Lucio Bellanti wrote this book with men outside trying to kill him, which he mentions on the first page of his preface. Bellanti was a physician and astrologer of Siena, living as an exile in Florence because he opposed the men who had taken over his city. Partway through his address to the reader he writes: "Look: while I write, a man bursts into the school to report that there are cut-throats at hand to murder me. I find ambushes laid everywhere, so that my friends call me Damocles, or Dionysius. And though constant danger has made me almost fearless, still the pen cannot help falling from my faltering hand." Then he picked the pen back up and got on with defending astrology.
The attack he was answering was among the worst astrology had ever suffered. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was the prodigy of Florentine humanism, the young man who wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man. In his last years he put together twelve books attacking the claims of predictive astrology and the reasoning on which they rested. He died in 1494 at thirty-one and the Disputationes came out after his death. It did enormous damage, and it came from inside the very circle that had been reviving the occult sciences. That is what made it so hard to answer.
Bellanti was undaunted. But he also opened by mourning Pico: "Do not believe, dear Reader, that I wrote what I publish moved by any enmity. Know that there was no one in Italy in our time whom I revered and honored as I did Pico, with whom I had no dealings. I grieved beyond all others at the death of so great a man, as a loss to the good arts." Bellanti blamed Savonarola as the real culprit. The Dominican friar had taken control of Florence and set the city burning its own books and pictures, and Bellanti held him responsible for turning Pico against the stars.
Thorndike reports that Bellanti also claimed to have read Savonarola's fall and violent death in the friar's own horoscope, five months before it happened. Savonarola was hanged and burned in the square at Florence in May 1498, the same year Bellanti's book first appeared. For the next hundred years, whenever the argument came round again, the astrologers pointed at Bellanti as the man who had answered Pico properly.
Bound also in this volume is Gabriele Pirovano's dialogue on the truth of astronomy, here in only its second printing. The dialogue builds the twelve signs out of the four elements by combination, and prints little triangles to show the working. Fire, air, water and earth are taken in threes, and each set resolves into one of the triplicities. It finishes with a flat list of results: from fire, air and earth comes Aries, from water, air and earth comes Pisces. It's set out like a geometrical proof, and on the page it looks like one. That's a great thing to find in a book about the stars.
This copy is in its old vellum over boards with five raised bands, and there is a medieval manuscript underneath it. Ruled lines and red rubrication show through the skin, though the writing cannot be made out from the outside. Someone lettered the title along the fore-edge in ink, LVCII BELL. TRAC. ASTR., because the book was shelved with its edges facing out, the way books were kept before spines faced the room. The title page carries an early ownership inscription: the volume belonged to the monastery of Santissimo Salvatore in Pavia, from the books of a Don Girolamo Candiens. Condition, binding and provenance are set out below.
BELLANTI, Lucio (Lucius Bellantius). Lucii Bellantii Senensis Mathematici ac Physici de Astrologica Veritate Liber Quaestionum. Astrologiae Defensio contra Ioannem Picum Mirandulanum. Gabrielis Pirovani Philosophi de Astronomiae Veritate Dialogus Absolutissimus. Basel: per Iacobum Parcum, impensis Ioannis Hervagii, February 1554. Third and last edition of Bellanti's two writings, after Florence 1498 and Venice 1502; second printing of Pirovano's dialogue, first published separately at Milan in 1507. One volume.
Physical Description: Folio, 30.5 by 21 cm, the chain lines running vertically. Collation AA4 a-z6 A6 B8: four preliminary leaves carrying the title, Bellanti's address to the reader and the index, then 302 pages of text, then the final leaf. Printer's device on the title and again at the end. Woodcut initials. The last page of the text is misnumbered 270 for 302, which is how the standard bibliographies record the book; the numbering and the gatherings are sound everywhere else.
References: VD 16, B 1592. The two component works are separately recorded, Bellanti's Astrologiae defensio at VD 16, B 1591, and Pirovano's dialogue at VD 16, P 2921.
Binding: Old vellum over boards, five raised bands, with a leaf of medieval manuscript beneath the covering, its ruling and red rubrication visible through the skin. The title lettered in early ink along the fore-edge. The spine has been restored and carries a small lesion; there are wormholes to the spine and front cover and worm traces to the pastedowns, and one edge is bumped.
Condition: A sound and strong copy for a book of this age. Light browning, heavier in places, with scattered foxing, and a small waterstain to the title page. The paper is firm and the text is clean throughout.
Provenance: Early ink inscription on the title page recording the book as belonging to the monastery of Santissimo Salvatore in Pavia, from the books of D. Hieronymus Candiens. An early ink paraph at the head of the title. The title lettered along the fore-edge in an early hand.
