(Kräuter, Tiere, Mineralien) HORTUS SANITATUS. 
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Ortus Sanitatis. De herbis & plantis. De Animalibus & reptilibus. Venice: Bernardinus Benalius & Johannes de Tridino alias Tacuinus, 1511. Chancery folio (286 x 198 mm). 367 leaves, without the final blank. Double column, 53 lines plus headline, initial spaces with guides. Title within a decorative woodcut border, 3 full-page woodcuts and more than 1,000 column-width cuts of plants, animals and genre images, one page of 18th-century manuscript notes in Italian bound in after the ‘Tractatus de lapidibus’, some leaves lightly browned, occasional wormholes, title supplied from a slightly shorter copy with marginal repairs and worming, aa1 and aa6 with marginal repairs and restoration [not affecting text] and slightly shorter [probably supplied], repaired tears to U8 and cc6, a few small wormholes to final 3 text leaves, final leaf with repairs to upper corner and fore-edge. Crushed brown morocco by Douglas Cockerell, stamped with his monogram and dated 1903 on lower turn-in (binding rubbed and bumped with slight wear to heads of joints)
The fifth edition of the Latin text, the first edition printed in Italy, of an illustrated natural history encyclopedia with a focus on the uses of the natural world to foster human wellbeing. In particular the parts on animals, birds, fishes, and minerals have been substantially enlarged from the original 15th cent. text. The thousand+ blocks are reverse copies of Johann Prüss’ Strasbourg cuts (1509 ?), themselves copies of the woodcuts in the first edition printed in Mainz by Jacob Meydenbach in 1491. The two fine full-page woodcuts by a Venetian artist appear here for the first time. Both are surrounded by nice ornamented floral borders, white on black ground. Among the woodcuts features what is probably the first depiction of oil collection: petroleum is described and a woodcut shows it pouring from a rock and being collected in a vessel. In addition to many plants and animals—from the prosaic (worms, snails, frogs) to the fantastic (mandrakes, unicorns, merpeople)—the woodcuts contain many compelling and charming scenes of Medieval life and craft. These iconic images were much copied, not only in other scientific books but even making their way into other genres, such as Grüninger’s illustrated edition of Horace (in which Maecenas is attacked by giant garlic cloves obviously copied from the woodcut here). Two full-page cuts depict physicians in consultation, one based on that in Ketham’s Fascicolo di medicina, the other repeated from a 1504 Venice edition of Guillelmus de Saliceto, Chirurgia. Original to this edition, as a supplement to the section De urinis, is the pseudo-Galen tract De facile acquisibilibus. Composition was divided between Benalius’ and Tacuinus’ printer shops, the former setting 30 of the quires, and the latter 28. The fine four-part title-page border with dolphins was part of Tacuinus’ stock, first used by him a few months earlier for his edition of Vitruvius. Mortimer calls it „one of the most influential pieces of [book] ornamentation of the sixteenth century“, being copied in several formats by many other Renaissance printers. In Sir David Attenborough’s Cambridge University Library exhibition The use and abuse of books 1450-1550, Private lives of print, he wrote of this work (first edition) that it “is the first natural history encyclopaedia. Today we consult such works to discover more about wonders of the world we live in, but readers at the end of the fifteenth century had more practical concerns. They believed that the natural world had been created by God to be of use to humanity and that animals and plants were there to provide cures for diseases. So this encyclopaedia is entitled Hortus sanitatis, ‚The garden of health.‘ Two earlier such books had dealt with plants, but this one, compiled by Jacob Meydenbach, adds sections on mammals, fish, birds, and rocks, and concludes with a description of the diagnostic qualities of urine, presumably so that readers might discover the sources of the remedies they needed. Many of the plants Meydenbach describes are immediately recognizable, but there are some where fantasy has taken over. The mandrake, in truth, has a near magical ability to relieve pain. Its wrinkled forked root, however, was believed to represent a man. Furthermore, if it was pulled up it would emit a shriek so appalling that it would kill the collector. Meydenbach provides the solution: the collector should take a dog with him and tie its lead to the plant. Then, after stopping his ears to shut out the lethal shriek, he should beat the dog so that it flees and so pulls up the root … For most of us, however, the charm of this wonderful book rests in its woodcut illustrations. Many of the plants, while delightfully stylized, are easily recognizable. But it is the human figures, surrounded by birds or standing by rivers containing not only fish but mermaids, that take us back most vividly to the birth of scientific natural history.” Choulant Inc. 18, pp. 64; Schreiber XXV; Adams H-1016; Durling 2468; Essling 1723; Hunt 1:12; Mortimer Italian 238; Nissen BBI 2368; Sander 3470. Provenance: Albert John Chalmers (British colonial physician and pioneer in tropical medicine research, 1870-1920; bookplate and plate recording bequest from Mrs Chalmers in the year of his death, to the Royal Society of Medicine. (Incunable, Herbarium, Kräuterbuch, Medizin, Apotheke, Mineralien, Tiere, Flora, Fauna, Animals, Renaissance, Holzschnitte )
18000,- EUR
inkl. 7% USt./incl. 7% VAT
Sachgebiete: Alte Drucke 16. Jahrhundert , Bergbau, Kräuterbücher, Mineralogie, Zoologie
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