Antiquarian Books Featured In Visions of the Cosmos Exhibit
New Scientist reports: Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to the Evolving Universe is on exhibit through 10 May 2010 at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, New York, NY 10011.
"In the Grilandus Inventum, a beautifully-preserved handwritten Italian book from 1506-07 currently on display at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, there is a figure of a man surrounded by zodiacal signs. In his left hand, he holds an armillary sphere, a celestial sphere with the Earth at the center of the universe, in accord with pre-Copernican astronomy. Lines from the zodiacal signs connect to Zodiac Man's body parts. The lesson is clear: man is governed by the cosmos.
The medieval manuscript depicting Zodiac Man is part of the Visions of the Cosmos exhibit, the Rubin's examination of the ways in which humans have conceived of their place in the universe over the centuries."...
"For the student of science and its history, one of the exhibition's high points will surely be the Renaissance books on display in the section that traces the evolution of modern cosmology from medieval times. There is an edition of Galileo's Siderius Nuncius (The Starry Messenger), published in Venice exactly 400 years ago this year. Galileo had turned his telescope to the heavens in the fall of 1609. What he would see - and document first in Siderius Nuncius - would turn medieval astronomy on its head and anger the Catholic Church."
"There are also editions of Nicolas Copernicus's 1543 work on heliocentrism, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), which inspired Galileo and Kepler, and, for contrast, French theologian Pierre d'Ailly's work on geocentrism and theology (Concordantia Astronomiae cum Theologia) from the previous century.
And in a nice reminder of how long it takes sometimes takes for our technology to catch up and prove by observation what some have imagined, there is an edition of Thomas Wright's An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, published in London in 1750. It contains Wright's assertion "that round every star then we may justly conjecture a similar System of Bodies, governed by the same Laws and Principles with this our solar one, though to us at the Earth for very good Reasons invisible"."
This is an exhibit many collectors of antiquarian books will want to include in their schedules. READ MORE HERE
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