PTOLEMY, Claudius.

Almagestum seu magnae constructionis mathematicae opus plane divinum, latina donatum lingua ab Georgio Trapezuntio … per Lucam Gauricum Neapolit. divinae matheseos professorem egregium in alma urbe Veneta orbis regina recognitum. [Bound with:] APIAN, Peter. <i>Introductio geographica Petri Apiani in doctissimas Verneri annotationes … cum quadrante novo Meteoroscopij loco usitatissimo. Huic accedit translatio nova primi libri Geographiae Cl. Ptolemaei translatio adiuncta … Adiuncta est epistola Io. de Regiomonte ad Reverendissimum Cardinalem Bessarionem … de utriusque arsque & vivendi rationibus de monstratura magnum opera Reverend. Petri Apiani sociogr.</i>

Venice; Ingolstadt: [Lucantonio Giunta]; [Peter Apianus], 1528; [1533].

First edition of George of Trebizond’s Latin Almagest, the working copy of Georg Joachim Rheticus, signed by him at the head of the title and annotated in his hand on thirteen leaves. Rheticus was Copernicus’s only disciple. He reached Frombork in May 1539, aged twenty-five, and persuaded Copernicus to publish; his Narratio prima (Gdańsk, 1540) was the first printed account of the heliocentric system, and in 1542 he carried the manuscript of De revolutionibus to its Nuremberg printer. The signature, Georgius Ioachimus de porris, gives his mother’s surname alone, without the by-name Rheticus that he took at Wittenberg in 1536. The entry belongs most probably to the years before 1536, and in any case before about 1550. The marginalia are of the same period. In the seventh book of the Almagest he tabulated the star declinations of Timocharis, Hipparchus and Ptolemy that demonstrate the precession of the equinoxes. In the third, fourth and fifth he worked through the mean motions of the sun and moon and the eclipses on which Ptolemy’s lunar theory rests. In the Werner volume bound after the Almagest he worked through the latitudes and the map projections of Ptolemy’s Geographia. Each of these subjects recurs in the work he printed or presented between 1540 and 1551. Some two dozen books from his library are documented, nearly all of them copies he gave away; on the published record this is the earliest datable one and the only printed book that he signed, kept and worked through.

Rheticus was born at Feldkirch in the Vorarlberg in February 1514 as Georg Joachim Iserin, the son of the town physician. In 1528 the father was tried at Feldkirch and beheaded, on charges the sources give variously as sorcery, theft and fraud, and the widow, Thomasina de Porris, gave her own name to her children: de Porris, of the leeks, Italian porro, the three leek stalks of the arms Rheticus later used. After schooling at Zürich under Oswald Myconius, probably from 1528 and at the latest to 1531, he matriculated at Wittenberg, where the university album enters him in the summer of 1532 as Georgius Joachimus de porris feldkirch, the first record of the name and still without a by-name. He took the toponym Rheticus, from the Roman province of Rhaetia, in 1536, the year of his promotion as master of arts on 27 April and of his appointment to the second mathematical chair; it stands on the title of his Praefatio in arithmeticen of the same year. The maternal name did not vanish: the Leipzig matriculation of October 1542 reads de Porris alias Rheticus, a letter of 1545 is addressed to Rhetico de Porris, in Italy in 1545 and 1546 he went by Porro, and in Burmeister’s reading Rheticus seems to have become his only name from about 1550. What dates the autograph on this title is therefore the surname without the by-name. It is the student form of 1532, written most probably before 1536, when the by-name is first attested, and in any case before about 1550. The attribution of the signature and of the notes rests on the name, the script and the matter; a comparison with the dated inscription to Andreas Aurifaber of 20 April 1543 is consistent with it but, at the lengths available, not decisive.

