TOSCANELLI DAL POZZO, PAOLO (Paulus Florentinus). — Mathematician, astronomer, geographer, born in Florence in 1397 and died there on 10 May 1482.
He studied at Padua with his brother Piero, obtaining his doctoral degree in 1424; he then returned to Florence, where he was enrolled in the guild of physicians and apothecaries, but there is no evidence that he practised medicine. A humanist of very broad learning, he was on terms of friendship and scholarly exchange with F. Brunelleschi, C. Landino, P. Bracciolini, L. B. Alberti, Niccolò da Cusa, G. Müller (Regiomontano), and other learned men. His mathematical and astronomical works have been lost (as has one on agriculture); there remains a manuscript containing precious and entirely original observations of comets, which would in themselves suffice to confirm his reputation, otherwise unanimously acknowledged and attested by his contemporaries. With a gnomon constructed in S. Maria del Fiore, he succeeded in determining the obliquity of the ecliptic. T. was also a geographer, no longer closely bound to the Ptolemaic tradition, but rather eager to keep abreast of the results of the travels and voyages of his time, as is attested by interrogations conducted among people who came to Florence from distant lands: Tartars who had come from the Tanais, Ethiopians who arrived for the Council of 1441, etc.
But his best-known geographical speculations are those that led him to propose to the Portuguese court (through an ecclesiastic whom he had met during a stay in Rome) the project of reaching the Indies, that is, eastern Asia, by sailing directly from the Iberian coasts westward across the Atlantic Ocean. The project, presented to Portugal in 1474 together with an illustrative map, was allegedly not accepted, but later it is said to have served as the basis for Columbus’s initiatives. The question has given rise to endless controversies among modern critics. It may now be considered certain that the Toscanellian project existed, as did the map, now lost (its identification with an anonymous map preserved in Florence has no basis), that accompanied II. It is also certain that Columbus knew of T.’s project, but a direct correspondence between the two would seem to have to be ruled out.