I Discorsi Di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli Sanese, Medico Cesareo, Et Del Serenissimo Prencipe Ferdinando Arciduca D’Austria,..

Title

I Discorsi Di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli Sanese, Medico Cesareo, Et Del Serenissimo Prencipe Ferdinando Arciduca D’Austria,..

Description

Herbal book with title page, index, illustrated on 842 pages with several hundred woodcut illustrations of herbs in the text. A well-preserved copy of the 164 Ginammi edition of Mattioli's famous herbal book. The woodcut illustrations are in very good impressions throughout and mostly with 2 or 3 woodcut illustrations on each page. At the end there is a small appendix on the distillation of water with 5 full-page illustrations of distilling apparatus. There is also a small section at the beginning with descriptions and illustrations of animals (fish and quadrupeds). Overall in very good condition. Occasionally lightly browned, very few pages at the beginning with crease marks.

c. 1645

Artist

Mattioli (1501-1578)

Pietro Andrea Gregorio was a Siena-born doctor and naturalist. Mattioli was not only an author of specialized medical writings, but also a representative of vernacular Renaissance humanism, who, by translating scientific works from Greek and Latin, popularized learned knowledge in his native language, thereby at the same time expanding its vocabulary and scientific expression. As a translator he was involved in Jacopo Gastaldi's edition of Ptolemy's Geography (1547/48), but he was most successful as a translator and commentator of Dioscurides' Materia medica. Mattioli described a number of species not included in the herbal books of the fathers of botany. For example, in 1544 he was one of the first to describe the tomato, imported from America, and called the yellow forms "mala aurea", "golden apples". He was also the first to illustrate the horse chestnut in a European herbal book.