The densest annotation is in Liber VII, on the chapter in which Ptolemy proves the precession of the equinoxes by comparing his own star positions with those of Timocharis and Aristyllus at Alexandria around 290 BCE and of Hipparchus around 130 BCE. On leaf 69v Rheticus set the chapter out as a table. Star by star, in the margins and the foot of the page, he wrote the declination recorded by the earliest observer, headed T or A according as Timocharis or Aristyllus had made it, beneath it Hipparchus’s figure headed H, and beneath that Ptolemy’s headed P: the middle Pleiad at 14° 30′, 15° 30′ and 16° 15′; Aldebaran at 8° 45′, 9° 45′ and 11°; Capella at 40°, 40° 24′ and 41° 10′; Regulus at 21° 20′, 20° 40′ and 19° 50′; Spica at 1° 24′, 0° 36′ and 0° 30′; Altair, Sirius, Arcturus, the stars of Orion and Gemini and the three in the Great Bear’s tail likewise. The shift of about a degree a century between the columns is the precession itself, and he named the quantity, declinatio borealis. A heading at the top of the margin notes the text’s reservation that Timocharis’s observations had been taken too roughly to be relied on. The table continues on leaf 70r with Antares, at 18° 20′, 19° and 20° 15′, and on leaf 70v he noted the year-counts from the era of Nabonassar for the observations of Timocharis, Agrippa and Menelaus. The Wittenberg astronomers, in Westman’s account, took Copernicus up first as the reformer of such technical questions. The opening chapter of the Narratio prima, finished at Frombork in September 1539, is on the motions of the fixed stars, and Erasmus Reinhold’s Prutenicae tabulae (Tübingen, 1551) carried the Copernican precession into the tables that served the next half-century. Rheticus returned to the subject to the end: Copernicus charged him at parting to re-observe the fixed stars, the preface of 1557 to his unfinished edition of Werner lists the copyists’ errors and the coarse armillary readings that vitiate Ptolemy’s catalogue, and the gnomon obelisk he raised at Kraków in 1554 was built for that work (Burmeister, vol. III, no. 34).

A second group of notes follows Ptolemy’s solar and lunar theory. In Liber III, on leaf 26r, beside the printed table of the sun’s daily motion, Rheticus copied out from the text the hourly and the monthly mean motion to six sexagesimal places, 0;2,27,50,43,3,1 and 29;34,8,36,36,15,30 degrees in the notation of the tables, the figures a computer needs at hand. At the head of Liber IV, on leaf 32r, he wrote the single word parallaxis beside Ptolemy’s first statement that lunar observations must be corrected for the observer’s position on the earth’s surface, before Ptolemy himself introduces the term in Liber V. On leaf 34r he labelled Ptolemy’s statements of the moon’s mean motions in the margin Diurnus, Horarius, Mensis, Annuus and 18 annorum, the last the Saros period after which eclipses recur. In Liber V, at leaf 51, above the diagram of the earth’s shadow cone, he wrote Cambisis annus 7 against the Babylonian lunar eclipse of 16 July 523 BCE in the seventh year of Cambyses, one of the fixed points of ancient chronology (Stephenson, 1997). These are the chapters behind the lunar theory of De revolutionibus IV, and that theory, with the moon’s parallax, distance and size, is set out in the Narratio prima. The habit of timing eclipses lasted: in February 1545 Matthias Lauterwalt wrote to Rheticus about a note in his hand on the lunar eclipse of December 1544, observed at Leipzig and compared with Copernicus’s tables (Burmeister, vol. III, no. 14).

In the Werner half of the volume the notes are a geographer’s. Beside Werner’s fourteenth annotation, on the latitude of Rome from the ratio of a gnomon to its shadow, Rheticus wrote Roma latitudo 41. 50 on leaf c5v; the figure is not Ptolemy’s but Werner’s own, observed at Rome in 1493 and reported three lines below. On leaf a4v, in the chapter in which Ptolemy reduces Marinus’s itinerary along the caravan road to Sera, he wrote 876 over 26280, the conversion of schoeni to stadia at thirty to one. On leaves g1r and g3r, at the two map projections of the Geographia as Werner prints them, he labelled the degree divisions of the first and checked the construction of the second in two sums, 63 and 23 making 86 and 90 less 23 making 67, worked from the rounded latitudes of Thule and of Syene on which Ptolemy builds it (Geographia I.24). On leaves c3r and c4r he lettered the printed diagrams of the meridian and the horizon with polus horizontis, polus mundi, Meridianus, aequator and Horizon. This is the arithmetic of his own map of Prussia. The Tabula chorographica auff Preussen went to Duke Albrecht in manuscript with a letter from Frauenburg dated 28 August 1541, and its German companion text, the Chorographia, edited by Hipler in 1876, states the rule the notes serve: without the longitude and latitude of a place, no eclipse and no motion of sun, moon or planets can be computed for it (Burmeister, vol. III, nos. 5–6). His work on Werner continued. In May 1542 Georg Hartmann gave him Werner’s manuscript on spherical triangles; Rheticus planned to print it with Werner’s treatise on the meteoroscope, the instrument that Regiomontanus’s letter to Bessarion in this volume describes, and the printing he began at Kraków was abandoned in 1557. The one other note in his working hand known in a printed book is on the subject of c5v: a note on gnomon shadows at the equinox on the last leaf of the Witelo he gave Copernicus in 1539, now at Uppsala, which Dobrzycki (1973) assigned to Rheticus against earlier readers who had given it to Copernicus.

