PICCOLOMINI, Alessandro (1508-78). De la sfera del mondo. Venice: Giovanni Varisco, 1559. 2 works in one volume, 4° (208 x 148 mm). Woodcut printer's device on titles, 47 full-page woodcut star maps (misnumbered 48, skipping no. 24, as usual), woodcut illustrations in text. (Occasional light spotting, staining and soling.) Contemporary limp vellum, manuscript title on spine and annotations on front cover (new endpapers, tail of spine crudely repaired, extremities rubbed, stained).
A later edition of Piccolomini's De la sfera del mondo, which was originally published in 1540. The first part is a traditional Ptolemaic-Aristotelian geocentric cosmography, but the appendix, entitled De le stelle fisse, contains the first star atlas to be published in the Western World. It also introduces the practice of identification of stars by letter, which would later be adopted and expanded by Bayer. Norman 1696.
PICCOLOMINI, Alessandro (1508-78). De la sfera del mondo. Venice: Giovanni Varisco, 1559. 2 works in one volume, 4° (208 x 148 mm). Woodcut printer's device on titles, 47 full-page woodcut star maps (misnumbered 48, skipping no. 24, as usual), woodcut illustrations in text. (Occasional light spotting, staining and soling.) Contemporary limp vellum, manuscript title on spine and annotations on front cover (new endpapers, tail of spine crudely repaired, extremities rubbed, stained).
A later edition of Piccolomini's De la sfera del mondo, which was originally published in 1540. The first part is a traditional Ptolemaic-Aristotelian geocentric cosmography, but the appendix, entitled De le stelle fisse, contains the first star atlas to be published in the Western World. It also introduces the practice of identification of stars by letter, which would later be adopted and expanded by Bayer. Norman 1696.
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