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Vito Volterra
Collection

Volterra's mathematical skills were the connecting thread in a diverse range of interests as he undertook close mathematical study of phenomena in fields as diverse as optics, celestial mechanics, and biology. The results were major advances in the calculus, especially in the methods for the solving and understanding of integral equations with variable limits.

Always active as a scientist, after entering the Italian Senate in 1905, Volterra also became increasingly dedicated to the cause of democracy. During the first World War, he was a strong proponent of Italy's involvement on the side of the Allies and in 1917 founded the Italian Office of War Inventions.

Later as president of the Accademia dei Lincei, a post once held by Galileo, Volterra was one of the principal signatories of the Intellectuals' Declaration against Fascism. In the end, his bold and unswerving opposition to Fascism cost Volterra his professorship, his membership in learned societies, and, ultimately, his seat in the Senate. Always, however, he remained among the most respected men in Italy and throughout the world.

Volterra had an unusually strong sense of history and was an avid collector of books both old and new. His library was acquired in the early 1980s by Bern Dibner. Bern brought many of these books to the United States, while a portion of Dr. Volterra's library remained in Rome as the property of the Republic of Italy.

In the interest of making Volterra's entire library available to scholars in one place, however, the Italian Ministry of Cultural Assets has placed its part of the collection on permanent deposit at the Burndy Library. This unusual collaboration between the Italian government and an American institution is a recognition of the Dibner Institute/Burndy Library's role as a center of international importance for the study of the history of science.

The numbers of works in the Volterra collection is staggering-nearly seven thousand volumes, dozens of journals, as well as seventeen thousand pamphlets and reprints. Truly, the arrival of the Volterra collection marks a new chapter in the Burndy Library's development as one of the world's premier resources for the study of the history of science and technology.

The Collection
The Volterra collection consists of more than 600 rare early works in the history of science as well as the vast number of books and journals Volterra's scientific carreer. Truly, the collection has strengths too numerous and varied to recount in any short summary.

There are, for example, copies of Galileo Galilei's Sidereus Nuncius {Venice, 1610); Tycho Brahe's Epistolarum astronomicarum libri (Uraniborg, 1596); and the Opticae Thesaurus (Basel, 1572), which contains the first printed edition of Ibn al-Haitham's (Alhazen) optical writings. Bern Dibner included all three of these titles among his Heralds of Science; none was previously held by Burndy.

But as well as its individual glories, this is a collection whose most distinguishing characteristic is its depth and range. In addition to the Sidereus Nuncius, for example, there are multiple editions of nearly every work published by Galileo, as well as many works by Galileo's predecessors and contemporaries.

An extraordinary group of works on mathematics features dozens of early editions of Euclid, beginning with the first of 1482; the first and second editions of Luca Pacioli's Suma de arithmetica geometria proportioni et proportionalita (Venice, 1494; Tusculano, 1523), and a beautiful copy of his De Divina Proportione (Venice, 1509) (Fig.5); as well as famous works of John Napier and Pierre Fermat.

There is a nearly complete set of the writings of Nicolò Tartaglia on mathematics, ballistics, and falling bodies, and, just as significantly, a large number of the works inspired by and reacting against his ideas.

The group of incunabula (works printed before Easter 1501), includes early editions of Vitruvius's ten books on architecture (Florence, 1496); astrological and astronomical works by Albumasar and Sacrobosco, as well as the collection of ancient astronomical texts published by Aldus in Venice in 1499. There is philosophy as well, including a 1491 edition of Paul of Venice's commentary on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics.

The works on perspective and optics do not end with Alhazen. Volterra owned the 1504 edition of John of Pecham's Perspectiva communis, and important optical treatises by Daniele Barbaro and Christiaan Huygens, as well as the stunning two volumes on perspective published by Andrea Pozzo, painter of the ceiling of the church of S. Ignazio in Rome.

Although not primarily an engineer, Volterra owned many significant (and often very beautiful) early engineering books, with a particular focus on hydraulics and military engineering. Standouts include Carlo Fontana's Utilissimo trattato dell'acque correnti (Rome, 1696)(Fig.3) and several works by Girolamo Cataneo.

For historians of chemistry, there is the first edition of Giambattista della Porta's epochal work De distillatione (Rome, 1608). For those interested in the reception of Aristotle, there is a copy of Simplicius of Cicilia's commentary on Aristotle's Physics (Venice, 1526), heavily glossed in Greek. For historians of astronomy, there is the very rare Primum mobile (Basel, 1567) of Erasmus Oswald Schreckenfuchs.

As a physicist and mathematician, Volterra was particularly drawn to works in those fields. The collection boasts many major (and minor) works by Euler, Gauss, Ohm, and Helmholtz; nearly the complete works of LaPlace and LaGrange; books by Babbage and Herschel. There are important works for the history of electricity, including crucial papers by Ampère that the Burndy Library did not yet own, some inscribed by the author. The collection's great strength in early mathematics continues forward in time, including what is among the most complete assemblages anywhere of works about Italian mathematics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Less dramatic, perhaps, but of incalculable historical value are the collections enormous numbers of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works about the history of science. Some of these early works-editions of texts, basic biographical and bibliographical research, and studies of both individual figures and whole movements-have become nearly as scarce as the more famous works that are their subjects.

To assemble a group such as that found in the Volterra Collection would be the work of many, many years, and the result would likely not be as complete as that already here.

 

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