On the front pastedown, in the same small cursive, is a numbered list of the twelve months of the Egyptian year, Thoth to Mesori, copied letter for letter from Ptolemy’s own table on leaf 143r and brought to the front of the book for use: every dated observation in the Almagest is given in Egyptian months, and reducing them is the first step of any calculation from the text. Gingerich’s census records the same aid a generation later in Paul Wittich’s copy of De revolutionibus at the Vatican, where Wittich added his own concordance of the Egyptian months to the printed calendar. Rheticus left Wittenberg on leave in October 1538, at the end of the summer semester, to visit Johannes Schöner at Nuremberg, Peter Apian at Ingolstadt and Philipp Imser at Tübingen; in April 1539 at Feldkirch he gave Achilles Gasser the three Nuremberg imprints now bound together in the Jagiellonian Library, and in May he was at Frombork. The author of half of this volume was one of the men he went to see. Nothing in the annotations is Copernican: no parameter, no reference, no correction of Ptolemy from the new system. They are the notes of the Wittenberg astronomer before that journey, and the signature is in the name of the same years.

Rheticus also taught from the Almagest. In October 1541, on Burmeister’s dating of the undated printed notice, a few weeks after his return from Prussia, he announced to the Wittenberg students a course on Ptolemy’s Great Syntaxis, a work he would almost dare to call by far the most beautiful of all human works, to begin on the Thursday following, and a Ptolemy lecture of his is attested again for 1542 (Burmeister, vol. III, no. 10; vol. I, pp. 57–58, 71). The edition on his desk is not recorded. The Greek Almagest of 1538 that he had owned, which had probably been his teacher Jakob Milich’s, he had given to Copernicus in 1539; the Latin working copy he kept is, on present knowledge, the present one. His trigonometry was printed for that course. De lateribus et angulis triangulorum (Wittenberg, 1542) extracted the trigonometry of De revolutionibus I a year before the parent work appeared, and its dedication explains that it was issued then ‘because in our exposition of Ptolemy we had need of the doctrine of triangles’ (Burmeister, vol. III, no. 11); the Canon doctrinae triangulorum (Leipzig, 1551) went on to define all six trigonometric functions, for the first time in print, as ratios of the sides of a right triangle (Van Brummelen and Byrne, JHA 52, 2021).

The Giunta Almagest of 1528 is the first edition of George of Trebizond’s translation from the Greek, completed at Rome in 1451 for Pope Nicholas V, attacked by Cardinal Bessarion, and left unprinted for seventy-seven years (Monfasani, 1976). It is the second Latin Almagest in print, between Gerard of Cremona’s medieval version from the Arabic (Venice: Liechtenstein, 1515) and the Greek text edited by Simon Grynaeus (Basel: Walder, 1538), and it was the Latin Almagest available to the Wittenberg school in the 1530s; Reinhold, who held the senior mathematical chair from 1536, made his own version of the first book from the Greek, with commentary (Wittenberg, 1549; Omodeo and Tupikova, JHA 44, 2013). The reviser named on the title, the Neapolitan astrologer Luca Gaurico, afterwards cast Rheticus’s horoscope, in 1547 or later, the one trace of a meeting between them (Burmeister, vol. I, p. 92). The copy is of the first state of the edition (William Patrick Watson, Catalogue 8, 1997).

The volume bound after the Almagest, Apian’s Introductio geographica of 1533, is two works under one title. Gatherings A to E carry Apian’s own introduction: the spherical geometry needed for geography, a sine table, a star catalogue verified, as its printed colophon says, to the last day of December 1532, and descriptions of three instruments, the astronomical radius, the new quadrant and the torquetum (Włodarczyk, JHA 53, 2022), here described in print seven years before the Astronomicum Caesareum. The lower-case gatherings reprint Johannes Werner’s Nuremberg edition of 1514 of the first book of Ptolemy’s Geographia, with Werner’s fourteen annotations on its technical terms, his construction of the two map projections, and the letter in which Regiomontanus described the meteoroscope to Bessarion (North, BJHS 3, 1966). The date of the star catalogue sets the earliest date for the volume as it is bound at 1533.

