Catalogue 32
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Physics & Optics
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Precursor To Galileo’s De Motu
BENEDETTI, Giovanni Battista. Resolvtio omnivm Evclidis problematvm aliorumqэ ad hoc necessario inuentorum vna tantummodo circini data apertura, per Ioannem Baptistam de Benedictis inventa. . Venice, apud Bartholomaeum Caesanum, 1553.
4to. [21 x 14 cm], (12) ff., 57 ff. (f. 53 misplaced following f. 57), (1) ff. Bound in contemporary ruled and stamped calf with prominent raised bands on spine and two ribbon closures. Expert repair to foot of title page, light toning in the margins of some leaves, occasional fingersoiling. Otherwise immaculate, with sharp dark woodcuts, a fresh and excellent copy.
$18,500 Scarce first edition of the author’s first book, treating selected Euclidean problems by means of a ruler and a compass with fixed setting, “of outstanding importance in the history of the laws of falling bodies.” — Drake & Drabkin, Mechanics in 16th-Century Italy, p. 32.
“Benedetti’s first important contribution to the birth of modern physics was set forth in the letter of dedication to the Resolutio. The letter was addressed to Gabriel de Guzman, a Spanish Dominican with whom he had conversed at Venice in 1551. It appears that Guzman had shown interest in Benedetti’s theory of the free fall of bodies, and had asked him to publish a demonstration in which the speeds of the fall would be treated mathematically. In order to forestall the possible theft of his ideas, Benedetti published his demonstration in this letter despite its irrelevance to the purely geometrical content of the book. Benedetti held that bodies of the same material, regardless of weight, would fall through a given medium at the same speed, and not at speeds proportional to their weights, as maintained by Aristotle. His demonstration was based on the principle of Archimedes, which probably came to his attention through Tartaglia’s publication at Venice in 1551 of a vernacular translation of the first book of the Archimedean treatise on the behavior of bodies in water. Benedetti’s ‘buoyance theory of fall’ is in many respects identical with that which Galileo set forth in his first treatise, De motu, composed at Pisa about 1590 but not published during his lifetime.” — Stillman Drake in DSB.
“His passing reference to the study of Euclid under Tartaglia seems designed to disclaim any indebtedness to the latter for the results published in the book; and indeed in this matter he far surpassed his former teacher, though he was but 22 years old when he published. Tartaglia’s own solution of the same problem, published posthumously in his great treatise on mathematics, is less systematic and less complete than Benedetti’s.” — Drake & Drabkin, op. cit.
* · Roberts & Trent, p. 33; Riccardi I.110; Stillman Drake in DSB I.605.
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