Optics

I address your Highness, who possesses such great favor toward letters and all learned men, and such great love even for mathematical study—with a progress responding not unsuccessfully to that love—that it now becomes less a wonder to me why that most distinguished man, Master Georgius Tanstetter Collimitius, Royal Physician and Mathematician, resolved to dedicate this not ignoble author on Perspective to your most illustrious Highness. He shared an exemplar of this author with me all the more readily from the most select books of his library, so that this most excellent writer, having at length come forth into the light, might come into the hands of as many as possible; and he entrusted the duty of this dedication to me as an old friend.

Nor could I refuse that service of offering the author to your Highness, who has always deserved the best from me, nor to that man bound to me in many ways, especially since the author himself, now as if newborn and brought into the light, has written so excellently on Perspective that he alone is deservedly to be preferred before all who have written on this matter. To be sure, Pomponius Gauricus wrote not badly on this subject, but with too few words to match the undertaking of the argument; there survive monuments from the ancients: Alhacen, Bacon, Roger, Balneolus, John the Englishman of Pisa, Brother Theodoric of the Order of Preachers, and perhaps others which shall at some time be published.

How much more praise has our Witelo earned, in the publishing of whom nothing has indeed been neglected which might contribute to the progress of this entire study; we also, according to our integrity and benevolence toward all students, have so illustrated this author with figures and all things necessary to this matter, that students may find nothing to desire in us. Here also I wished to declare nothing else, except that I seem to have done enough for that best of men, Master Georgius Tanstetter, and to have offered this work to your most illustrious Highness with the readiest service.

May your Highness now fare well for us all, most illustrious Prince, and zealously aid the progress of the good arts. Given on the fifth day of February, on which day, not long before noon, Jupiter, with a mild and friendly aspect, joined to himself Venus, his old and long-known companion, whom in this manner he had not beheld for many days, even beyond a full year. In the year 1535.