The binding is contemporary Wittenberg work. The alum-tawed pigskin over wooden boards is blind-tooled with three rolls in concentric panels: the peasant-dance roll outermost, the roll of portrait medallions of Erasmus, Melanchthon, Luther and Holbein framing the central panel, and within it the roll of named virtues, Prudentia, Fides, Iustitia and Lucretia. Beside the Melanchthon medallion on the front board the portrait roll carries, cut into the roll itself, a cartouche with the monogram C.N., the mark of Conrad Neidel, bookbinder at Wittenberg from the late 1530s until his death in 1568, after which his widow kept the house (Senf, 1909; Hennen, 2022; EBDB w000427). The portrait roll recurs on documented Neidel bindings for members of Melanchthon’s circle: Paul Eber’s copy of the 1543 Vesalius at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow (McAinsh, The Library, 2016), from which the four portraits were identified, and Paulus Hessius’s Sophocles of 1544, bound in 1554, when Hessius is said to have lived in Melanchthon’s house. Rheticus, Melanchthon’s protégé from his arrival in the city, is the earliest of Neidel’s customers so far identified in that circle, and the binding is of Wittenberg make and of his own time there.

Some two dozen books from Rheticus’s library are documented, from Burmeister’s register of his ownership marks and dedications, Birkenmajer’s descriptions of the Kraków volumes, Gingerich’s census of De revolutionibus and Tautschnig (2025). Nearly all of them he gave away, most within months of acquiring them. They include the three Nuremberg imprints given to Gasser at Feldkirch in April 1539, now one volume at the Jagiellonian Library; the Greek Almagest, Euclid and Apian carried to Frombork for Copernicus, now at Uppsala; the Schöner tracts at the Smithsonian; his own Narratio prima and De lateribus at the Vatican; the copies of De revolutionibus inscribed to Andreas Aurifaber on 20 April 1543 and to Georg Donner; and the books he left with friends at Kraków on his departure for Hungary. Of the books that stayed in his own hands, three survive at Kraków with his ownership signature or a few words in his hand, an Agricola, a Valleriola and a Micyllus, none of them astronomical; Copernicus’s autograph manuscript of De revolutionibus, which was in his library from the 1540s until his death, carries his notes and is in the Jagiellonian Library; and the one note in the Uppsala Witelo is his on Dobrzycki’s attribution. Burmeister’s register begins in April 1539; the signature on this title precedes it. On the published record the volume is the earliest datable book from Rheticus’s library and the only printed book that he signed, kept and worked through, and with the Aurifaber De revolutionibus it is one of two books carrying his hand in private ownership.

When the volume left Rheticus is not recorded, and the history of his library points to one event before all others. By May 1551 he had fled Leipzig ahead of a criminal accusation, leaving debts of nearly two years’ salary. On 5 May the rector sealed his rooms in the Collegium novum at the city’s request; on 1 and 2 February 1552 the university notary Wolfgang Fusius inventoried what he had left there and handed the list to the creditors’ agent Andreas Siber; on 22 March 1552 the creditors resolved to have the books and the other goods valued so that each might be satisfied (Zarncke, Acta rectorum, pp. 395–396, 415, 419). That inventory has not been found, and the Acta record no sale; a second inventory, taken by the town court on 1 December 1551 of a storeroom he had rented, lists paper stock, twelve copies of Zell’s map of Germany, one of them coloured and mounted, and 1,450 unsold copies of the Canon doctrinae triangulorum, three sheets each, but no library book (Burmeister, Montfort 56, 2004). He had removed the manuscripts of Copernicus and Werner; the mathematical and astronomical library of his Wittenberg and Leipzig years he had, in Burmeister’s judgement, for the most part to leave behind, and at Kraków in 1554 he no longer owned a copy of his own Euclid (Burmeister, vol. I, pp. 117–119, 151). A Wittenberg-bound Almagest annotated in the 1530s would have been among those books. The alternatives are weaker. A volume kept to the end would have gone with him to Kraków, where he gave books away when he left for Hungary, or into the baggage he had with him in Upper Hungary, where he died at Kassa (Košice) on 4 December 1574 and where his executor handed Valentin Otho his papers. Nothing places a printed book of his among the manuscripts that Otho carried to Wittenberg and Heidelberg. The volume next appears in the seventeenth century, in the library of a Doctor Berosius whose identity, whether under a humanist name taken from the Babylonian Berosus or a surname of the form Berosi or Berusio, has not been recovered, and from there, by way of a cousin, in that of a Viennese physician in Habsburg Hungary.

