PONTANO, Giovanni Gioviano

by Giovanni Gioviano Pontano

£3,950 · Offered by Sokol Books

First Aldine edition of the astrological writings of Johannes Jovianus Pontanus (Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, 1429-1503), humanist, diplomat, scholar and poet who became the driving force behind the Neapolitan Academy and its official leader after 1471, as well as Naples' Secretary of State. His was considered by contemporaries as good as, or superior to, his Classical models. Pontanus' career provides an excellent illustration of the power and prestige which might be attained by men of letters in fifteenth-century Italy. The present volume consists of Pontanos' scientific (or proto-scientific and astrological) works: a translation and commentary on the Centum Ptolemaei sententiae, and other, briefer treatises, including De luna and De rebus coelestibus. The pseudo-Ptolemaic Centum Sententiae, or Centiloquy, is a collection of astrological aphorisms, once thought to have been the work of Claudius Ptolemaeus - from whose work it differs in many key respects. Seventeenth-century English scholars such as Joseph Moxon and William Lilly noted that some ascribed it to the mythical Hermes Trismegistus. More recent speculation has centred around the figure of Abu Ja'far Ahmad ibn Yusuf Ibn Daya (d. c.941), who wrote extensive glosses to the work, and translated it into Hebrew and Latin. While some of the sententiae demonstrate typical astrological vagueness (III: a person skilled in a particular field will have been born under the relevant star; VI, XI: the day and time for a particula

• Binding: Hardcover

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