“Cor microcosmi sol”

The Harvey revolution of the early 17th century

The volumes and artifacts on display here give an idea of the extraordinary cultural climate that made Padua a unique place in Europe in the 16th century, as well described by William Shakespeare in “The Taming of the Shrew” which is set in Padua: “beautiful Padua, cradle of the arts” compared by Shakespeare to a place where visitors, upon arriving, find themselves “like those who leave a pond to dive into the sea, and seeks to quench his thirst to the full.”

On display here are volumes on ancient medicine. Medical knowledge reached its peak with Galen (2nd century AD) and Avicenna (980 AD -1037 AD), which owed much to Galenic medicine, widespread in medieval and early modern Europe, but also some of the works of the most important authors who contributed to the birth of “scientific” medicine, which began with the first anatomical dissections in Padua in the 14th century with Pietro d’Abano (died 1316), continued with Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical research, and, above all, with the studies on dissected cadavers by Andreas Vesalius in the first half of the 16th century, and later by his successors at the University of Padua, such as Bassiano Landi or Realdo Colombo, who discovered the “small circulation” between the heart and lungs (although the same conclusion had been reached in the same years by the Catalan physician and philosopher Michael Servetus, who was condemned as a “heretic” and burned alive by Calvin in Geneva in 1553).

Also present are the works of philosophers from the 16th-century “Padua School,” such as Pietro Pomponazzi, and of the physician-anatomist Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente (died 1619), whom William Harvey declared to have been his teacher during his studies in Padua. There is also a book by Galileo Galilei, among the many extremely important works he wrote, who spent the most productive and fruitful years of his life in Padua between 1592 and 1610, as he himself stated in a famous letter, as well as a work by Nicolaus Copernicus, who was also a student in Padua.