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Gaurico, Luca (1475-1558) Tractatus Astrologicus.
Venice: Apud Curtium Troianum Navo, 1552.
First edition, quarto, large woodcut printer's device to title, showing a lion with a dead dragon at its feet; contents nicely preserved; bound in full contemporary limp parchment (some surface grime, lacking ties); 8 1/2 x 6 in.
Gaurico's collection of astrological prognostications covers important and influential thinkers, theologians, poets & politicians from his time and early periods. When it came out, he was locked in a battle with Girolamo Cardano, another astrologer who had criticized the accuracy of Gaurico's genitures (horoscope diagrams) and his interpretations thereof. "In his Tractatus, Gaurico gave as good as he got from Cardano, and because he wrote in 1552, he had the last word. He pointed out every error that he could find in Cardano's genitures, and described every instance where a Cardano prognostication went awry. Cardano, for example, predicted a long life for King Henry VIII of England, who died in 1547, the year Cardano's book came out. Gaurico showed that, with a proper interpretation of Henry's geniture, an early death was easily foreseen. " (Quoted from William B. Ashworth Jr.'s March 12, 2024 "Scientist of the Day" essay, published by the Linda Hall Library: https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/luca-gaurico/). See also Anthony Grafton's Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (1999).
Ex libris Professor, Astronomer, Historian & Bibliophile Owen Gingerich.
