Reading Dürer in Late Sixteenth‐Century Padua: Matteo Macigni (ca. 1510–1582), His Library and the Annotated Institutionum geometricarum (Paris, 1535)

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the history of material culture and intellectual biography by definitively identifying the Paduan scholar Matteo Macigni (ca. 1510–1582) as the author of the annotations found in a 1535 copy of Albrecht Dürer’s Institutionum geometricarum currently preserved in Vicenza. The attribution rests on bibliographical and palaeographical sources. By analysing this discovery, this research recovers Macigni's identity as a key, though understudied, figure in the Republic of Letters, shedding light on the specific intellectual milieu of the late sixteenth‐century Paduan Studio . Macigni's annotated copy—alongside his annotated copy of Daniele Barbaro’s La pratica della perspettiva now in London—demonstrates his profound and systematic engagement with theoretical geometry and its applications in architecture and optics. This study illuminates how Macigni, a professor, private teacher and affiliate of the Accademia degli Infiammati , treated Dürer's theory not as a historical artefact, but as a living text to be mastered and integrated into the evolving Italian tradition. The rigorous, empirically focused environment Macigni championed ultimately served as a vital antecedent that would, towards the end of the century, favour the pivotal appointment of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) at the Paduan Studio .