SCHEINER, Christoph.

Rosa ursina sive Sol ex admirando facularum & macularum suarum phoenomeno varius: necnon circa centrum suum et axem fixum ab occasu in ortum annua, circaq[ue] alium axem mobilem ab ortu in occasum conuersione quasi menstrua, super polos proprios, libris quatuor mobilis ostensus...

Bracciano: Andreas Phaeus, 1626-1630.

First edition, extremely rare large and thick paper copy, of the most lavishly illustrated astronomical work published in the first half of the seventeenth century — and the first printed monograph on a single heavenly body. Christoph Scheiner’s Rosa Ursina, issued between 1626 and 1630 at Bracciano by Andreas Phaeus at the ducal press of Paolo Giordano II Orsini, consolidates in four books and more than seven hundred and eighty pages the programme of solar observation Scheiner had pursued for nearly two decades with instruments he had himself devised for the purpose. The printing began in 1626 and was completed four years later; the licence was recorded on 28 May 1630 by Juan de Alvarado S.J. of the Collegio Romano, and the imprimatur was granted by the Master of the Sacred Palace, Niccolò Riccardi, in mid-September of that year. Ordinary sheets of the work measure about 375 × 260 mm; the Macclesfield copy, in contemporary binding, stood at 350 × 230 mm; the present copy, on paper of noticeably greater substance and with generously ampler margins, measures 405 × 260 mm. No large-paper copy has been traced in auction records.

The engravings of the solar disc are among the finest instrumental records of the pre-photographic era, and it is a commonplace of modern historiography that no meaningful improvement in the art of depicting sunspots followed until the first decade of the twentieth century. The argument of the work is fourfold: it asserts Scheiner’s priority in the telescopic observation of sunspots; it demonstrates, against the Aristotelian cosmology still dominant in the Schools, that the spots are phenomena of the sun’s body rather than satellites moving in front of it; it determines the inclination of the solar axis of rotation to the plane of the ecliptic; and, in its second book, it gives the first published account of the astronomical telescope with a convex ocular — the instrument whose diffusion through European observatories can be dated from the very appearance of the present volume.

Christoph Scheiner (1573–1650), born at Markt Wald in Swabia, attended the Jesuit Latin school at Augsburg and the Jesuit college at Landsberg before entering the Society of Jesus in 1595. He was sent to Ingolstadt in 1600, studying philosophy and, especially, mathematics under Johann Lanz. From 1603 to 1605 he carried out his magisterium at Dillingen, teaching humanities in the gymnasium and mathematics in the academy; it was during this period that he invented the pantograph, an instrument for copying plans at any scale, later described in the Pantographice, seu ars delineandi of 1631. He returned to Ingolstadt for theology, completed his third year of spiritual formation at Ebersberg, and in 1610 was appointed professor of Hebrew and mathematics at the Jesuit college there.

In March of the following year Scheiner, assisted by his student Johann Baptist Cysat (1587–1657), constructed a telescope for the observation of Jupiter’s satellites — partly to test the claims Galileo had advanced in the Sidereus nuncius of 1610. One morning they turned the instrument on the rising sun and saw dark patches on the solar disc; uncertain at first whether these were flaws in the lenses or clouds in front of them, Scheiner set the matter aside to return to Jupiter and Venus. Cysat persuaded him to resume the solar observations using tinted glass of the kind sailors employed when taking the solar altitude, and by 21 October 1611, as Scheiner records in the Ad Lectorum of Rosa Ursina, the two were observing the sun systematically in full daylight.

News of the sightings reached the well-connected Augsburg humanist Marc Welser (1558–1614). Scheiner addressed three letters to Welser, dated 12 November, 19 December, and 26 December 1611, which Welser printed at his private press the following year as Tres epistolae de maculis solaribus. On the urging of his Jesuit superiors, Scheiner wrote pseudonymously, signing himself Apelles latens post tabulam — Apelles hiding behind the painting — after the Plinian anecdote of the Greek painter who concealed himself behind his own work to overhear the comments of viewers. Welser distributed copies widely, including to Galileo, who identified the Jesuit behind the pseudonym and responded with three letters of his own, also addressed to Welser; Scheiner replied in a further series printed at Augsburg in 1612 as De maculis solaribus accuratior disquisitio, and Galileo’s own letters appeared at Rome in 1613 as Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari, with an introduction pressing his priority claim and ridiculing Scheiner’s. The charge of plagiarism was misconceived. Sunspots had been observed independently and in several places within a single twelvemonth: by Thomas Harriot in Oxford, who was the first to see them through a telescope; by Johann Fabricius in Wittenberg, who was the first to publish a work on them; by Domenico Passignani in Rome; and by Scheiner and Galileo themselves at Ingolstadt and Florence.

