First Edition of Magini's Geography in Italian Translation.
Nice example of a fine 16th-century Italian translation of Ptolemy, published by Giovanni Batista and Giorgio Fratelli in Venice.
Beautifully engraved in the late Lafreri School style, this work contains sixty-three maps set into the text as well as one full-page world map. This method of setting the maps into the text allows for an easy flow between the prosaic description of the geography and the copperplate engraved maps. Magini's work is the only 16th-century Ptolemy published in Italy to use this setting.
The work preserves a marvelous look at 16th-century geography, with interesting features found throughout including mythical islands in the Arctic, an oversized southern continent, the cities of gold in California, Japan in the middle of the Pacific, and a Northwest passage near Greenland. Maps are both Ptolemaic and modern, with the Ptolemaic section including an abridged translation of the 2nd century work and the modern section including detailed descriptions of world geography.
The maps in the atlas, for the most part, represent faithful reductions of those in Mercator's atlas, predating the first official Hondius pocket issue of that famous work. Several maps, including those of the Americas, Northern Europe, and Tartaria follow Ortelius instead, showing the Magini used a compendium of sources when executing this work.
Collation
[Title], [Dedication], a - i6, k8, aa - cc6, dd3, A6, B - C4, A - C6, [Title], D - Z6, Aa - Ll6, Mm8, a - e6.
Giovanni Antonio Magini was an accomplished Italian cartographer, astronomer, astrologer, and mathematician—in short, a Renaissance man. Born in Padua, he studied philosophy in Bologna. His first publication was Ephemerides coelestium motuum, an astronomical treatise published in 1582. In 1588 he was selected, over Galileo Galilei, to fill the chair of mathematics at the University of Bologna. He died in that city in 1617.
Magini operated under a geocentric understanding of the universe and created his own planetary theory consisting of eleven rotating spheres. He published this theory in Novæ cœlestium orbium theoricæ congruentes cum observationibus N. Copernici (Venice, 1589). In the 1590s he published works on surveying and trigonometry, as well as invented a calculator. In 1596, he published a commentary of Ptolemy’s Geographia, which was published in several editions and languages. He labored for years on an atlas of Italy, which was printed posthumously in 1620. To pay for this project, Magini served as the math tutor to the son of the Duke of Mantua, as well as being the court astrologer to the Duke.