Provenance: Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574), autograph Georgius Ioachimus de porris at the head of the Almagest title, in the student form of his 1532 matriculation, with his marginalia on thirteen leaves and the list of the Egyptian months on the front pastedown. One Doctor Berosius, unidentified, whose library is named as the source of the volume in the next owner’s inscriptions. Polycarpus Procopius Bonanus or de Bonanno (died 14 December 1663), born at Vienna, doctor of medicine of Padua in 1653, physician and scientific adviser to György Lippay, archbishop of Esztergom, with whom he explored the mining districts of Upper Hungary and for whom he planned an illustrated book on Hungarian minerals that his sudden death left unprinted, patronised also by Count Ferenc Nádasdy (Kiss, in Almási, 2014, and 2022), and by his bookplate physician to the imperial mining chamber of Hungary, whose towns included Banská Štiavnica; his inscriptions on the title, Ex lib. Poly. and Proc. Bonanni. P. A. M. Dr. / Ex bibl. D[octo]ris Berosij, the longer ex-libris on the front pastedown recording that he held the volume and the Berosius library in good faith through a cousin (patruelis), with the shelf entry 645, his engraved armorial bookplate with the motto In Deo Natura et Arte on the verso of the title, his note at Apian D2r citing Athanasius Kircher’s Magnes (Rome, 1641) on the variation of the compass, which dates his reading of the book after 1641, and, apparently in the same hand, the proportions written beside Apian’s propositions at C4r and D1v and the topic-markers on Werner a3r, a4r and b2v; a similar ex-libris, dated [1]649, is in his copy of Croll’s Basilica chymica at Esztergom (Kiss, 2022), where the letters written to him between 1648 and 1663 are also kept. His son Ignatius de Bonanno, by the note beneath the bookplate, Nunc Ignatij de Bonanno 4. Junij [1]664, six months after the father’s death; the same note, with the same date, stands in another of his books at Vienna (Kiss, 2022). The number 22 in an early hand on the flyleaf. Thereafter untraced until the later twentieth century.

Rheticus’s later work rests on the subjects of these notes. The Narratio prima of 1540 opens with the motion of the fixed stars and expounds the new lunar theory; the manuscript Tabula chorographica of 1541 is the geography; De lateribus of 1542 was printed for his Almagest course; and Erasmus Reinhold’s Prutenicae tabulae of 1551, the Copernican tables of the next half-century, carried the Wittenberg work on precession into print. This is the Almagest that the first Copernican, in Danielson’s phrase, worked through before he went to Copernicus, and the only printed book of his working library known to survive.

