De motibus corporum coelestium iuxta principia peripatetica sine eccentricis et epicyclis (Venetiis, 1536), 27ff. Later editions, Venice, 1537 and Paris, 1540; I have seen the 1536 and 1540 editions. Amico was born in Cosenza in 1511 or 1512. According to his epitaph, he was murdered in Padua in 1538 “by an unknown assassin, it is believed, out of envy of his learning and virtue”. Little more is known of him. He explains in the dedication of his treatise that his teachers in Aristotelian natural philosophy were GenuaAntonius Marcus (GenovaM. A.) and MadiusVincentius (MaggiV.), and that he was persuaded to take up homocentric planetary theory by his friends Cyprian Pallavicino, Giovanni Battista Ario, and another of his teachers, the professor of mathematics at Padua, Federico Delfino. See GalatiV. G., Gli Scrittori delle Calabrie, i (Firenze, 1928), 134–6; Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, ii (Roma, 1960), 788.
2.
DreyerJ. L. E., A history of astronomy from Thales to Kepler (2nd ed., New York, 1953), 301–3.
3.
The principal literature is: De VauxCarra, Les sphères célestes selon Nasīr Eddīn Attūsī, Appendice VI in TanneryP., Recherches sur l'histoire astronomie ancienne (Paris, 1893), 337–59; RobertsV., “The Solar and Lunar Theory of Ibn ash-Shāir: A Pre-Copemican Copernican Model”, Isis, xlviii (1957), 428–32; KennedyE. S.RobertsV., “The Planetary Theory of Ibn al-Shāir”, Isis1 (1959), 227–35; AbbudF., “The Planetary Theory of Ibn al-Shāir: Reduction of the Geometric Models to Numerical Tables”, Isis, liii (1962), 492–9; RobertsV., “The Planetary Theory of Ibn al-Shāir: Latitudes of the Planets”, Isis, lvii (1966), 208–19; KennedyE. S., “Late Medieval Planetary Theory”, Isis, lvii (1966), 365–78; HartnerW., “Nair al-Dīn al-üsī's Lunar Theory”, Physis, xi (1969), 287–304.
4.
De revolutionibusiii, 4; Nikolaus Kopernikus Gesamtausgabe, i (München and Berlin, 1944), f. 75r.
5.
NeugebauerO. has found in MS Vat. Gr.211, f. 116r, figures showing a model employing Tüsī's rolling circle device. One may wonder if more of this material is to be found in Greek manuscripts in Italy, and further, if any Italian astronomers and natural philosophers of the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries knew of the Marāgha astronomers' models and wrote treatises on planetary theory incorporating them. I would guess that if there are any surviving intermediaries between Marāgha and Copernicus they are to be found in Italy. The discovery of such works would place the Commentariolus clearly in perspective as an adaptation of Marāgha models to a heliocentric arrangement and confirm its suspected early date, as it would then appear the result of Copernicus's years in Italy.
6.
De revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543), f. iiib; Nikolaus Kopernikus Gesamtausgabe, ii (München, 1949), 5, lines 1–3.
7.
Such an additional sphere to counteract a rotational motion is also used by üsī in his lunar model; see de VauxCarraHartner, op. cit..
