PIFFERI, Francesco.

Sfera di Gio. Sacro Bosco tradotta, e dichiarata da don Francesco Pifferi Sansavino monaco Camaldolese e matematico nello studio di Siena.

Siena: Silvestro Marchetti, 1604.

First edition of Francesco Pifferi’s Italian translation and commentary on Sacrobosco’s Sfera, containing the earliest printed appearance of Tycho Brahe’s catalogue of 1004 stars. On pages 121–178 Pifferi inserted a complete tabulation of the fixed stars, ordered by the forty-eight Ptolemaic constellations, with longitude, latitude, magnitude, and astrological “nature.” The list reproduces Tycho’s expanded catalogue of 1598, previously confined to a handful of sumptuous presentation manuscripts, and antedates Kepler’s edition in the Rudolphine Tables (1627) by more than twenty years. Its appearance within a vernacular Sfera marks a decisive stage in the circulation of Tycho’s data from Uraniborg into print.

Tycho had long intended to provide a replacement for the Ptolemaic framework of the stars with positions measured anew to the arcminute. By the early 1590s he had completed a short catalogue of some 777 stars. In May 1598 he finalised a greatly enlarged catalogue of 1004 stars, reducing positions to the epoch 1601.0, the epoch he favoured for his final system. The expansion drew on supplementary observations made in 1593–95 and again in February–March 1597, and the reductions were coordinated by Longomontanus. To facilitate distribution, the catalogue was sometimes bound together with the Mechanica, “commodioris vectionis causa,” as Tycho wrote to Magini in November 1598. These manuscripts, often on heavy paper or even on parchment, sometimes illuminated and bound with Tycho’s portrait, were presented to selected rulers and astronomers: Rudolf II, Wilhelm IV of Hesse, Giovanni Antonio Magini, the Venetian Senate, and others. After Tycho’s death in 1601 the shorter list was printed posthumously in the Progymnasmata de motu stellarum fixarum (Prague, 1602), together with a series of his observational reports. The long catalogue, however, remained unpublished, its existence almost forgotten outside the circle of manuscript recipients, until Pifferi printed it here in 1604.

In his preface Pifferi explicitly states that he collated two exemplars: the copy sent by Tycho to Magini at Bologna and another deposited at Venice with the patrician Girolamo Diedo. This statement is borne out by later discoveries. Norlind identified the Florence volume that confirms Pifferi’s testimony: Tycho’s Mechanica bound with the long catalogue, the title page carrying Magini’s inked ownership inscription “Liber Joh. Antonii Magini,” later marked with a Santa Maria del Fiore library label, and containing the expected 1004 entries. This was precisely the exemplar Pifferi consulted at Bologna. His reference to Diedo also corresponds with the known distribution; Tycho’s son-in-law Tengnagel had carried a copy to Venice in 1598, and Diedo is named in Tycho’s correspondence. Taken together, these traces make it clear that Pifferi worked from authentic manuscripts of the long catalogue, not from hearsay or the short Prague list, and that he transmitted them in print with minimal delay after their arrival in Italy.

The catalogue as presented in the Siena edition is faithful in design to its manuscript models. Pifferi orders the stars by constellation, introducing each with a short mythographic account in Tuscan prose and then listing the stars with their longitudes, latitudes, magnitudes, and natures. For the northern and zodiacal constellations he follows Tycho closely. For the southern sky, which could not be observed from Hven, he supplemented from Christoph Clavius’s Commentarius in Sphaeram. Thus in Centaurus he included only the four stars Tycho could observe, but in Lupus, Ara, Corona Australis, and Piscis Australis he filled the gaps with Clavius. By his own reckoning the total reached 1094 entries, eighty-eight more than Tycho’s, the surplus accounted for exactly by the Clavian additions. The table therefore reproduces Tycho’s long catalogue as it stood in manuscript, completed by data already familiar to Italian readers from Jesuit classrooms. Importantly, Pifferi preserved Tycho’s epoch of 1601.0, making the Siena printing an independent witness to Tycho’s final decision on stellar reductions, prior to any Keplerian re-editing.

