ABSTRACT
Sperone Speroni had written, in 1530, a treatise entitled Del modo di studiare for young Luigi Cornaro at the request of the Cornaro family. Speroni's text in Del modo di studiare contains a well-known defence of the vernacular against the Latin and Greek languages. Alessandro Piccolomini wrote most of his scientific works in the vernacular, which was quite exceptional in the sixteenth century. Piccolomini's aims and intentions, or his cultural programme, can be seen clearly in a letter he wrote to Pietro Aretino in March 1541. Piccolomini's attitude to Aristotle can be considered a creative one, he was not just 'a popularizer of science' as sometimes has been claimed. In Piccolomini'sview, Aristotle's unrhetorical style of writing was the most suitable for the study of nature. He warned natural philosophers against using rhetorical trappings which would unnecessarily increase the natural difficulty of discovering what is hidden in nature.
