Beschreibung:

COLLADO, Luigi. Prattica manuale dell ’ artiglieria, opera historica, politica, e militare, Dove principalmente si tratta dell ’ ecellenza, & origine dell ’ Art e Militare, e delle Machine usate di gli antichi… Milan: Filippo Ghisolfi and Giovanni Battista Bidelli, 1641.
COLLADO, Luigi. Prattica manuale dell ’ artiglieria, opera historica, politica, e militare, Dove principalmente si tratta dell ’ ecellenza, & origine dell ’ Art e Militare, e delle Machine usate di gli antichi… Milan: Filippo Ghisolfi and Giovanni Battista Bidelli, 1641. 4° (275 x 206 mm). 27 folding plates, engraved vignette on title, numerous woodcut illustrations throughout. (Pale waterstain to lower margin of first two gatherings, short tear to D1 not affecting text, a small amount of underlining in red pencil to a few leaves, figure 56 browned, otherwise fine and fresh.) 19th-century Italian quarter vellum, tree-calf paper sides, UNCUT (lightly rubbed). Provenance : Max Dreger (bookplate). Very scarce early edition in Italian, following the first of 1586, of this celebrated treatise on artillery by a Spanish engineer attached to King Philip II’s army in Italy. Collado’s manual is the first work detailing ballistic experiments based on the cannon. This edition is illustrated with 84 woodcuts, many folding, and entirely different from those in the original Spanish edition of 1586. Following progress in the science of arms at the end of the 16th Century, the author revises his work entirely, to such an extent that this present edition can be considered a separate work altogether, providing a complete picture of the state of artillery at the beginning of the 17th Century. The book is divided in seven sections detailing the history of projectiles prior to the invention of powder, the construction of cannons, the mathematics of artillery based mostly on the treatises of Tartaglia, as well as the transport, setting and use of cannons. There is also a chapter on fireworks and dialogues on the practice of artillery. The present expanded edition is much scarcer than the first edition, with only one copy having sold in the last thirty five years, according to American Book Prices Current .