Original scientific paper
Without Barberini “ruling bees”: the pseudo-edition of Marin Getaldić’s De resolutione et compositione mathematica in 1640
Ivica Martinović
orcid.org/0000-0003-0424-1242
; Dubrovnik, Hrvatska
Abstract
The first edition of Marin Getaldić’s masterpiece De resolutione et compositione mathematica (1630) was printed posthumously in the Vatican printing-house of the Reverend Apostolic Camera by order of the powerful Francesco Barberini, “cardinal nephew” of Pope Urban VIII and “cardinal protector” of the Dubrovnik Republic. Yet apart from the mentioned first edition, there was also another edition in 1640, recorded in literature only once – in Jurić’s bibliography of Croatian Neo-Latinism Croatiae scriptores (1971).
A comparison of these two editions has resulted in merely four differences: the first, naturally, relates to the year of edition, while the remaining three concern Cardinal Francesco Barberini, that is, the Barberini noble lineage. “Ruling bees,” heraldic insignia of the Barberini family, have been removed from two places in the 1640 edition: from the title page and from the decorative layout of the letter of the Vatican printer Andrea Brogiotti to Prince Taddeo Barberini, supreme commander of the Papal Army. The letter of Marin Getaldić’s three little daughters to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, which contains the syntagm “ruling bees” (regnatrices apes) and was included in a few copies of the first edition, has not been found in the analyzed copy of the 1640 edition. The changes, thus, refer only to the title page and the front matter, while Getaldić’s five books on the methods of analysis and synthesis in mathematics have remained intact. Therefore, this leads to a conclusion that the 1640 edition owes its publishing to the fact that in the unsold copies of the first edition of Getaldić’s masterpiece from 1630 the first three or two pages were changed, depending on whether the copy contained the letter of Getaldić’s daughters to Cardinal Francesco Barberini or not. Clearly, the edition from 1640 is therefore a pseudo-edition without Barberini “ruling bees” and mirrors a trend towards lesser presence of Barberini’s heraldic insignia in public in the last years of the papacy of Urban VIII, Maffeo Barberini.
Until now only three copies of the pseudo-edition of Getaldić’s work De resolutione et compositione mathematica libri quinque from 1640 are known: the first is housed in the British Library in London under shelfmark 50.e.6, the second in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris under shelfmark V-1492, and the third is kept in the Michigen University Library in Ann Arbor, and since 2009 is accessible in digitized form at Google Books. The first two copies were documented in Jurić’s bibliography, while the third was used for comparison with the first edition from 1630.
Keywords
Marin Getaldić / Marinus Ghetaldus; Francesco Barberini; Andrea Brogiotti; Taddeo Barberini; Typography of the Reverend Apostolic Camera; pseudoedition; rare books; mathematics of the 17th century; heraldry of the 17 century
Hrčak ID:
254880
URI
Publication date:
20.12.2020.
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