References: Norman 1760 — cf. PMM 40 — Houzeau-Lancaster 865 — Honeyman 2551 — Stillwell 97m — EDIT16 CNCE 29477 — Adams P 2214 — Sander 5972 — Mortimer, Harvard Italian 16th-Century Books, 410 — DSB XI, pp. 186–206 (Toomer on Ptolemy), pp. 395–398 (Rheticus); V, pp. 277–279 (Gaurico) — VD16 A 3090 — Van Ortroy, Bibliographie de l’œuvre de Pierre Apian (Besançon, 1902), no. 101 — William Patrick Watson, Catalogue 8 (London, 1997), lot 82 (the first state of the 1528 Giunta) — Haebler, Rollen- und Plattenstempel des XVI. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1928–1929), I, pp. 307–309, rolls 4 and VIII; EBDB Werkstatt w000427 — Senf, Die Buchbinder-Innung zu Wittenberg im 16. Jahrhundert (Wittenberg, 1909) — Hennen, in Valleriani and Ottone, eds., Publishing Sacrobosco’s De sphaera in Early Modern Europe (Springer, 2022), ch. 4 — McAinsh, The Library 17.4 (2016), pp. 446–450 — Förstemann, Album Academiae Vitebergensis, I (Leipzig, 1841), p. 146 — Burmeister, Georg Joachim Rhetikus 1514–1574: Eine Bio-Bibliographie, 3 vols (Wiesbaden, 1967–1968), vol. I, pp. 9–13, 20, 25–31, 56–58, 71, 78, 90–92, 117–119, 146–151, 159, 175–183; vol. II, pp. 11–17, 40–44, 55–56; vol. III, nos. 5, 6, 10, 11, 14, 34 — Burmeister, ‘Ein Inventar des Georg Joachim Rhetikus von 1551’, Montfort 56 (2004), pp. 160–168 — Zarncke, Die urkundlichen Quellen zur Geschichte der Universität Leipzig: Acta rectorum (Leipzig, 1859), pp. 394–399, 415, 419 — Hipler, ‘Die Chorographie des Joachim Rheticus’, Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik 21 (1876), pp. 125–150 — Hipler, Analecta Warmiensia (Braunsberg, 1872), pp. 59–60 — Birkenmajer, Mikołaj Kopernik, I (Kraków, 1900), pp. 584–585, 595, and Stromata Copernicana (Kraków, 1924), pp. 234–236, 366–369 — Czartoryski, ‘The Library of Copernicus’, Studia Copernicana XVI (1978), pp. 364–368 — Dobrzycki, ‘Uwagi o szwedzkich zapiskach M. Kopernika’, Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki 18 (1973), pp. 492–493 — Danielson, The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution (New York, 2006) — Gingerich, An Annotated Census of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (Leiden, 2002), the Vicenza 1 (Aurifaber), Uppsala 1 (Donner) and Vatican (Wittich) entries — Sotheby’s New York, The Collection of The Garden Ltd., 9–10 November 1989, lot 51 (the Aurifaber inscription reproduced) — Westman, ‘The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory’, Isis 66 (1975), pp. 165–193 — Omodeo and Tupikova, ‘The Post-Copernican Reception of Ptolemy: Erasmus Reinhold’s Commented Edition of the Almagest, Book One’, Journal for the History of Astronomy 44 (2013), pp. 235–256 — Hugonnard-Roche, Verdet, Lerner and Segonds, eds., Georgii Joachimi Rhetici Narratio prima, Studia Copernicana XX (Wrocław, 1982) — Toomer, Ptolemy’s Almagest, rev. ed. (Princeton, 1998) — Van Brummelen and Byrne, ‘Maurolico, Rheticus, and the Birth of the Secant Function’, Journal for the History of Astronomy 52 (2021), pp. 189–211 — Stephenson, Historical Eclipses and Earth’s Rotation (Cambridge, 1997) — North, ‘Werner, Apian, Blagrave and the Meteoroscope’, British Journal for the History of Science 3 (1966), pp. 57–65 — Włodarczyk, ‘The torquetum (or turketum): Was it an observing instrument?’, Journal for the History of Astronomy 53 (2022), pp. 266–299 — Monfasani, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden, 1976) — Pietrzyk, ‘A History of the Autograph Manuscript of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus’, Polish Libraries 9 (2021), pp. 6–27 — Tautschnig, ‘Greek Thresholds to the Stars: Nicolaus Copernicus, Georg Joachim Rheticus, and the Ideal Reader of De revolutionibus’, Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Literatures 11 (2025), pp. 30–53 — Kiss, ‘Alchemy and the Jesuits’, in Almási, ed., A Divided Hungary in Europe, vol. 1 (Newcastle, 2014), pp. 157–182 (Procopius Bonanus) — Kiss, ‘Jezsuiták és rózsakeresztesek között: Polycarpus Procopius Bonannus, Lippay érsek orvosának olvasmányai’, in Betegség és gyógyulás a kora újkori irodalomban (Budapest, 2022), pp. 465–496 (his library, the Croll copy, the 4 June 1664 notes) — Ecsedy, in Művészettörténeti Értesítő 73 (2024), pp. 307–333 (Bonannus 1623/24–1663; Esztergom Ms. I. 172).

