Rome, Giacomo Mascardi, 1613. In-4, vélin à petits recouvrements (Reliure de l'époque).
Édition originale de cet important traité de Galilée sur les taches du soleil dans lequel le savant italien confirme ses positions en faveur du système copernicien.
L'illustration, gravée sur cuivre, comprend un portrait de l'auteur à pleine page, 38 planches de taches solaires, 5 planches des satellites du système jovien et des schémas dans le texte gravés sur bois.
Exemplaire du tirage réalisé pour l'export, sans les trois lettres de Christoph Scheiner, pour lesquelles l'éditeur italien ne possédait pas de privilège et dont il réserva donc l'impression au marché italien.
« Galileo received from Markus Welser of Augsburg a short treatise on sunspots that Welser had published pseudonymously for the Jesuit Christoph Scheiner, asking Galileo's opinion of it. Galileo replied in three long letters during 1612, demolishing Scheiner's conjecture that the spots were tiny planets. He asserted also that he had observed sunspots much earlier and had shown them to others at Rome early in 1611. This set the stage for a deep enmity of Scheiner toward Galileo, which, however, did not take active form at once. Galileo's Letters on Sunspots was published at Rome in 1613 under the auspices of the Lincean Academy. In his book Galileo spoke out decisively for the Copernican system for the first time in print. In the same book he found a place for is first published mention of the concept of conservation of angular momentum and an associated inertial concept » (DSB).
Bel exemplaire bien conservé.
Sparrow, 77 – Ricardi, I, 509 – DSB, V, 237-249.
