Rosa Ursina sive Sol ex admirando facularum & Macularum suarum Phoenomeno varius....Libri quatuor.
Folio [26 x 39.5], (20) ff. including allegorical engraving on title page, allegorical engraved title, and engraved medallion portrait of Duke of Bracciano on dedication leaf; 784 [i.e., 839] pp., (1 blank, 18) ff., with 147 full- or nearly full-page and 22 quarter- or half-page engraved plates in text. Bound in red morocco gilt Barberini binding, gilt-ruled with crest and ornamental corners, one corner bumped, minor stains; a remboitage, later spine with raised bands, gilt. Ownership inscription of an unidentified Jesuit College on title, several minor repairs, some browning and foxing.
First edition of the most sumptuously illustrated astronomical work published in the first half of the seventeenth century, with many full-page illustrations of the sun and optical instruments devised by the eminent German Jesuit astronomer Scheiner (1575-1650), including his helioscope. Scheiner’s helioscope was the first Keplerian telescope in use and the first to use colored glass in the eyepiece. “For his masterpiece, Scheiner produced the first monograph on a heavenly body, the sun. Even today it is still an impressive volume, with scores of engravings of sunspots and the various instruments needed for solar observations” (Jesuit Science in the Age of Galileo).
Rosa Ursina summarizes Scheiner’s investigations of the sun, which in 1611 had brought him to the point of observing the presence of sunspots. Galileo’s discovery of them at about the same time became the basis for a heated controversy between the two scholars that continued for more than 20 years. In this work, “Scheiner confirmed his method and criticized Galileo for failing to mention the inclination of the axis of rotation of the sunspots to the plane of the ecliptic” (DSB XII, 151-2).
* · Cinti 79; Backer-Sommervogel VII, 738-9; Grässe VI, 298.
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