De Motu Tractatus.
4to (19.8 x 14 cm). [4] ff., 46 pp., with several geometrical diagrams in text. Title page soiled, gutter margin reinforced, pinhole in lower margin. Bound in quarter calf and marbled papers over boards, new endpapers. Old library stamp of the St. Maria Magdalena Church Library in Breslau (present Wrocław, Poland) on verso of title, along with a ca. late 19th-early 20th century duplicate release stamp from the Stadtbibliothek zu Breslau. Even toning throughout but otherwise good. Extremely rare first edition of this highly original and insufficiently known work on mechanics, which recent scholarship by Camerota and Hellbing has shown to be the most important such work in the generation between Guidobaldo and Galileo. Highlights include the revolutionary view that the true science of motion is the foundation of human knowledge, the adoption of a controversial cosmological model such as multi-centered gravity, the equivalence of a body’s resistance to a force required to raise it, and innovative treatment of combined forces. Further, Varro’s experiments on free-fall, the inclined plane and simple mechanics can now be seen as a precursor to Galileo’s mechanics. Indeed, while the route of transmission is undocumented, precise coincidences in conceptual terminology and technical usage lead Camerota and Hellbing to hypothesize that Galileo very likely knew the present work during his Paduan period, whether directly from the text or indirectly from an oral account by Swiss or German students, who formed a studio or informal college in Padua. The development of revolutionary views by two thinkers at approximately the same time independently is not unknown in the history of science and establishes Varro as a major figure in his own right. While not altogether previously unknown, the study of Camerota and Hellbing (2000) explicates the radical doctrines set forth in the present work, and it provides judicious assessment of the evidence for whether Galileo knew it. The most compelling evidence consists of eight passages in which the use of a technical term in Varro’s work has a precise and significant parallel in the early works of Galileo. The parallels can, in fact, be found in a gamut of Galileo’s works, from De motu antiquiora (c. 1592-98), the famous letter to Paolo Sarpi of October 16, 1604 (OG X.115), Galileo’s much-studied manuscript on motion (De Motu) and even in the Dialogo. Varro’s mathematization of simple machines also recurs strikingly in the Mecaniche (1597-98). The principal circumstantial evidence for contact is a manuscript copy of the work now in Jena made after the printed edition bound with various works by Giordano Bruno composed in Venice, offering evidence for the circulation of Varro’s work in Venetian/Paduan circles when Galileo began teaching in Padua and joined the intellectual group centered around Giovanni Vincenzo Pinelli. Of lesser weight but worth notice are a number of manuscript copies of the work in Italian libraries (three in Florence) and a printed copy at the Vatican with a Barberini provenance. While the route of contact is technically undocumented as remarked above, the authors deem the philological evidence to be sufficiently weighty that they consider the hypothesis that Galileo knew the present work to be highly likely. The self-confidence and even swagger of Varro occasionally remind one of Galileo as well: “I have never sworn on the word of any master, but always philosophized completely freely” (p. vi). Camerota and Hellbing also see evidence for a proto-Baconian insistence on the public utility of science. In one regard, Varro is even more radical than Galileo, claiming with great vigor that his science of motion is not merely a reformation of medieval mechanics or a “cutting edge” Renaissance theorist such as Guidobaldo, but the foundation of all human knowledge, contributing to such domains as politics and economics. (He wrote tracts on these subjects, which are lost.) Notwithstanding Camerota and Hellbing’s thorough review of the archival evidence, little is still known about the author. Michel Varro (ca. 1542-1586) was a Swiss scientist, businessman and politician. Born in Geneva to a Protestant immigrant Piemontese family, Varro matriculated in law and mathematics in Geneva from 1559 and in Frankfurt an der Oder from 1563; he may also possibly have studied in Padua. Highlights of his political career in Geneva included membership in the Council of Two Hundred (1568), and Secretary of State (1573–1576). He was also scholar-magistrate (Scholarque) from 1581. He traveled to France (1572), where he narrowly escaped death during the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and to Poland (1573–1578), where he drafted his De motu tractatus in 1584. He was the Syndic of the city from 1582 until his death in 1586. The Tractatus mentions several other works by Varro never printed and now considered lost, mostly on physics: De Iactu, De continuatione eiusque solution, De condensatione et rarefactione earumque causis et effectibus, De variis machinis, as well as some works on politics. Varro’s name also surfaces in Bruno’s interrogation of 1579. He died as a high-ranking Syndic in Geneva in 1586.
* Adams V291; Hellbing/Camerota, All’ Alba della Scienza Galileiana. Michel Varro e il suo De Motu Tractatus (2000); R. Netz, “Michel Varro”, in Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (DHS) (https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/025302/2013-01-16/; accessed 5/28/2026).
Price: $39,500.00