Galilei, Galileo | Il Saggiatore …, Rome, 1623, first edition, a fine copy of one of the most celebrated polemics in science

Galilei, Galileo

Il Saggiatore nel quale con bilancia esquisita e giusta si ponderano le cose contenute nella Libra Astronomica e Filosofica di Lotario Sarsi. Rome: Giacomo Mascardi, 1623

A fine copy of the first edition of Galileo's response to the Jesuit mathematician Orazio Grassi arising from the controversy over the three comets of 1618.

In 1619, under the pseudonym of Lothario Sarsi, Fr. Grassi attacked Galileo's hypotheses on the nature of comets. In the course of his defense, Galileo distinguished physical properties of objects from their sensory effects and rejected accepted authority in any matter that could be investigated directly. "This was a truly masterful piece of sarcastic invective and criticism. It is still read today in Italian language classes in Italy as a fine example of the use of rhetoric devices in the Italian language" (P. Machamer, The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, 1998, p. 21).

This edition is bibliographically complex, and recent scholarship by Jason W. Dean and Nick Wilding has debunked the notion of a "fictitious 'first issue' claiming chronological and monetary priority" amongst copies offered on the market. The present copy includes the engraved portrait signed "F. Villamoena Fecit" bound before the title-page. Other copies have been observed with the Istoria portrait inserted instead, and the location of where it is bound also varies. The present volume includes the gathering with the Introductory Poems, whose "inclusion is seemingly at random, present in some copies, and not in others." Within the body of the text, the diagram at P4v was accidentally printed upside-down and a cancel is pasted into many copies, though here the original diagram remains. The absence of the cancel diagram was historically thought to denote a "first issue", whereas in fact the "lack of a pastedown is … rather evidence of the ad hoc solution to the printer's error, improvised alongside the edition's ongoing distribution." Lastly, the errata has been found in three states, of which the first (titled "Errori occorsi nello stampare di maggio consideratione" and listing sixteen errors on Ff6v in two columns) is present in this copy. Revisions to the errata were printed after Galileo completed his own edits to the printed text. (See Dean and Wilding, "Assaying Il Saggiatore").

Small 4to (210 x 162 mm). Engraved frontispiece portrait, engraved title, imprimatur on title-page verso, engraved diagrams in text; engraved frontispiece shaved (costing artist's initial and some of border), verso of title-page with transparent tape repair to old tear at lower margin, without the extended list of errata printed in Florence for Galileo (see catalogue note), plate at P4v printed upside-down, light staining, two tears at R1, cutting into text and plate. Early speckled calf, red sprinkled edges; rebacked and repaired at corners, boards scuffed.

REFERENCES

Buffalo/Sparrow 76; Carli & Favaro 95; Honeyman sale 1404–05; Horblit sale 2:422; Riccardi 1.i 511, no. 9 1; Rocco/Cinti 73; USTC 4008331; Dean and Wilding, "Assaying Il Saggiatore, With a Delicate and Precise Bibliographical Balance," in Galilaeana XX, 2 (2023), pp. 61–90)

PROVENANCE

Joseph Martini (1874–1944; bookplate and pencil collation note) — Giorgio Di Veroli (1890–1952; ex-libris tickets, his sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries, 28–29 February 1956, lot 383, purchase by F. Thomas Heller, New York — Robert S. Dunham (acquired from Heller in March 1956, pencil acquisition note to front pastedown and carbon copy of typed letter from Heller to Dunham loosely inserted; Sotheby's New York, 11 December 1993, lot 683)