Folio (319 × 220 mm). [I:] Almagestum: ff. [6] 143 [1, blank]; collation A⁶ a–s⁸, verified against the printed register on leaf 143v (‘Omnes sunt quaterni præter A qui est ternio’); first state of the edition, with leaf 90 missigned m3 and the two-line register on the verso of leaf 143 (Watson, Catalogue 8, 1997, lot 82; the second state has m3 correctly signed and a three-line register); title in red and black with the Giunta giglio device in red (monogram L A) and the ten-year privilege of the Venetian Senate printed beneath it, woodcut historiated initials, woodcut astronomical and geometric diagrams in the margins and text, mathematical tables in roman and italic. [II:] APIAN, Introductio geographica (Ingolstadt 1533; VD16 A 3090; Van Ortroy 101): ff. [88]; collation A–E⁴ a⁴ b–c⁶ d⁸ e–h⁶ i⁸ k–l⁶ (D3 missigned E3); title in red and black with the large woodcut vignette and the full-page woodcut arms on the verso, woodcut instrument figures and diagrams throughout, the sine table and the star catalogue; gatherings b–k reissue Werner’s Nuremberg volume of 1514. Contemporary Wittenberg binding of alum-tawed pigskin over wooden boards by Conrad Neidel (Haebler I, pp. 307–309, rolls 4 and VIII; EBDB w000427), blind-tooled with three concentric roll-stamped panels — the Bauerntanzrolle outermost, the portrait-medallion Reformatorenrolle (Erasmus, Melanchthon, Luther, Holbein; EBDB r003604) framing the central panel, and the Tugendrolle (Prvdentia, Fides, Ivstitia, Lvcretia) within — Neidel’s C.N. cartouche on the front-board Reformatorenrolle beside the Melanchthon medallion; spine with raised bands and contemporary ink titling in the upper compartments (Almagestum … per Georgium … Trapezuntinum); the two clasps lacking, with no hardware surviving; rear pastedown renewed in old style. At the head of the Almagest title, in Rheticus’s hand, Georgius Ioachimus de porris; in the left margin Ex lib. Poly. and in the right margin Proc. Bonanni. P. A. M. Dr. / Ex bibl. D[octo]ris Berosij, both in the seventeenth-century hand of Polycarpus Procopius de Bonanno; on the front pastedown, in the same hand, the longer ex-libris AB. libru[m] hunc bona fide possidet Polycarpus Procopius Bonanny et Bibliotheca[m] D[octo]ris Berosij à eius patruele bona pariter fide accommodat[a] f[oli]o 645, a short Italian line of the same century, and, in Rheticus’s hand, the numbered list of the twelve Egyptian months (Thoth, Phaophi, Athyr, Chiach, Tybi, Mechir, Phamenoth, Pharmuthi, Pachon, Pauni, Epiphi, Mesori); the engraved armorial bookplate of Polycarpus de Bonanno (P. et M. D. S. C. R. M. apud Cam. mont. Ung. Medicus, motto In Deo Natura et Arte) on the verso of the Almagest title, with the manuscript note beneath Nunc Ignatij de Bonanno 4. Junij [1]664; the number ‘22.’ in an early hand on the flyleaf. Rheticus’s working marginalia in brown iron-gall ink on thirteen leaves: in the Almagest, leaves 26r (the Solis motus figures to six sexagesimal places), 32r (parallaxis), 34r (Diurnus, Horarius, Mensis, Annuus, 18 annorum), 51 (Cambisis annus 7), 69v–70r (the Timocharis–Hipparchus–Ptolemy declination tables), 70v (the Nabonassar year-counts) and 105 (Timochares); in the Werner, 876 / 26280 at a4v, the diagram labels at c3r and c4r, Roma latitudo 41. 50 at c5v, Gradus at g1r and the two sums at g3r. In a looser seventeenth-century cursive, apparently Bonanno’s: the proportions beside Apian’s propositions at C4r and D1v, the topic-markers on Werner a3r, a4r and b2v, the note citing Kircher’s Magnes at Apian D2r, and probably the short line at the head of Liber IX (leaf 89r); a red-ink graduation pass (the values 30 and 40) on the printed Quadrans universalis at E4, the hand not determined. Slightly browned overall with some foxing; the last gathering of the Apian with brown spotting increasing towards the end, the last four leaves with repaired damp damage, the leaf carrying De usu Torqueti and the Castigationes erratorum with small repaired losses of text; binding rubbed and lightly soiled, joints sound, headcaps and corners worn but stable. An unsophisticated copy.

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Item #6705

Price: $285,000.00