Having declared victory in print, Galileo moved on to other projects — the controversy over the comets, in which Scheiner may have played a part behind the scenes, and the preparation of the Dialogo — while Scheiner, personally admonished by the Superior General of the Jesuits, Claudio Aquaviva (1543–1615), to adhere to the established philosophy, withdrew for more than a decade to the mathematically unobjectionable subject of optics. But the solar programme continued under cover. He had built a helioscope, in which the image of the sun produced by a telescope was projected onto a sheet of paper placed about a metre from the eyepiece — a method of Benedetto Castelli’s which Galileo too had used. Keeping the projected image steady as the sun moved raised a problem of orientation: the Galilean form of the telescope, with its concave eyepiece, produces an upright image when looked through but an inverted one when projected, so that the observer following the solar motion must turn the telescope against the apparent drift of the image on the paper. Having studied Kepler’s Dioptrice of 1611, Scheiner knew that more than one combination of lenses would yield a telescopic effect, and he asked what would follow if the concave ocular were replaced with a second convex lens.

The arrangement produced an inverted image on direct viewing — an apparent disqualification, as Kepler himself had observed — but an erect projected image, which is what a helioscope required. When Scheiner put his eye to the new instrument he found, unexpectedly, that terrestrial objects viewed through it appeared inverted but with a field of view, magnification, and brightness well beyond anything the Galilean form could provide, and that the inversion was of no consequence for round astronomical objects (fol. 130r of the present work). He addressed the terrestrial inversion by adding a third convex lens — a field element that rectified the direct image without sacrificing the advantages of the Keplerian configuration. The astronomical telescope is not, strictly speaking, Scheiner’s invention; Kepler himself had envisaged its optical principle in 1611. But Scheiner was the first to construct the instrument, the first to publish a working account of it, and the astronomical telescope replaced the Galilean form as the standard instrument of European observatory work from the appearance of Rosa Ursina onwards. Scheiner also built, in Rome, an equatorial mounting for his projection apparatus, designed by his Jesuit colleague Christoph Grienberger (1561–1636) of the Collegio Romano, whose principal axis was set parallel to the axis of the earth, so that a single rotation about it sufficed to keep the sun centred in the field; the ecliptic appeared on the pre-ruled paper as a horizontal line, and Scheiner taught his students and assistants to rule a second line perpendicular to it, without which the complex sunspot paths could not be correctly interpreted. Many of the observations forwarded from the German lands during the years of the Thirty Years’ War were useless for this reason; but his student Georg Schönberger (1596–1645) did mark the perpendicular, and from Schönberger’s records Scheiner was able to demonstrate the curved paths of the spots.

Scheiner settled in Rome in 1624, and by 1626 the publication of what became Rosa Ursina was under way. Its central argument was that Galileo, in his sunspot letters of 1612–13, had taken the axis of solar rotation to be perpendicular to the ecliptic, whereas it is in fact inclined to that perpendicular by 7° 15′. Scheiner was anxious to keep this result from Galileo before it appeared in print. Galileo, meanwhile, was aware that Scheiner was printing on sunspots, and the exchanges between the two camps in these Roman years were guarded on both sides; in early 1626 Francesco Stelluti reported that Scheiner had enquired whether it was true that Galileo was preparing a treatise on the tides — the subject of what would become the Fourth Day of the Dialogo — and had professed to concur with Galileo’s view of the world system, a diplomatic profession that appears to have convinced no one. In January 1629 Castelli, writing to Galileo from Rome, announced the imminent appearance of a great new book on sunspots from the Jesuit still hidden behind his Apelles pseudonym; Galileo affected low expectations and insisted in advance that whatever Rosa Ursina contained at variance with his own Istoria e dimostrazioni would be, in his phrase, “nonsense and lies”.

When the imprimatur was issued in mid-September 1630, Galileo was himself in Rome seeking permission for the Dialogo. He claimed not to have seen Rosa Ursina until the autumn or winter of 1631 — in April of that year he had already heard that the Jesuit referred to his sunspot letters with great frequency and hostility — and when he did see it, he expressed his displeasure to Paolo Giordano II Orsini (1591–1656), Duke of Bracciano, who by then regretted, on both financial and personal grounds, having agreed to bear the cost of the edition. Scheiner’s satisfaction at the appearance of his greatest work was, however, brief.

The Dialogo, published in Florence in 1632, appeared to him a mirror offence. In the First Day, the discussion of sunspots forms part of Salviati’s arguments against the perfection of the heavens; Simplicio answers with Scheiner’s original position, that the spots are dark bodies orbiting the sun, and is made to conclude sarcastically that subtler minds would no doubt propose better explanations. In the Third Day, Galileo recounts his own discovery of sunspots, his initial supposition that the sun rotates on an axis perpendicular to the ecliptic, and his eventual — but, he insists, still timely — realisation to the contrary; in one of the very few passages in the Dialogo presented as direct recollection from Galileo’s lips, Salviati relates that the two had together observed a solitary sunspot whose path was not quite a straight line, and that Galileo had then proposed an inclined axis of rotation for the sun. There are good reasons to doubt the account. Filippo Salviati had died in 1614, so the observations attributed to him would need to predate that year, and nothing in Galileo’s surviving papers supports such an early dating. Nor could Castelli, who had been working closely with Galileo on the projection method in 1613, have been unaware of so important a conclusion had it actually been reached then; yet when Castelli received his copy of the Dialogo he wrote to Galileo that he had been delighted at the false attestation of the sunspots — a reaction incompatible with prior knowledge. The circumstantial case suggests that Galileo’s knowledge of the annual paths of sunspots was in fact acquired from Rosa Ursina, and that the relevant material in the Third Day was inserted into the Dialogo after the imprimatur had already been granted (see On Sunspots, Reeves & Van Helden, pp. 325–327).

