Pietro Andrea Mattioli - Commentaires De M. Pierre André Matthiole Médecin Sennois, Sur Les Six Livres De Ped. Dioscoride - 1579

Mattioli’s Great Renaissance Herbal in French: Dioscorides Reborn for Physicians, Botanists, and Apothecaries.

MOUSEION CURATOR NOTE

“A Renaissance pharmacy in folio: roots, leaves, flowers, beasts, stills, remedies, authorities, and observations gathered into one vast medicinal theatre. Mattioli does not merely translate Dioscorides; he makes antiquity bloom again under the eyes of the sixteenth-century physician.

A book that once stood open on the tables of doctors, apothecaries and learned householders. Its images gave form to names; its French prose brought learned medicine into the vernacular; its pages preserved an older world in which botany, pharmacology, zoology, distillation, and classical commentary still belonged to one continuous art of healing.”

THE BOOK

MATTIOLI, Pietro Andrea — Commentaires de M. Pierre André Matthiole médecin sennois, sur les six livres de Ped. Dioscoride Anazarbeen de la matière médicinale…
Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé, 1579.

Two volumes in folio. Complete.
Collation: 2 vols. in-folio. Vol. I: [68] ff., 386 pp.; Vol. II: pp. 387–852, [14] ff.
Numerous woodcut illustrations in text.
Bound in later marbled fawn calf, smooth spines with gilt titles, volume numbers and fillets; covers framed with blind-tooled roulette; speckled edges.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on Dioscorides was one of the most influential botanical and medical books of the Renaissance. First issued in Italian in 1544 and then repeatedly expanded, translated, and illustrated, it transformed the ancient De materia medica into a living sixteenth-century encyclopedia of plants, remedies, and natural substances. Modern institutional summaries rightly stress that Mattioli’s work was not merely another edition of Dioscorides: it became a much more personal and greatly enlarged natural history, incorporating plants known to Mattioli himself, traditional remedies, and new observations gathered through correspondence and field experience.

The 1579 Lyon folio stands in the great Rouillé tradition of illustrated scientific publishing. Guillaume Rouillé, one of Lyon’s most active and sophisticated publishers, issued books for a learned European market, and Mattioli’s Commentaires belongs among the most ambitious productions of that milieu: a large vernacular folio, densely illustrated, intended not simply for reading but for consultation.

The illustrations are central to its authority. In the Renaissance herbal, the image was not ornament; it was evidence. Plants had to be recognized before they could be prescribed. Mattioli’s great achievement was to unite the ancient textual authority of Dioscorides with the increasingly visual, comparative, and empirical habits of Renaissance botany.

The work’s scope extends beyond plants. The auction description notes woodcuts of animals, fish, and crustaceans, and calls attention to the section on distillation. This is important: Mattioli’s book served not only as a botanical guide, but also as a practical medical repertory. It belongs to a world in which the physician, apothecary, gardener, and naturalist all worked from overlapping bodies of knowledge.

A useful modern assessment comes from the Edward Worth Library, which calls Mattioli “the most successful botanical writer in sixteenth century-Europe” and notes that, by Mattioli’s own estimate, 30,000 copies of his herbal had been sold by 1568. It further observes that Italian universities turned to Mattioli’s Dioscorides as a textbook when botanical gardens and lectureships were being established.

CONDITION REPORT

Good condition.
Later marbled fawn calf bindings, rubbed; speckled edges. Wear to the headcaps of volume II and split joints to volume II.

Toned and moderately soiled, with scattered spotting, dampstaining chiefly to the upper and outer margins, early ink inscriptions, minor marginal creasing and wear, yet the portrait, title border, ornaments, and text remain clear and substantially intact.

Overall: a substantial, working copy of a major Renaissance medical-botanical folio.

The photographs should be consulted, as they form an integral part of the condition report.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Mattioli’s Commentaires belongs to the great Renaissance movement that returned ancient scientific texts to active use, but revised them through observation. Dioscorides had been the central pharmacological authority of antiquity; Mattioli made him usable for early modern Europe. The National Library of Medicine has noted, for example, how Mattioli greatly expanded Dioscorides’s treatment of particular plants: where Dioscorides might give only a few lines, Mattioli could produce extended discussions many times longer.

The French translation by Jean Des Moulins is especially significant. Latin editions served scholars and university physicians, but French folios widened access to surgeons, apothecaries, noble households, and cultivated readers who required practical knowledge in the vernacular. This is the same cultural passage seen across sixteenth-century medical printing: from cloistered authority to usable, illustrated, vernacular science.

A contemporary phrase from the title tradition is worth retaining in the catalogue: the figures are described as “tirés au vif” — drawn from life. Whether or not every image fulfilled that ideal in a modern botanical sense, the phrase captures the ambition of the book. It announces a world in which the authority of the eye was beginning to stand beside the authority of the ancient text.

MOUSEION CURATOR NOTE

“Here the book becomes a garden, and the garden becomes a pharmacy. Each woodcut is a small act of recognition: a plant named, a virtue assigned, an ancient authority tested against the living world.”

For collectors, this 1579 Rouillé Mattioli has several converging attractions: an imposing folio format, an early French medical text, Renaissance botanical illustration, the prestige of Dioscorides, and the long afterlife of Mattioli’s commentary in European medicine.