Catalogue 32
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Physics & Optics
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CARDANO, Girolamo. De Subtilitate. Libri XXI. Nuremberg, Johann Petreius, 1550.
(18) ff., the last blank and integral, 371 pp. Bound in contemporary blindstamped pigskin over wooden boards, raised bands on spine, with title written in ink, central panel showing Christ bordered by prophers and evangelists, in turn bordered by rows of interlocking fronds. Purchase inscription dated 1557 signed Nicolas Maler on title. Some gashes, burns and stains on covers, remnants of ties. Pale waterstain in upper margin of text. Withal very fresh, unpressed copy, excellent.
$55,000 First edition, fine copy in a handsome contemporary binding, and especially unusual bound with the supplemental work published 7 years later of Cardano's encyclopedic survey of the sciences.
"De subtilitate was the most advanced presentation of physical knowledge up to its time. It contains many remarkable observations and ideas, including Cardano's distinction between the attractive powers of rubbed amber (electric) and the lodestone (magnetic), his pre-evolutionary belief in creation as a progressive development, and the premise that natural law was unified and could be known through observation and experiment. The similarity of many of Cardano's scientific opinions to those in the unpublished works of Leonardo da Vinci have led some scholars to speculate that Cardano had access to Leonardo's manuscripts, although others argue that the similarity is coincidental?"(Norman Catalogue I.401).
Cardano's De subtitlitate inspired J.C. Scaliger?s Exotericarum exercitationum (Paris 1557), "the most savage book review in the bitter annals of literary invective. Julius Caesar Scaliger, another vain and articulate natural philosopher of Italian origins, devoted more than 900 4to pages to refuting one of Cardano's books, On Subtlety, and promised to return to the subject at still greater length. Though Scaliger died without producing more than a fragment of this promised polemic, his Exercitationes became a standard work in university curriculums-perhaps the only book review ever known to undergo transformation into a textbook" (Grafton, Cardano's Cosmos, p. 4).
* 1) Norman 401; Adams C-668; 2) Adams C-662 (this edition; date of ?1577? is incorrect.); Mario Gliozzi in DSB III.66.
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