For anybody with an interest in Galileo, Antonio Favaro is the founding father of Galileo studies as they are understood today as well as being the editor of the monumental national edition of Galileo’s works. For students of Leonardo, he stands out as one of the first to consider Leonardo as an artist in the historical sense of the word and to address the need for a critical reorganisation of Leonardo’s manuscripts. For those interested in Padua’s local history, Favaro is a pioneer of documentary research into the city’s ancient university; for engineers, he is one of the first academics in Italy to hold a chair in Graphic Statics; for historians of mathematics, he is considered a trailblazer in the teaching of the discipline.
Despite these ‘firsts’, and despite having been one of the principal contributors to the history of science in Italy in the second half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries, little interest has been shown in Favaro apart from a few specialist studies. The intention of the digital Theca dedicated to him is to provide the tools for a comprehensive reconstruction of this emblematic figure who stands as a virtual embodiment of the century of philological sciences and historical positivism.
The basis on which the whole edifice of the Theca rests is Favaro’s personal archive, given by the family to the Domus Galilaeana in Pisa shortly after its foundation. Hitherto the only catalogue had been one compiled in paper form in the 1950s and 60s that was limited to part of the correspondence. Now the material has been comprehensively sorted, catalogued and digitised thanks to an agreement between the Museo Galileo and the Domus Galilaeana. The Fondo Favaro constitutes the basic framework to which a corpus of manuscripts, documents, letters and printed works from libraries and archives in Italy and abroad has been added. This impressive collection, underpinned by sections dealing with bibliography, chronology, illustrative material and related biographies, is directed not only to a narrow circle of historians of science, but has also been constructed using an interdisciplinary approach in order to reach out to anyone interested in delving deeply into the nooks and crannies of 19th century culture as it passed into the 20th.
Favaro is at the same time the subject of this Theca and serves as a model for it: its subject, in that his personality, life and works will emerge better contextualised, explaining his European standing and his relationships with the foremost intellectuals of the time; its model, because the research has followed his methods. What emerges offers an insight into the history and ideas of the period, making it possible to appreciate its conquests and defeats, the nuances as well as the contradictions.