Alhazen [Ibn al-Haytham]

2 parts in one volume, folio (310 x 205mm.), woodcut printer's device on title-page and woodcut sea- and townscape on verso (repeated on *1r),  woodcut diagrams throughout, with blank [alpha]4 and errata leaf *4, ruled throughout, seventeenth-century calf, gilt panels on covers enclosing arms of Louis Bizeau with monogram "L.B." at corners [Olivier 486:1, 486:2], identical monograms in spine compartments, with early shelfmarks on pastedown and front flyleaf and inventory number at foot of spine, slight browning and dampstaining, some wear to binding

Louis Bizeau, arms and monogram on binding

Adams A745; Norman 1027

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First edition of the Latin text of Ibn al-Haytham's influential treatise on optics and vision.

In the Optics, his major work, Ibn al-Haytham "deliberately set out to dispel what appeared to him to be a major confusion in the subject by 'recommencing the inquiry into its principles and premises, starting the investigation by an induction of the things that exist and a review of the conditions of the objects of vision' ... The Optics is not a philosophical dissertation on the nature of light, but an experimental and mathematical investigation of its properties" (DSB).

This edition, edited by the German mathematician Friedrich Risner, also includes the spurious De crepusculis (probably the work of the eleventh-century scholar al-Jayyani) and the Perspectiva, an important commentary on the Optics by the thirteenth-century Polish scholar Witelo which had first been published in Nuremberg in 1535.  Risner's influential edition of Alhazen and Witelo remained the standard scholarly work on optics for a century.