The book is divided into four books. Book I takes up the priority question. Book II treats the telescopic instruments themselves — the varieties of projection, the helioscope, the astronomical telescope with its convex ocular — and draws a sustained analogy between the optics of the telescope and the physiological optics of the eye. Book III gathers Scheiner’s long series of sunspot observations in systematic form, with their engraved records folded in page by page. Book IV is in two parts: the first on solar phenomena proper, including the faculae, the twenty-seven-day rotational period, and the 7° 15′ inclination of the axis; the second on the concord of a geocentric cosmos with scripture, the Fathers of the Church, and the philosophical tradition — the conservative frame within which the whole investigation is presented.

Closing the main text is a passage of high interest for the history of early-seventeenth-century cosmology: the first printing of Prince Federico Cesi’s letter of 1618 to Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine, De caeli unitate, tenuitate, fusaque & pervia stellarum motibus natura (pp. [775]–782), together with Bellarmine’s reply (pp. 783–784). Cesi (1585–1630), founder and head of the Accademia dei Lincei and ally of Galileo, defends the conception of a fluid, elemental heaven — a defence which some have read as part of a programme to rescue the Copernican cause after the Congregation of the Index’s decree of 1616. Cardinal Bellarmine (1542–1621), no friend of Copernicanism, accepts Cesi’s theses with equanimity in his reply. That this correspondence should appear at the close of a Jesuit volume whose printed frame is avowedly geocentric is one of the minor ironies in the genesis of the trial of 1633.

The plate programme is exceptional even by the standards of early-seventeenth-century Italian printing. The engraved vignette on the title page plays on the pun of the work’s name — Rosa Ursina answering to Ursa Rosina — in a rose-festooned bower-cave inhabited by three bears, one of whom is projecting an image of the sun onto a board with his telescope. The large engraved frontispiece is an elaborate allegorical programme on epistemology and the sources of truth: two beams of light descend from the Godhead labelled Sacred Authority and Reason, both deriving their certainty from Him; two further beams emanate from the Sun, labelled Profane Authority and Sense, the latter represented by a telescopic view of the solar disc in which the spots appear blurred and indistinct, while Reason, at the upper right, views the sun with a clarity which the senses alone cannot supply — a figuring, as William Ashworth has observed, of the divide between Jesuit natural philosophy and Galilean science. The Sun at the centre of the composition carries the Rose of the Orsini, the heraldic device of the dedicatee’s family, and is shown travelling through the zodiac — an image in which the daily and annual motions of the sun are pressed into emblematic service against heliocentricity. The portrait of Paolo Giordano II Orsini, rather ursine of feature, is set in a garland of roses interspersed with spotted suns. The plate serving as a frontispiece to Book III, signed by the engraver Daniel Widman, shows Jesuit astronomers at work in a darkened room, projecting the solar image through a telescope onto paper, with one observer taking measurements at the projection screen while another transfers them to a register — the very method by which the sunspot plates of the Rosa Ursina were produced, shown at its making.

Scheiner’s personal animus toward Galileo, sharpened by the appearance of the Dialogo in 1632, has long been held by historians of the affair to have been instrumental in the opening of the process against the Florentine in 1633. Scheiner left Rome in the latter year and spent his remaining decades at Vienna and, from November 1637, at Neisse in Silesia, where he was active in pastoral work at the Jesuit college until his death on 18 June 1650.

References: Backer-Sommervogel VII, 738, 8 — Carli & Favaro 116 — Cinti 79 — Grässe VI, 298 — Parkinson, Breakthroughs, p. 74 — Jesuit Science in the Age of Galileo 6 — Rowland 19 — Galilei & Scheiner (Reeves & Van Helden, tr.), On Sunspots, University of Chicago Press, 2010 — Galluzzi, The Lynx and the Telescope, 2017, ch. 7 (Cesi–Bellarmine correspondence).

Folio (405 × 260 mm), pp. [xl, including frontispiece], 1–66, [2, blank], [67]–125, [126]; ff. 126–149, [12, including blank R6]; pp. [2, unpaginated opening leaf of Liber tertius], 149–784, [2, blank], [36, index and errata], with engraved frontispiece, engraved vignette on title, engraved portrait of Orsini, and 172 engraved plates folded in; the collation’s alternation of pagination and foliation is inherent to the work, and pages 511–522 are mispaginated 459–470 (some light browning). Contemporary vellum with manuscript title on spine; manuscript paper labels over the top and bottom spine compartments lettered ‘L V’ and ‘M O’, the second enclosed in a manuscript cartouche bearing some resemblance to the Orsini coat of arms. A fine copy, with the deckle showing on several lower edges.

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Item #5198

Price: $95,000.00