The appearance of the catalogue in Pifferi’s Sfera did not pass without notice. In the 1606 edition of his Sphaera, Clavius remarked that “whoever trusts Tycho’s observations may consult his own works now in print, or certainly the Sfera of Francesco Pifferi, written in Italian, where the stars are described according to Tycho’s judgment.” Christoph Grienberger, who succeeded Clavius at the Collegio Romano, adopted Pifferi’s printing when compiling his Catalogus veteres affixarum … cum novis (Rome, 1612), which combined Tycho’s data with Clavius’s to reach 1225 stars. It was this Jesuit digest, along with Tycho’s Prague materials, that lay to hand for Kepler when he edited the stellar section of the Rudolphine Tables (1627). The Siena edition thus stands at a defined point in the chain from Tycho’s workshop to the Jesuit colleges and thence to Kepler’s canonical tables.

Placed within the longer history of catalogues, the significance of the Siena table becomes clear. The Ptolemaic list, transmitted through the Almagest and its medieval Latin versions, had set the baseline for more than a millennium. Copernicus in De revolutionibus (1543) had retained those positions, applying only precessional corrections. Reinhold’s Prutenic Tables (1551) inherited the same stellar framework. Jesuit pedagogy, particularly Clavius’s widely circulated commentary on the Sphaera (from 1570 onwards), codified it for generations of students. Tycho’s new catalogue, built with his giant armillary spheres and mural instruments, disciplined by repetition and comparison, was intended to supplant the entire Ptolemaic scheme with fresh measurements. By inserting the long list into his vernacular Sfera, Pifferi provided the first occasion in print when the Ptolemy-to-Clavius sequence was interrupted by Tycho’s numbers on a large scale.

The Siena edition also intersects with Italian traditions of cosmography. From Alessandro Piccolomini’s De la sfera del mondo and De le stelle fisse in the 1540s had sprung a tradition of Tuscan vernacular astronomy intended to equip courtiers and literate laymen with a practical cosmology. Pifferi’s Sfera belongs to that tradition, but it is also a transformation of it. His Tavola delle cose messe di nuovo lists a range of added chapters: methods for measuring length, breadth, and depth; a treatment of the Antarctic pole; “new harmonies” of the heavens; the sizes of the stars; the Milky Way; hydrography; navigation; winds and tides; and practical instructions for sundials. Within this expanded framework, Tycho’s catalogue is presented not as an isolated appendix but as part of a comprehensive manual for use in schools and courts.

Pifferi himself (1540–1624) was a Camaldolese monk who taught mathematics at Siena. He published on instruments, notably the Monicometro of 1595, citing Ostilio Ricci’s Archimetro and Abel Foullon’s Olometro. He tutored Medici princes and was present in Rome in 1611 at the banquet hosted by Federico Cesi and the Lincei in honour of Galileo. His career illustrates the milieu of Italian practical mathematics, in which monks, tutors, and artisans mediated new results for wider audiences. His Sfera is not a routine rendering of Sacrobosco but a deliberately modernised handbook, integrating recent observational astronomy with established teaching.

Several technical details emphasised by Norlind are worth noting. The long catalogue, produced in haste in 1593–95 and early 1597, contains duplications and some stars that later editors found unidentifiable. These features are preserved in the Siena printing, making it a valuable witness to the raw state of the material before Kepler’s editorial revisions. The epoch 1601.0 is consistently maintained. The practice of binding the long catalogue with the Mechanica for presentation to patrons is corroborated by Magini’s Florence copy. Pifferi’s edition reproduces faithfully what lay before him and supplements what Tycho could not observe with Clavius, without attempting any revision. For critical assessment of the positions one must look later to Grienberger’s composite catalogue and Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables.

The choice of vehicle was not anomalous. Tycho’s long catalogue existed in elaborate manuscripts, but there was no immediate plan to issue it as a standalone print. After his death in October 1601 his papers required sorting, and Kepler’s 1602 Progymnasmata favoured a manageable shorter list. By contrast, in Italy the manuscript channel was unusually active. Tengnagel had carried copies to Venice and Bologna in 1598; Magini acknowledged receipt; and Pifferi’s reference to Diedo shows that the Venetian exemplar was locally accessible. To publish the catalogue within a vernacular Sfera was therefore a practical solution: such a textbook could carry a long tabular section more easily than a separate catalogue could find a printer, and it placed the data directly in the hands of the students and practitioners who would use them.

