus is that soon after he widowed, he joined the Capuchin order to which four of his sons already belonged, and erected at his own expense a church dedicated to Saint Philip and Saint Cecilia.