Petri Apiani Cosmographia, per Gemmam Phrysium, apud Louanienses Medicum ac Mathematicum insignem, restituta.

Title

Petri Apiani Cosmographia, per Gemmam Phrysium, apud Louanienses Medicum ac Mathematicum insignem, restituta.

Description

Atlas with a total of 62 leaves including 35 pages of various woodcuts of large globes (incl. title page) and astronomical armillary spheres, 4 of which with movable parts. IA 106.429; Adams A 1278; Nijhoff-Kronenberg 125; Sabin 1744; Alden-L. 539/1; Church 77; van Ortroy, Apian 30 & Gemma Frisius 11. - Early edition of Apian's major work, edited by Gemma Frisius. Also contains two important contributions of Gemma Frisius' own, his "Libellus de locorum describendorum ratione" (Bll. 47v-53), in which he was the first to describe the principle of triangulation for land surveying, and his "Usus annuli astronomici" (Bll. 54-60), published here for the first time. At the same time an important Amerikanum with description of the new continent on fol. XXXI recto. Four of the large text woodcuts with movable spheres, pointers etc., including a world map in polar projection (Shirley 51). The woodcut on leaf 11v with anchor recto, movable parts according to Church and other comparative copies, however, not published. - Stain on leaf XXVIII, number on leaf LX, leaf LXI wormhole, last page wormhole and corner below replaced. partly Antwerp, Ä. Coppenius for Arnold Berckmann, 1540. Early edition.

c. 1549

Artist

Apian (1495-1552)

Peter Apian, or Petrus Apianus (1495 -1552), was a German scholar of the Renaissance period. He was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, and cartographer, as well as a printer and editor. Apian collected extensive observational data on planetary motions and developed scientific instruments that were used to predict these planetary motions on the mechanical model. Some of these were paper discs stitched into his books that could be rotated against each other. How to operate these so-called volvelles, Apian explained in detail in the course of his texts.In the course of this activity, Apian developed a method for measuring geographic longitudes by means of lunar distances to stars. In 1527 he was the first occidental author, even before Blaise Pascal, to publish a variant of Pascal's triangle, which had been used earlier by Arabic and Chinese authors. Observations of Halley's comet in 1531 led Peter Apian (and, independently of him, Girolamo Fracastoro) to realize that the comet's tail always points in the direction opposite to the sun. As a court mathematician, Apian earned the favor of Emperor Charles V, who ennobled him and his brothers (George, Gregory, and Niclas) on July 20, 1541, at the Diet of Regensburg by appointing them "knightly nobles" (Reichsritterstand). Only a little later he was appointed court palatine. Peter Apian is the father of the mathematician and cartographer Philipp Apian who, surveying Upper and Lower Bavaria by order of Duke Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria, published the famous Landtafen von Bayern on 24 woodcuts.

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.