Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli has been one…

Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli has been one of the central figures in the intellectual and cultural history of Renaissance Florence in its early years, thanks to his long life, his intelligence and his wide interests.

Along with Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus), Toscanelli appears to have belonged to a network of Florentine and Roman intellectuals who searched for and studied Greek mathematical works, along with Filelfo, George of Trebizond, and the humanist Pope Nicholas V, in company with Toscanelli’s friends Alberti and Brunelleschi.

Around 1468, Toscanelli devises the gnomon still to be seen in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence: a bronze plate let into the dome high above the left transept, and a circular white marble slab let into the floor of the Cathedral, which records the summer solstice to a half-second, and which is then and subsequently used for centuries for other calculations such as the regular movement of the sun; effectively a 'camera oscura'.