Lot n° 14
Estimation :
6000 - 8000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 7 583EUR
CARDAN (Jérôme)
Les Livres, intitulés de la Subtilité, & subtiles inventions, ensemble les causes occultes, & raison d'icelles. Paris, Jan Foucher, 1556.
Bound with: [GESNER (Conrad). Tresor de Evonyme Philiatre des Remedes secretz. Lyon, Balthazar Arnoullet, 1555. 2 works in a large volume in-4, of (4) ff. 381 pp. mis-coded 391 without missing, the pagination jumping from 256 to 267, (27) ff. the last one blank; (14) ff. 326 pp, the last unnumbered, (1) f.: limp vellum with cover, gilt fillet, small gilt cartouche in the centre, traces of laces, smooth spine decorated with pallets and a small repeated fleuron, title in ink, gilt edges (contemporary binding).
First editions in French of both works.
Les Livres de Cardan were translated by Richard le Blanc.
Dedicated to Marguerite de France, the edition is illustrated in the text with about a hundred woodcut figures and diagrams.
A scientific encyclopedia.
De la Subtilité is not only a document on the state of science in the sixteenth century, but a vast scientific encyclopedia in which cosmology, medicine, geometry, natural sciences, cryptography, the virtues of precious stones, etc., are discussed. The prodigies and the occult are reintegrated into an intelligible organization of the Universe, not without temerity with regard to his unorthodox conception of the relationship between the body and the soul.
Accused of heresy, Cardan was brought before the Inquisition in 1570. Among the heretical opinions he supports here is a passage concerning the Koran and the "Mohammedan saints" which will be deleted in later editions (ff. 242-243).
Many French scholars and poets meditated on the work that was in Ronsard's library, which Ambroise Paré quotes in his Chirurgie and which the learned libertines of the 17th century made their honey.
(Dibner, Heralds of science, 1980, no. 139: for the first Latin edition of 1550. "The book represents the most advanced presentation of physical knowledge up to his time and the idea that all creation is in progressive development.")
The first French edition of the Tresor des Remedes secretz by Conrad Gesner (1516-1565), translated by Barthélemy Aneau, is bound in.
This Physic, Medical & Alchymic Book, published by the great Swiss physician and naturalist, under the pseudonym of Evonyme Philiatre, is intended for physicians, surgeons and apothecaries. It provides recipes for various waters, oils, liquors, vapors, perfumes, and other medicines obtained by distillation with the aim of invigorating & strengthening the life of the human body.
The edition is illustrated in the text with more than one hundred and fifty woodcuts representing retorts, furnaces, and plants; those concerning botany had been engraved by Clément Boussy, a "picture cutter" who had come from Paris, for the 1549 Lyon edition of the famous herbarium by Léonard Fuchs.
Small crack without missing at the lower corner of the title.
Superb copy in contemporary gilt vellum, very pure, having belonged to a Saint-Simonian worker-poet.
In a handwritten letter dated 1878 (2 pages in-8), attached to the volume, the worker-poet Louis Gabriel Gauny donates the copy to one of his colleagues: In anticipation of the unknown hour of my death, I bequeath to you a volume bearing this title : The books of Hierome Cardanus [...]. As soon as I am transformed, I authorize you, Louis Désiré Philippe, to take possession of this volume, followed by twenty others that you will be pleased to choose from my library.
A carpenter, Louis Gabriel Gauny (1806-1889) belonged to a Saint-Simonian group and collaborated with the Ruche populaire. In 1846, Father Enfantin's protection earned him a position as a site guard on the Lyon railway (Maitron).
Gauny lived in "a cramped two-room apartment lined with books - books whose possession had cost the worker-poet "more than one abstinence", and he continues: He did not hide an aristocratic taste for beautiful editions, "the large margins, the sumptuous in-quarto typefaces". [...] "Learning, learning", this appetite of his whole life, he satisfied it largely. He gorged himself with reading" (Un ouvrier-poète : Gabriel Gauny, 1806-1889 in La Révolution de 1848, n° 161, pp. 69-94).
From the library of Jean Blondelet, with his usual initials on the lower back cover.
(I : Caillet, n° 2014.- Dorbon, n° 623. - II : Baudrier, t. X, pp. 149-150.- Caillet, n° 4509.)
My orders
Sale information
Sales conditions
Return to catalogue