It started, as internet diversions often do, with a Google search. Art historian Federica Gigante was preparing a lecture last year when a search for one 17th-century art collector, Ludovico Moscardo, happened to return an image of Moscardo’s collection. Looking closely, Gigante spotted “something that looked like an astrolabe,” an astronomical device often used for timekeeping that was developed in antiquity but is associated primarily with the medieval Islamic world.
The find piqued the interest of Gigante, whose work at the University of Cambridge focuses in part on astrolabes and other Islamic astronomical instruments. After receiving photos of the device from the curator of a museum in Verona, Italy, Gigante went to examine the astrolabe in person (in part, she confesses, because she wanted an excuse to visit her parents).
It was a fortuitous decision. As Gigante reports in the March issue of Nuncius, a journal devoted to the...