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GALILEI, Galileo (1564-1642) and Buonardo SAVI [Urbano D'AVISO, (b. 1618)]
Trattato della sfera di Galileo Galilei con alcune prattiche intorno a quella, e modo di fare la figura celeste, e suoi direttioni, secondo la via rationale. Rome: Nicolò Angelo Tinassi, for Domenico Grialdi, 1656.
First edition of an early work by Galileo but published posthumously, providing an outline of university-level Ptolemaic astronomy; a fresh copy in contemporary vellum. It is one of the few works documenting Galileo’s teaching activity in Padua and Pisa and allows a glimpse into the development of his scientific method prior to 1610, before the invention of the telescope. The text originated in lectures given by Galileo at Padua in the late 1590s. The subject of these lectures was probably Sacrobosco's De Sphaera, the most common teaching tool on astronomy at that time. It is unsurprising, therefore, that in this text Galileo adhered to the conventional Ptolemaic model, as described by Sacrobosco, in which a static earth is orbited by the sun and other planets, despite Galileo having embraced heliocentrism as early as 1597. The editor of this volume was Urbano D'Aviso, whose name appears in an anagram on the title. This copy conforms to the collation in Cinti, with a frontispiece, 2 folding tables and 2 engraved plates. Carli and Favaro 252; Cinti 133; Riccardi I, 519; S. Drake, Galileo at Work, Chicago 1978, 51-55; S. Drake, Essays on Galileo, ed. N.M. Swerdlow and T.H. Levere, 3 vols, Toronto 1999, I, 67.
12mo (136 x 70mm). Additional engraved title, 2 folding engraved plates and 2 folding letterpress tables, woodcut initials and head-pieces, a diagram and tables in text, errata at end, with the final blank (browning from quire C). Contemporary vellum, manuscript title on spine.
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