Alessandro Piccolomini and the First Printed Star Atlas (1540)

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr Kathryn Freschi, Professor of Italian and Chair of Modern Languages at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California, for her translations of sections of Piccolomini's De sfera del mondo and De le stelle fisse; and also Mr Bruce Bradley, Librarian for History of Science at the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology in Kansas City, Missouri, for his kind assistance in providing various editions of Piccolomini's work.

Notes

Dr Nick Kanas is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California/San Francisco and at the Veterans Administration Hospital in San Francisco.

1. Lycophron, Callimachus, Aratus, ed. G. P. Goold; Loeb Classical Library 129 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1989), 185–299.

2. For more information on the Leiden Aratea, see Ranee Katzenstein and Emilie Savage‐Smith, The Leiden Aratea (Malibu, California, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1988), 5–36. The authors make the point that this manuscript is probably a 9th century copy of a 4th or 5th century work.

3. This edition of Aratus's Phaenomena is found in Firmicus Maternus's Scriptores astronomici veteres (Venice, Aldine Press, 1499).

4. An illustration of Dürer's northern planisphere is shown in Peter Whitfield's The Mapping of the Heavens (London, The British Library, 1995), 71. Both northern and southern planispheres are shown in George S. Snyder's Maps of the Heavens (New York, Abbeville Press, 1984), 52–55.

5. For details regarding Piccolomini's life, see Rita Belladonna's introduction and English translation of Piccolomini's Alessandro (L' Alessandro, ed, D. Beecher and M. Ciavolella (Ottawa, Canada, Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation, Dovehouse Editions, 1984)), 5–7. For a shorter version, see ‘Alessandro Piccolomini’, in The Catholic University of America's New Catholic Encyclopedia, 11: Pau to Pyx (New York, McGraw‐Hill, 1967), 345–46, and also: ⟨www.newadvent.org/cathen⟩.

6. Alessandro Piccolomini, De la sfera del mondo (Venice, G. A. and D. di Volpini, 1540).

7. Recall that Copernicus's great heliocentric book, De revolutionibus, was not published until 1543, three years after Piccolomini.

8. Alessandro Piccolomini, De le stelle fisse (Venice, G. A. and D. di Volpini, 1540). In the original 1540 edition, De la sfera del mondo and De le stelle fisse were published as two parts of one book. Although each had its own title page and printer's device, the first page listed both titles, and the pagination continued sequentially throughout both parts of the book. In many later editions, however, each book had its own title on the title page and its own separate pagination; the two books could be bound together or stand as separates.

9. The on‐line search catalogue of books, WorldCat, lists 12 Italian editions between 1540 and 1595, although additional editions of De le stelle fisse may have been included but not mentioned in some entries for De la sfera del mondo. In his personal survey of several libraries in London, Paris and the United States, the distinguished Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich also documented 12 editions in this same period (Owen Gingerich, ‘Piccolomini's Star Atlas’, Sky and Telescope Magazine (December 1981), 532–34). These included one Italian edition not found in my WorldCat search (dated 1564) and one Latin edition (1568), but excluded two WorldCat Italian editions (1554 and 1566). The celestial catalogue from the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology states that at least ten editions were published within the first three decades of the book's initial release (William B. Ashworth, Out of this World: The Golden Age of the Celestial Atlas (Kansas City, Missouri, Linda Hall Library, 1997), Catalog No. 6, available from ⟨www.lhl.lib.mo.us⟩). Both my survey and Professor Gingerich's list three editions between 1570 and 1595. Thus, these three sources converge to suggest that a minimum number of 13 Italian editions and one Latin edition were published between 1540 and 1595.

10. Although the sequence of the constellations is the same in the various editions, the specific numerical label given to the missing illustration varied. For example, in the four editions I examined at the Linda Hall Library, Kansas City, Missouri, the 1540 and 1559 editions lacked Figura XXIIII; in the 1553 edition Figura XVIII was missing, and in the 1579 edition, there was no Figura XVI.

11. Gingerich states that these directional indicators are only accurate for the constellation of Ursa Minor, which contains the pole star, Polaris. He speculates that this labelling across images might have been a printer's error, although he also notes that it was repeated in all of the Italian editions of the book. (Owen Gingerich, ‘Piccolomini's Star Atlas’ (see note 9).

12. Joseph Ashbrook, The Astronomical Scrapbook (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984), 415.

13. Basil Brown, Astronomical Atlases, Maps & Charts (London, Search Publishing, 1932), 17–18.

14. Deborah J. Warner, The Sky Explored: Celestial Cartography 1500–1800 (New York, Alan R. Liss; Amsterdam, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1979), 200.