PICCOLOMINI, Alessandro

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Sixth edition of this very influential Italian cosmography paired with a much important illustration of the Ptolemaic constellations, originally published together in 1540. The sam e years as this edition, another more common reprint by Varisco appeared in Venice. The scion of a papal family in Siena, Alessandro Piccolomini (1508-1578) was a leading Renaissance humanist, philosopher, dramatist and astronomer. He was a founding member of many Italian academies, notably the Intronati and Infiammati. After teaching philosophy in Padua, he moved to Rome and Siena to started an ecclesiastical career, which eventually led him to being appointed archbishop of Patras. A partisan of the Italian vernacular, he intentionally avoided Latin in his numerous works. These comprise a couple of moral comedies and collections of his letters and sonnets, several philosophical treatises and translations of classical authors, as well as his famous astronomical essays. Among them, La Sfera and Le Stelle fisse stand out for accuracy and success. The first describes the universe following the traditional Ptolemaic-Aristotelian geocentric cosmography, while the second contains the one of the earliest star atlases to be published in the Western World. All Ptolemy s 48 constellations, save Equuleus, were displayed without the traditional depiction of the related animals. Piccolomini introduced here the practice of identification of stars by Latin letters, which would be adopted using the Greek alphabet by Johann Bayer some seventy years later. The lunar crater Piccolomini is named after him. Show more