Piccolomini. De la sfera del mondo.

Alessandro Piccolomini. De la sfera del mondo : libri qvattro in lingva toscana ... De le stelle fisse, libro vno con le sve figvre e con le sve tauole, doue cõ marauigliosa ageuolezza potrà ciascheduno conoscere qualunque stella dele XLVIII immagini del cielo stellato …Venetia: Al segno del Pozzo, 1540.

Alessandro Piccolomini (1508-1578) was an Italian humanist astronomer and philosopher from Sienna. In addition to his work on astronomy, Piccolomini produced several translations of classical Greek texts, including book XIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and book VI of the Aeneid. It was through these translations that Piccolomini was exposed to Aristotelean and Ptolemaic theories of the structure of the universe: thus, De la sfera del mondo adheres to the Ptolemaic (or geocentric) model. The first edition of this work, displayed here, includes the first printed star atlas. Star atlases attempt to give the locations of all the visible stars, as opposed to only the constellations. In each map Piccolomini shows the comparative size of each star, the position of the celestial pole and the direction of daily rotation of the celestial sphere.