ACADEMY OF THE CRUCIBLE, FLORENTINE. - A scientific society founded in Florence at the initiative of Vincenzo Viviani among the disciples of Galileo, and inaugurated on 15 June 1657 under the patronage of Ferdinando II and Leopoldo de’ Medici, who hosted it in a room adjoining his library in the ducal palace. Its aim was the pursuit of truth through repeated and collective experimentation; hence the choice of its emblem: three crucibles within a lit furnace, and Dante’s motto: «Provando e riprovando» [‘By testing and retesting’].
The seriousness of its purpose precluded the use of academic titles and even the drafting of a formal statute; a draft prepared by the member Paolo Del Buono was never adopted. Besides Viviani and Del Buono, its members included Alessandro Marsili, Antonio Oliva, Carlo Rinaldini, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Candido del Buono, Francesco Redi, and Count Lorenzo Magalotti. Corresponding members abroad were Cassini, Ricci, Rossetti, and Falconieri among Italians; Steno, Thévenot, and Fabry among foreigners. Work was suspended from late 1657 to 1658 when the grand-ducal court moved to Pisa, and resumed actively only in 1660, expanding into astrophysics, especially through the efforts of Magalotti, who had taken on the role of secretary. In 1666 Magalotti himself published a moving account of the Academy’s studies and experiments under the title *Saggi di naturali esperienze fatte nell’Accademia del Cimento* [‘Essays on Natural Experiments Conducted in the Academy of the Crucible’], which may be regarded as the first model of experimental research and the first practical course in physics. The *Saggi* (translated into English in 1684 by the scientist Richard Walter and into Latin by Pieter van Musschenbroek, Leiden 1731) and the forty-eight manuscript volumes preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze show how, within its brief decade of existence, the Academy succeeded in renewing and broadening the physical, mathematical, astronomical, and natural sciences.
In 1667, disputes between Viviani and Borelli, and above all the elevation of Prince Leopoldo—its animator and guiding spirit—to the cardinalate, marked the Academy’s end. It briefly revived for a single session early in the nineteenth century under the government of Murat (cf. *Gazzetta Universale di Firenze* for the year 1801, nos. 21 and 28, pp. 166 and 207).
The Academy’s activity made experimental physics a Tuscan discipline, a study that half a century earlier had been pioneered in Rome by the Accademia dei Lincei (q.v.), where Galileo and other distinguished Florentines had carried out much of their admired work.