Protomathesis:

£50,000 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

a monument of the book arts First collected edition. A magnificent, large copy of this beautifully illustrated publication encompassing arithmetic, geometry, cosmography, and sundials. It contains the first printings of many of Finé's texts and more than two hundred fine woodcuts. In a handsome, contemporary binding likely produced in Spain. Finé (1494-1555) was Regius Professor of mathematics at the Collége Royal, recently founded by Francis I of France, to whom this volume is dedicated. He was also a talented artist and map-maker whose work 'is closely related to his major fields of mathematics, astronomy, and geography, and his contribution to book production is particularly interesting in extending beyond the illustration to the ornamentation of scientific texts' (Mortimer 225). The present volume is the most important and lavish example of his design work, beginning with a fine architectural title page border with a lunette of Hercules defeating the Lernean Hydra, followed by a full-page woodcut representing the goddess of astronomy, Urania, lecturing the author, who holds a book and an astrolabe beneath a spherical model of the solar system. The other woodcuts include geometric figures, polyhedra, depictions of the Ptolemaic solar system, diagrams of planetary orbits, Finé's 'octant mesh' for mapping an eighth of the globe, and detailed renderings of instruments including quadrants, cross-staves, sundials, geometrical squares, astronomical rings, astrolables, and the hy

• Binding: Hardcover

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