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Details
DELLA PORTA, Giovan Battista (c.1538-1615). Magiae naturalis libri XX. Naples: Orazio Salviani, 1589.
2° (291 x 206 mm). Title within wide woodcut border, author's medallion portrait on title verso, 21 woodcut illustrations and diagrams in text, woodcut head- and tailpieces, and initials. (Brown stain in inner upper corner of first gathering, affecting woodcut border on title, some browning and spotting.) 19th-century marbled boards, patterned slipcase. Provenance: a few marginalia.
FIRST EDITION of the complete text in twenty books, an augmented version of a work first published in four books in 1558. As Mortimer notes, the scrollwork title border in four parts, the upper piece containing Porta's device of a lynx, had been designed for Porta's Phytognomica, but 'it is probably its appearance in the Magia that provided the inspiration for the emblem of the Accademia dei Lincei ... The 1588 text was Della Porta’s earliest published work, and the 1589 volume is essential to an understanding of Della Porta and the science of his day’ . Mortimer/Harvard Italian 400; Riccardi I(ii) 307.
2° (291 x 206 mm). Title within wide woodcut border, author's medallion portrait on title verso, 21 woodcut illustrations and diagrams in text, woodcut head- and tailpieces, and initials. (Brown stain in inner upper corner of first gathering, affecting woodcut border on title, some browning and spotting.) 19th-century marbled boards, patterned slipcase. Provenance: a few marginalia.
FIRST EDITION of the complete text in twenty books, an augmented version of a work first published in four books in 1558. As Mortimer notes, the scrollwork title border in four parts, the upper piece containing Porta's device of a lynx, had been designed for Porta's Phytognomica, but 'it is probably its appearance in the Magia that provided the inspiration for the emblem of the Accademia dei Lincei ... The 1588 text was Della Porta’s earliest published work, and the 1589 volume is essential to an understanding of Della Porta and the science of his day’ . Mortimer/Harvard Italian 400; Riccardi I(ii) 307.
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