Echi leonardeschi nella Cina dei Ming: l'idraulica occidentale del missionario salentino Sabatino de Ursis

The essay starts from an article by Ladislao Reti of 1963, Francesco di Giorgio Martini's Treatise on Engineering and Its Plagiarists, in which the contribution of this important fifteenth century architect to later scholars is obscured: among these the most striking case is certainly that of Leonardo. Reti also, among the various real or alleged plagiarists of Giorgio Martini, mentions the Jesuit from Salento Sabatino de Ursis (1575-1620), an extraordinary figure of missionary scientist in China. Moral heir of Matteo Ricci, de Ursis had important merits especially in astronomy and geography, he was a theologian, architect, botanist, technologist. Among his works, written in mandarin chinese, the authors of the essay examine the Treatise on hydraulic pumps, or Western hydraulics (Tai xi shui fa), with a careful and powerful bibliographic reconstruction. The authors want to show how de Ursis certainly had knowledge of Leonardo's acquisitions, which the Jesuit permeated in his Chinese studies. Trait d'union between the two cultures, were the Arab and Persian astronomers who in the Yuan era (1279-1368), in the service of the Khan, contributed enormously to the scientific and cultural progress of the Mongol empire. In this way, de Ursis, like so many mathematical and physical missionary colleagues, present in the same years in the Ming's China and mediators of the two cultures, worked an original synthesis between the ideas coming from the West and oriental wisdom.