- 47
Montanari, Geminiano
Description
8vo (8ΒΌ x 6 in.; 210 x 152 mm). Engraved academic vignette of the author beneath the drop-head title, 2 full-page woodcut plates, decorative woodcut initial and armorial tail-piece, inscribed by the author to Johannes Hevelius iudici o[mn]ia optimo "the best judge of all things"; slight dampstain in upper margin of one leaf affecting running title, formerly folded. Modern boards.
Provenance
Literature
Catalogue Note
Extraordinary survival of a seventeenth-century scientific offprint, addressed by the professor of mathematics at Bologna to the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius.
Montanari (1633-1687) led a productive but peripatetic life, with contributions in astronomy, physics and engineering, in Modena, Bologna, and Venice. His greatest achievements were in astronomy, especially his study of the variable stars. He was the first person to systematically investigate the variations in light of Algol, a star he observed closely from 1668 to 1677, helping to undermine the Aristotelian concept of the immutability of the heavens. His results were published in an anthology of works by members of the Accademia dei Gelati in Bologna and sent to the Royal Society in London where it was reviewed in the Philosophical Transactions, vol. 7 (1672), pp. 5125-5128.
The present version is an offprint of that work and anticipates the dominant modern method by which scientists honor their colleagues. His contribution is found on pages 369-392 of the Accademia's anthology, but the present work has a new pagination 1-22 while the plates retain the pagination of the larger work. Riccardi cites one copy of this offprint in the Ducal Library of Modena; we note copies at the Huntington Library (Dibner Collection), the Linda Hall Library and the Paris Observatory.