The tabular pages in Pifferi’s book were not an inert appendix but followed a sequence of chapters that already aligned classical cosmography with contemporary practice. These included isoperimetric figures, the centre of gravity, ancient and modern measures, the circumference of the Earth, the daily distance travelled by a star, the natures of the signs, debates on the Milky Way, cosmography and terrestrial distances, winds and hydrography, navigation, and the making of sundials. The Tychonic tables therefore entered a framework that gave them practical utility: the fixed stars appeared as coordinates underpinning calendrical reckoning, geography, and navigation.

The Siena catalogue also speaks to the Italian reception of the major astronomical actors of the generation. It made Tycho’s fixed-star positions available in print; it reflected Magini’s computational stance, which embraced Copernican accuracy while holding a geocentric frame; it preceded Galileo’s telescopic discoveries, which would soon transform the heavens; and it provided material on which Kepler could draw for theoretical consolidation. Chronologically it lies between Tycho’s Progymnasmata (1602) and Kepler’s Astronomia nova (1609), contemporary with Magini’s work at Bologna and just before Galileo’s telescopic observations. It thus preserves the final state of pre-telescopic stellar astronomy at the moment when Italian mathematicians were about to face a radically different sky.

The Siena Sfera of 1604 is therefore both a vernacular handbook and the first printed vehicle for Tycho’s long catalogue. It demonstrates how new observational astronomy could be assimilated into the oldest of cosmographical shells, how manuscripts intended for emperors and patricians could find their way into Tuscan prose, and how Jesuit pedagogy, vernacular cosmography, and the Tychonic programme intersected in early seventeenth-century Italy. It shows that long before the Rudolphine Tables gave Tycho’s catalogue definitive form, Italian readers could already consult the 1004-star framework in print, Clavius could cite it, and Jesuit compilers could expand it. The Siena edition is thus a necessary link in the chain of transmission from Hven to Prague to Ulm, and an important witness to the final stage of naked-eye stellar astronomy.

Norlind, “On a Copy of Tycho Brahe’s ‘Mechanica’ and of his Great Star Catalogue,” The Observatory 75 (1955), 254–55; W. Norlind, “The MS copies of Tycho Brahe’s great star catalogue,” in Dansk Bibliografi 1551–1600 (appendix, census of manuscripts); Christoph Clavius, Sphaera (Rome, 1606); Christoph Grienberger, Catalogus veteres affixarum … cum novis (Rome, 1612); Johannes Kepler, Tabulae Rudolphinae (Ulm, 1627); D. Laurenza, “A Copy of Sacrobosco’s Sphaera in Mirror Script Attributed to Matteo Zaccolini,” in The Circulation of Science and Art (Brill, 2016), 33–49; R. de Andrade Martins & W. Thomazi Cardoso, “Galileo’s Trattato della sfera ovvero cosmografia and Its Sources,” Philosophia Scientiæ 21/1 (2017), 131–47.

4to (215 × 153 mm). Collation: a⁴ ††⁴ †††⁴ ††††⁴ A–Z⁴ Aa–Zz⁴ Aaa–Bbb⁴ Ccc⁴. . Irregular pagination [16], 401 [= 419], [1] pp. Engraved portrait of Pifferi after the preliminaries; woodcut Medici device on title; numerous woodcut diagrams, tables, typographical ornaments, and historiated initials. The long Tycho catalogue occupies pp. 121–178. Contemporary Italian quarter sheep over patterned paper boards, spine gilt in compartments with small roll tools and direct gilt-lettered title SANSAVIN SFERA, red edges. Boards rubbed and extremities worn, joints firm, a sound unsophisticated copy. Title with early pressmark “I996”; occasional foxing and light marginal spots, but overall crisp and complete.

Item #6469

Price: $6,500.00