Lucio Bellanti wrote this book with men outside trying to kill him, which he mentions on the first page of his preface. Bellanti was a physician and astrologer of Siena, living as an exile in Florence because he opposed the men who had taken over his city. Partway through his address to the reader he writes: "Look: while I write, a man bursts into the school to report that there are cut-throats at hand to murder me. I find ambushes laid everywhere, so that my friends call me Damocles, or Dionysius. And though constant danger has made me almost fearless, still the pen cannot help falling from my faltering hand." Then he picked the pen back up and got on with defending astrology.
The attack he was answering was among the worst astrology had ever suffered. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was the prodigy of Florentine humanism, the young man who wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man. In his last years he put together twelve books attacking the claims of predictive astrology and the reasoning on which they rested. He died in 1494 at thirty-one and the Disputationes came out after his death. It did enormous damage, and it came from inside the very circle that had been reviving the occult sciences. That is what made it so hard to answer.
Bellanti was undaunted. But he also opened by mourning Pico: "Do not believe, dear Reader, that I wrote what I publish moved by any enmity. Know that there was no one in Italy in our time whom I revered and honored as I did Pico, with whom I had no dealings. I grieved beyond all others at the death of so great a man, as a loss to the good arts." Bellanti blamed Savonarola as the real culprit. The Dominican friar had taken control of Florence and set the city burning its own books and pictures, and Bellanti held him responsible for turning Pico against the stars.
Thorndike reports that Bellanti also claimed to have read Savonarola's fall and violent death in the friar's own horoscope, five months before it happened. Savonarola was hanged and burned in the square at Florence in May 1498, the same year Bellanti's book first appeared. For the next hundred years, whenever the argument came round again, the astrologers pointed at Bellanti as the man who had answered Pico properly.
Bound also in this volume is Gabriele Pirovano's dialogue on the truth of astronomy, here in only its second printing. The dialogue builds the twelve signs out of the four elements by combination, and prints little triangles to show the working. Fire, air, water and earth are taken in threes, and each set resolves into one of the triplicities. It finishes with a flat list of results: from fire, air and earth comes Aries, from water, air and earth comes Pisces. It's set out like a geometrical proof, and on the page it looks like one. That's a great thing to find in a book about the stars.
This copy is in its old vellum over boards with five raised bands, and there is a medieval manuscript underneath it. Ruled lines and red rubrication show through the skin, though the writing cannot be made out from the outside. Someone lettered the title along the fore-edge in ink, LVCII BELL. TRAC. ASTR., because the book was shelved with its edges facing out, the way books were kept before spines faced the room. The title page carries an early ownership inscription: the volume belonged to the monastery of Santissimo Salvatore in Pavia, from the books of a Don Girolamo Candiens. Condition, binding and provenance are set out below.
BELLANTI, Lucio (Lucius Bellantius). Lucii Bellantii Senensis Mathematici ac Physici de Astrologica Veritate Liber Quaestionum. Astrologiae Defensio contra Ioannem Picum Mirandulanum. Gabrielis Pirovani Philosophi de Astronomiae Veritate Dialogus Absolutissimus. Basel: per Iacobum Parcum, impensis Ioannis Hervagii, February 1554. Third and last edition of Bellanti's two writings, after Florence 1498 and Venice 1502; second printing of Pirovano's dialogue, first published separately at Milan in 1507. One volume.
Physical Description: Folio, 30.5 by 21 cm, the chain lines running vertically. Collation AA4 a-z6 A6 B8: four preliminary leaves carrying the title, Bellanti's address to the reader and the index, then 302 pages of text, then the final leaf. Printer's device on the title and again at the end. Woodcut initials. The last page of the text is misnumbered 270 for 302, which is how the standard bibliographies record the book; the numbering and the gatherings are sound everywhere else.
References: VD 16, B 1592. The two component works are separately recorded, Bellanti's Astrologiae defensio at VD 16, B 1591, and Pirovano's dialogue at VD 16, P 2921.
Binding: Old vellum over boards, five raised bands, with a leaf of medieval manuscript beneath the covering, its ruling and red rubrication visible through the skin. The title lettered in early ink along the fore-edge. The spine has been restored and carries a small lesion; there are wormholes to the spine and front cover and worm traces to the pastedowns, and one edge is bumped.
Condition: A sound and strong copy for a book of this age. Light browning, heavier in places, with scattered foxing, and a small waterstain to the title page. The paper is firm and the text is clean throughout.
Provenance: Early ink inscription on the title page recording the book as belonging to the monastery of Santissimo Salvatore in Pavia, from the books of D. Hieronymus Candiens. An early ink paraph at the head of the title. The title lettered along the fore-edge in an early hand.
Image 1 of 14
Image 2 of 14
Image 3 of 14
Image 4 of 14
Image 5 of 14
Image 6 of 14
Image 7 of 14
Image 8 of 14
Image 9 of 14
Image 10 of 14
Image 11 of 14
Image 12 of 14
Image 13 of 14
Image 14 of 14