Cosmographia. Petri Apiani, per Gemmam Frisium

Title

Cosmographia. Petri Apiani, per Gemmam Frisium

Description

Atlas containing a folded woodcut world map in the form of a heart, numerous woodcut text plates, movable spheres, a pointer and a printer’s mark. A total of 66 sheets, including a title page and a folded world map.

c. 1545

Artist

Apian & Frisius (1495-1552)

Peter Apian (1495–1552) was a German astronomer, mathematician, cartographer, printer, and publisher. He compiled extensive observational data on planetary motions and developed scientific instruments designed to predict these motions using mechanical models. Some of these instruments took the form of rotating paper discs, known as volvelles, bound into his books, whose use he explained in detail throughout his texts. In this context, Apian devised a method for determining geographic longitude by measuring the angular distance between the Moon and stars. In 1527, he became the first Western author—predating Blaise Pascal—to publish a variant of Pascal’s triangle, which had previously appeared in Arabic and Chinese sources. Observations of Halley’s Comet in 1531 led Apian to recognize that a comet’s tail always points away from the Sun. With the first edition of his Cosmographia, published in 1524, he created one of the most influential textbooks of the Renaissance, combining astronomical, geographical, and navigational knowledge. Gemma Frisius (1508–1555) was a Dutch astronomer, mathematician, cartographer, and instrument maker. Beginning in 1529, he revised and expanded Apian’s Cosmographia, enriching it with new instruments, practical instructions, and a description of triangulation. These additions greatly enhanced the work’s usefulness and contributed to the widespread popularity and influence of its later editions.

Historical Description

The history of Western astrology can be traced back in its origins to the pre-Christian era in Babylonia or Mesopotamia and Egypt. The basic principles of interpretation and calculation, which are still recognizable today, were developed in the Hellenistic Greek-Egyptian Alexandria. Astronomy emerged from this as an interpretation-free observation and mathematical recording of the starry sky. In Europe astrology had an eventful history. After the elevation of Christianity to the state religion in the Roman Empire it was partly fought, partly adapted to Christianity and temporarily also pushed into the sidelines. The strict separation of astronomy/astronomia and astrology/astrologia did not exist until late antiquity. Both terms could mean the interpretation of the alleged effect of the celestial bodies on the so-called sublunar sphere, i.e. the earth, or the observation of the heavens for the purpose of recording and researching the movements of the celestial bodies. Accordingly, the astrological aspects of astrology found interest and recognition with ancient astronomers like Ptolemy or Hipparchus. Until the 18th century, astrology was often based on the assumption that there was a physical connection between the positions and movements of planets as well as stars and earthly events, which should have an effect, for example, on the weather, agriculture and in medicine. From the 2nd century two extensive compendia of the classical Hellenistic astrology of that time are preserved in Greek. The more important from an occidental point of view was the four-volume Tetrabiblos by Claudius Ptolemy. It was designed as a systematic textbook on astrology, covering its basics in the 1st volume, Mundane astrology in the 2nd volume, and natal astrology in the 3rd and 4th volumes, i.e., how to make a horoscope for the time of a person's birth and how to interpret it. With the advent of printing, the production of numerous popular astrological writings such as predictions, annual forecasts, almanacs and presentations of astrological medicine began. The so-called astronomical revolution, the transition from the geocentric view of the world to the heliocentric view of the universe, did not affect astrology. Many of the protagonists of the new astronomy, including Nicolaus Copernicus (In his main work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium from 1543, he describes a heliocentric world view, according to which the earth is a planet, rotates around its own axis and also moves around the sun like the other planets) and Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei, were simultaneously engaged in astrological studies and were not bound by the geocentric or heliocentric worldview. Kepler's planetary orbit calculations enabled for the first time in the history of astronomy exact indications of the planetary positions in the ephemerides, which also astrology needed, after the Copernican model of the - inapplicable - circular planetary orbits in his heliocentric cosmic model did not lead to any improvement in the accuracy of the ephemerides.