Giovanni Battista Della Porta - De Humana Physiognomonia - 1586

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PORTA, Giovanni Battista della. "De humana physiognomonia". Vici Equense, apud Iosephum Cacchium, 1586.

The copy has 272 pages, with the leaves exchanged between pages 272 and 265. It contains 83 wood engravings, 4 of them full-page, and several initials.

This is the first edition, one of the earliest illustrated works on physiognomy, of considerable influence on later generations of scientists, including Lavater (Garrison-Morton 150). Its influence also reached painting, literature, and theater. Furthermore, it is a typographic rarity: Cacchi was the first printer established in Vico Equense, the hometown of the Porta family, near Naples.

Giovanni Battista della Porta (Vico Equense/Naples, c. 1535-1615) was one of the great polygraphs of Neapolitan Renaissance. He is the author of Magia naturalis, founded the Academy dei Segreti, and worked in optics, cryptography, agriculture, and theater. In this treatise he sought to provide a scientific basis for ancient physiognomy, comparing human features with those of animals. Thus the engraving of the eagle and the partridge illustrates the masculine and feminine temperaments.

Frontispiece engraved with the author’s portrait inside an architectural frame populated with human and animal heads, signed on the plate. It also contains a full-page engraved portrait of the dedicatee, Cardinal Luigi d’Este, with the inscription "Inspicite Heroes Magni hec Estensis imago / Qui dignus vultu, dignior est animo". Throughout the work there are numerous engravings in the text of heads and compared figures of man and animal, historiated woodcuts, running titles and tailpieces. At the end, the licenses of Naples and of Vico Equense and the colophon "Cum Regio assensu, & privilegio".

The flexible medieval parchment binding is worn from use, with a weakened spine. The interior of the work is almost detached from the binding. Ancient handwritten annotations in some margins, an old shelf mark or reference in ink at the head of Liber primus and in the final endpaper. Slight darkening and some marginal stains. An ex libris on the endpaper, which is almost completely detached. The frontispiece with loss of paper at the bottom edge reveals the underlying leaf.