Although Galileo seriously considered the priesthood as a young man, at his father's urging he instead enrolled in 1580 at the University of Pisa for a medical degree.[34] He was influenced by the lectures of Girolamo Borro and Francesco Buonamici of Florence.[20] In 1581, when he was studying medicine, he noticed a swinging chandelier, which air currents shifted about to swing in larger and smaller arcs. To him, it seemed, by comparison with his heartbeat, that the chandelier took the same amount of time to swing back and forth, no matter how far it was swinging. When he returned home, he set up two pendulums of equal length and swung one with a large sweep and the other with a small sweep and found that they kept time together. It was not until the work of Christiaan Huygens, almost one hundred years later, that the tautochrone nature of a swinging pendulum was used to create an accurate timepiece.[35] Up to this point, Galileo had deliberately been kept away from mathematics, since a physician earned a higher income than a mathematician. However, after accidentally attending a lecture on geometry, he talked his reluctant father into letting him study mathematics and natural philosophy instead of medicine.[35] He created a thermoscope, a forerunner of the thermometer, and, in 1586, published a small book on the design of a hydrostatic balance he had invented (which first brought him to the attention of the scholarly world). Galileo also studied disegno, a term encompassing fine art, and, in 1588, obtained the position of instructor in the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, teaching perspective and chiaroscuro. In the same year, upon invitation by the Florentine Academy, he presented two lectures, On the Shape, Location, and Size of Dante's Inferno, in an attempt to propose a rigorous cosmological model of Dante's hell.[36] Being inspired by the artistic tradition of the city and the works of the Renaissance artists, Galileo acquired an aesthetic mentality. While a young teacher at the Accademia, he began a lifelong friendship with the Florentine painter Cigoli.[37][38]
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Galileo's books, personal papers and unedited manuscripts were then collected by Vincenzo Viviani, his former assistant and student, with the intent of preserving his old teacher's works in published form. Unfortunately, it was a project that never materialised and in his final will, Viviani bequeathed a significant portion of the collection to the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, where there already existed an extensive library. The value of Galileo's possessions were not realised, and duplicate copies were dispersed to other libraries, such as the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, the public library in Sienna. In a later attempt to specialise the library's holdings, volumes unrelated to medicine were transferred to the Biblioteca Magliabechiana, an early foundation for what was to become the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, the National Central Library in Florence.[251] 2ff7e9595c
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