Lot 03

Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501 - 1577) DE MEDICA MATERIA WITH COMMENTARIES

Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577) was an Italian Renaissance physician and botanist who lived in Prague from 1554, where he published his main work in Czech with George Melantrich of Aventine, entitled "Herbarium neboli bylinář". This most important botanical publication of the 16th century is originally a commentary supplement to the work of the Greek scholar Dioscorida "De materia medica" from the 1st century AD. It was gradually expanded in text and illustration, it focuses on plants mainly from a medicinal point of view, but it was also used and valued for cooking purposes and obtaining information from distant lands until the 18th century. The Latin edition presented here is the second prepared by the Basel botanist and anatomist Caspar Bauhin (1560-1624), supplemented by a separate section "Apologia adversus Amathum Lusitanum" with its own title page and pagination. With a full-page title copperplate border, engraved portrait, more than 1000 woodcuts in the text, vignettes, headings and initials. The book is very beautiful typographically and illustratively, the quality of rich woodcuts faithfully depicts not only vegetation (flowers, trees, shrubs, mushrooms), but also domestic and exotic animals (hens, fish, frogs, snakes, crustaceans, crocodile, elephant) . There are also several genre scenes from horticultural or agricultural life and at the time a popular passage about distillation apparatus with appropriate depictions of the alchemical properties of "De ratione distillandi aquas". The complete specimen is in an exceptionally good collector's condition, everything is original from the historical period, without oxidation, notes or other interventions or damage. A total of 61 sheets, 1027 pages, 11 sheets, 236 pages, 3 sheets.