Platon

1484 · Best.-Nr. ABC_50481 — Colophon: Florence: Laurentium Venetum i.e. the Sisters of the Convent of San Jacopo di Ripoli for Laurentius Francisci de Alopa 1484. Modern blind-tooled vellum in period style. Folio ca. 27.7 x 20.8 cm. Editio princeps of the first mathematical world model in philosophy. Plato’s Timaeus here with the Critias De legibus the Epistolae corrigenda and colophon survives in a substantial consecutive portion of the 1484-1485 Florentine Opera: 176 leaves comprising the complete parts III IV and V. What gives this section its singular force is the presence of the Timaeus the dialogue in which the structure of the cosmos is explained through number proportion geometry and ordered construction. This should not be overstated into modern science in the strict sense yet it is fully arguable that the text offers the earliest great model of nature as intelligible through formal relations and that this edition is the first printed witness to that claim.In that limited but important sense the book stands near the beginning of a long intellectual trajectory that still shapes the modern world: the effort to render complex phenomena explicable through abstraction structure and rule-governed relations. In that respect its underlying ambition still feels strikingly modern: to explain the visible world through abstract structures capable of ordering complexity. Plato grants mathematical form a privileged explanatory status in relation to the visible world; modern computational thinking likewise depends on formalisation modelling and the reduction of phenomena to structures that can be analysed and operated upon. The Critias continuing the Atlantis narrative announced in the Timaeus extends cosmology into political and moral history while the Laws Plato’s final dialogue turns to the architecture of legislation civic education and mixed government. In the present survival these final Platonic books are joined by the Epistolae and the corrigenda making the copy especially valuable as evidence for the closing structure and publication logic of the edition.Printed as part of the first collected edition of Plato’s dialogues issued in five sections and associated with the press of San Jacopo di Ripoli the first press known to employ women this copy also embodies a major event in Renaissance textual culture. Ficino’s Latin translation produced under Medici patronage furnished Europe with the first complete Plato in a language accessible to the republic of letters decisively shaping philosophy natural speculation theology and political thought. This copy preserves telling signs of early reception. At the opening of the De legibus a contemporary humanistic note reads “Ad laurentium medicem virum magnanimum.” while an early hand has written at the lower margin “Mars. Ficino in Tim. Ptol.” The first leaf supplied from another copy and slightly shorter bears a 2.5 cm illuminated initial Q in red green and blue on a gold-ochre ground with further small initials and paragraph marks in red and blue differing from the remainder. Many surviving copies of the 1484-1485 Plato are incomplete a fact long connected with the edition’s sectional production and probable separate distribution. A consecutive and complete survival of parts III-V is therefore not merely a fragment but a materially eloquent witness to the first printed transmission of Plato’s mathematical cosmology and one of the decisive editorial enterprises of the Renaissance.Binding with minor abrasion and slight fading to the backstrip. Includes a circular owner's stamp reading "Walter Ashburner Florence" on leaves cum4v 2rum6v ll4r pp1r ss10v chi6v. 1. Small wormhole in the lower blank margin of about ten early leaves; a thin pale water stain along the upper margin of some initial leaves; occasional light blooms and marginal halos more noticeable in places. Further marginal worming from oo2 and towards the end; small old repair with a pasted patch peccetta affecting the lower margin on the final leaves. Generally very well preserved and clean. This copy preserves telling signs of early reception. At the opening of the De legibus a contemporary humanistic note reads “Ad laurentium medicem virum magnanimum.” while an early hand has written at the lower margin “Mars. Ficino in Tim. Ptol.” The first leaf supplied from another copy and slightly shorter bears a 2.5 cm illuminated initial Q in red green and blue on a gold-ochre ground with further small initials and paragraph marks in red and blue differing from the remainder.l ISTC ip00771000. IGI 7860. HC 13062. BMC VI 666. GW M33912. Kristeller “The First Printed Edition of Plato’s Works and the Date of Its Publication 1484” in Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters Rome 1993 138ff. Laurentium Venetum [i.e. the Sisters of the Convent of San Jacopo di Ripoli for Laurentius (Francisci) de Alopa], hardcover