Ignazio Danti

Ignazio Danti (April 1536–1586), born in Perugia, came from a family of artists and scientists: his father, an architect and engineer, taught him painting and architecture. He entered the Dominican Order in 1555 and devoted himself to mathematics, astronomy and geography, teaching mathematics at Bologna before Pope Gregory XIII called him to Rome as pontifical mathematician.

Danti sat on the commission whose work produced the Gregorian calendar reform and supervised the forty frescoed regional maps of the Vatican's Gallery of Maps (1580–1581). In 1583 Gregory made him Bishop of Alatri, where he convoked a diocesan synod before his death on 10 October 1586.