Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Siena 1501-Trento 1578: La vita, le opere: con l'identificazione delle piante (review)

Sara Ferri, ed. Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Siena 1501-Trento 1578: La vita, le opere: con l'identificazione delle piante. Perugia, Italy: Quattroemme, 1997. 405 pp. Ill. L 70,000.00; E 36.15 (paperbound, 88-85962-27-0).

"If the mind could be pictured as well as the body, then a single image would serve for both Dioscorides and Mattioli." This verse, attached to a portrait of Pietro Andrea Mattioli published in 1563, neatly summed up his reputation in his own day. Between 1544 and Mattioli's death in 1578, his Italian and Latin trans-lations of Dioscorides' De materia medica became the standard form in which his contemporaries encountered the classic first-century text on medicinal substances.

The act of translation into the vernacular (as Sara Ferri observes in her introduction to these collected essays) underscored the difficulty and importance of correctly identifying the plants named by Dioscorides and other classical authorities. Mattioli's ever-expanding commentaries and medical letters recorded his ferocious debates over the appearance, names, properties, and uses of medicinal plants. For the deluxe Prague edition of 1563, he supervised the production of Giorgio Liberale and Wolfgang Meyerpeck's exuberant woodcut illustrations, which succeeded in being both naturalistic and decorative and undoubtedly increased the appeal and utility of the book (see Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi's essay). The commentaries and illustrations had a very wide and long-lasting influence. Translations into French, Czech, and German followed quickly; versions of the work and its illustrations continued to appear into the eighteenth century. Alicja Zemanek's essay describes a 1613 Polish herbal by Szymon Syreniusz that was deeply influenced by Mattioli's work; a copy of that herbal was still being used by Russian pharmacists early in the nineteenth century. And in 1965, the American naturalist-essayist Joseph Wood Krutch reproduced a sampling of the woodcuts and texts in his Herbal.

About half of the twenty-one essays in this volume are, in effect, commentaries on the Dioscorides commentaries, as they explore Mattioli's observations of plants, animals, minerals, marine life, and distillation. Mauro Giorgio Marotti's preliminary list of identifications of the plants illustrated in the Venice 1568 edition and Marco Franzini's identifications of the minerals make this volume an indispensable reference work for Renaissance natural history and medicine.

Especially interesting are the studies by Vera Credaro, Franco Pedrotti, and Gino Tomasi of Mattioli's fifteen years as a humanist-physician in Trent. His projects leading up to the 1544 publication of his Italian Dioscorides included a report to a baroness on the healing properties of the hot springs at Bormio, a long poem for his patron Cardinal Bernardo Clesio about the medicinal plants of Trent, and a map of the Val di Sol and Val di Non. The photographs with Pedrotti's essay show the kind of alpine terrain that Mattioli had to traverse in order to prepare these botanical and geographical works.

Even before the Dioscorides editions and commentaries became bestsellers, Mattioli's medical abilities were recognized by his appointment in 1542 as Protomedicus to the city of Gorizia, a post that allowed him to botanize extensively in Istria and Slovenia (discussed by Fabrizio Martini and Livio Paldini). Between 1555 and 1566, he served the Hapsburg court in Prague. In Maria Ludovica Lenzi's edition of Mattioli's letters to Ferdinand I in February 1563, we get a fascinating glimpse of Mattioli at work, successfully dosing Archduke Ferdinand with manna, senna, and rhubarb for an acute melancholic illness.

Mattioli strongly identified himself with Siena, even though he spent almost his whole life far from his hometown. It is fitting that these invaluable, closely documented studies of Mattioli were organized at the University of Siena by Professor Ferri, and that the volume and its splendid color illustrations were underwritten by...