Lot 6E email save

MONTI, Pietro. De unius legis veritate...1509.

Sign In to see what this sold for

Milan: Giovanni Angelo Scinzenzeler for the brothers de Lignano, 1509. Folio (298 x 198 mm). Collation: A4 B10 A-Z 2A-2Z 3A-3X8 3Y10 (3Y10 blank). [559] (of 560) leaves, final blank removed. Publisher's woodcut device on title, one half-page and two small woodcut planetary diagrams in book 10. Fol. 3O7 misbound between 3O2 & 3O3. Contemporary ms. table of contents in Greek on title (cropped). 18th-century French olive morocco, gold-tooled spine, g.e. (spine faded, joints & extremities rubbed). Condition: Minor marginal soiling to first few leaves, fore-edges of a couple of leaves in book 10 stained & frayed. first edition, of Monti's magnum opus. Monti was a Milanese military strategist, engineer and theologian, who served the Venetian republic for a time as commander of an infantry battalion, and who frequented the circle of Leonardo da Vinci. This vast tome represents Monti's attempt to formulate a unified system of philosophy and theology, written partly as a protest against the Lutheran reform; it brings together "mysticism and experimentalism, Aristotle and the new concepts set forth by da Vinci and his successors, theology and physics." (E. Solmi, Leonardo (1452-1510), Florence 1907, p. 81). Monti was considered an authority in military engineering, and a certain passage in the book on the trajectory of a cannonball has received attention, less for its intrinsic merits than because of a relevant entry in Leonardo's Notebooks, in which, reflecting on the curved trajectory of an object in motion, Leonardo reminds himself to "ask Pietro Monti about certain ways of throwing spears." This (complete) copy appears to contain an unrecorded variant issue of the prelims, with only 4 leaves in quire A. EDIT-16 CNCE 16718; Adams M-1721 (describing 8 leaves in quire A).

View Bloomsbury Auctions next auction.

Similar lots up for auction