JF Ptak Science Books  Post 203

This is one of the earliest wall-mounted calendars that I’ve seen.  Constructed by Tommaso Gianotti (1493-1577) and printed by Thomas Janothus in Venice in 1544, this astrological wall calender, exhibiting tables of the phases of the Moon, movable feasts, lucky and unlucky days, hours of the sunset, and so on, was a very large, lovely thing of real and soft information.. Gianotti, also know by his more aristocratic name of Rangoni, was a physician of sorts, a man of semi-medicines who practiced some sort of quacky healing arts in Venice.  He was well a very well paid practionner of the questionable arts, evidently surrounding himself with a mixture of mythological care and medicine–so well paid as a matter of fact that he was able to commission several works (on St. Mark) by none other than Tintioretto, paying his way, by the way, to have his own portrait included in the scene, painted by the great master himself. 
Gianotti did make some minor contributions to medicine, and did study physics and the allied sciences, but his contributions were generally sugary flakes.  He  did make other social, architectural, liturgical contributions–paying for restoration work at the churches of San Guilliano and San Germinamo–though the cost of his generosity was usually a statue of bust of himself, perched above entry ways here and there,    His calendar though was pretty and useful.