Summary: Janello Torriani, known in the Spanish-speaking world as Juanelo Turriano (Cremona, Italy ca. 1500 – Toledo, Spain 1585), is the greatest among Renaissance inventors and constructors of machines. Contemporary literates and mathematicians celebrated Janello Torriani and his creations in their writings. It is striking how such fame turned into nearly complete oblivion, leaving only a few clues of a blurred and distorted memory dispersed here and there. This book wishes to show the central role that artisans formed in the Vitruvian tradition played in demonstrating through practical mathematics an increasing and positive control over Nature, a step rooted in humanist culture and foundational for the understanding of those historical processes known as the Scientific and the Industrial Revolutions.

Contents: PART 1. A Centre of education for the vitruvian artisan at the periphery of the empire. Chapter 1. Janello Torriani's First Education - Cremona, the Italian Wars and the Desire for a Better Life - Fashioning the Aura of the Genius - Family, Social Status, Education - Humanist Pedagogy in Cremona. Chapter 2. The Theoretical Clock - The Science of the Stars - Renaissance Scientific Instruments - A Physician as a Mentor: Giorgio Fondulo (Cremona 1473-1545). Chapter 3. The practical Clock - The Guild - Janello Torriani the Blacksmith - Between Public Clock and Private Workshop. PART 2. The Emperor's Clockmaker (1540-1558) - Chapter 4. The Artisan Courtier - The Grand Tour in Reverse - A Broth of Clocks for the Emperor - Climbing The Social Ladder. Chapter 5. Networks and Technology in Habsburg Europe - From Commoner to Courtier - The Artisan's Apotheosis - The Ambassadors from Mantua and their Brokerage of Janello's Inventions - Janello Entrepreneur. Chapter 6. The Microcosm - The First Machine-Tool to Cut Gears - Anatomy of the Microcosm. PART 3. Hydraulic metamorphosis of a clockmaker at the court of the Never-Setting Sun. Chapter 7. Mechanics: From Micro to Macro - Automata, Watches And Great Machines - Models and the Problems of Scale - From Clockmaking to Hydraulic Engineering. Chapter 8. Janello in Spain as a Royal Hydraulic Engineer (1563-1585) - Hydraulic Engineering in the Habsburg Empire - Toledo: a Paradigmatic Stage for Renaissance Water-Technology. Chapter 9. The First Global Empire Produces the First Giant Water-Machine - Qui Bono? Janello caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea - Invention and the Practice of Secrecy. (Nuncius Series - Studies and Sources in the Material and Visual History of Science, 2)

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