Search Results: Authors starting with L from Alessandro Borgato

Great provenance: Abenperg-Traun Coat of Arms to both plates; minor defects to the spine, inside light browning to some leaves, very light waterstains to some leaves (below), one leaf repaired, else in good condition.
Two works by Fortunio Liceti bound together.
The extremely rare first edition of De novis astris containing possibly the earliest published illustration of the rings of Saturn and the first edition of the Controversiae De Cometarum.
Galileo observed the rings of Saturn for the first time in 1610, as reported in a lettered he wrote dated 30 July 1610; and he was surprised when in December 1612 he couldn't see the rings anymore.
In his Saggiatore of 1623, at page 217, Galileo reports how in 1616 he was able to observe Saturn in another shape; he had also sent a letter to Liceti describing his discoveries in 1617, and Liceti published these discoveries, along with Galileo's illustration, in this present work. This illustration can be found in the second part of the book, with a sectional… Read More

With 7 half-page woodcuts and one full-page woodcut of stills and other alchemical apparatus; margins of title very slightly frayed, some contemporary annotations, a very attractive, crispy copy in contemporary limp vellum.
Second edition of this compilation (first Strasbourg 1541), edited by Walther Ryff, and first edition published in Italy. Lull's alchemical works were published singularly and in collections; this work was printed as a separate edition.
The first part is a treatise on the quintessence (pp. 1-107), being a Lullian version of the De consideratione quintae essentiae of Joannes de Rupescissa (first printed in Venice, 1514). Although spurious, this treatise had enormous influence on the development of alchemy and is regarded as one of the most authoritative texts on the quinta essentia. "Although Lull himself was opposed to alchemy ... his methods had obvious applications in the alchemical field - and they were so applied in a host of pseudo-Lullian alchemical works, most of them… Read More