Description
Lot consisting of the two most beautiful Dioscorides that belonged to Cardinal Fabio Chigi, later Pope Alexander VII (1655-1667), both originals preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Library.
Latin Dioscorides, 12th century, manuscript signature Vat. Chigi F. VII. 158
Greco-Latin Dioscorides, 15th century, manuscript signature Vat. Chigi F. VII. 159
Complete and faithful facsimile editions produced jointly by the BAV and the publishing house Testimonio in 1999 and 2003, limited to 900 numbered and certified copies. Bindings in red leather with gold, spine ribs, guide tape, with 2 leather closures and gold clasp. Complementary study books bound in hardcover silk cloth illustrated and made by Miguel Ángel González Manjarrés and María Cruz Herrero Ingelmo, Professors of the Department of Classical Philology at the University of Valladolid.
Dioscórides Latino, an illustrated herbarium without text. ISBN 9788495767424. 220 profusely illustrated pages. Study book format 23 x 32 cm. 620 pages.
Dioscórides Greco-Latin (Dioscurides graeco-latinus). ISBN 9788488829733. 496 profusely illustrated pages. Study book format 22 x 30.5 cm. 424 pages.
LATIN DIOSCORIDES:
This extraordinary codex comes from the rich personal library of Cardinal Fabio Chigi who, when he was elected Pope, took the name of Alexander VII (1655-1667), and is currently kept in the Vatican Apostolic Library (Chig. F.VII.159). It contains a dioscorides, that is, the basic pharmacopoeial treatise required consultation throughout the Greek, Latin and Arab world from the 2nd century to the Modern Age.
It takes its name from Pedacio Dioscorides Anazarbaeus, a Greek doctor in the service of Rome and its legions. In his “De materia medica” – the title of his work – he collected 600 plants, 90 minerals and 30 products from animals, of each of which he reproduces a drawing, indicating their therapeutic virtues. The Vatican Codex is made up of 100 parchment pages, to which ten paper pages were added in the 16th century, when the Vatican was already in Italy, with the alphabetical index of all the medicinal “simplices” reproduced. This manuscript was conceived from the beginning with illustrations only, without the addition of an explanatory text.
It was composed, following the alphabetical order, in the middle of the 12th century in the monastery of St. John the Baptist in Constantinople, and using as a model a famous dioscorides, today in Vienna, which had been donated in 512 to Juliana Anicia, daughter of the emperor Anicio Olibira and Placidia, daughter of Valentinian III. A well-known cleric – monk or hegumenos – of the monastery of St. Demetrius, called Isidore Ruthenus, was in charge of putting in very small letters at the top of the page the Greek name of the plant. Five later hands –two Greek and three Latin, the latter when the codex was in Italy– added the names given to the different plants in Greek, Latin and even in Romance languages.
Most of the folios are dedicated to the representation of plants, and a few less to the animal world (reptiles, insects, birds, etc.). The quality of the drawings and the appropriateness of the colour used in the illustrations is of such quality –something that does not occur in other dioscorides– that it has been described by botanists as a work of art of ancient and medieval pharmacopoeia and botany.
GRECO-LATIN DIOSCORIDES:
This beautiful codex is richly illustrated with images of herbs, trees, quadrupeds, birds, amphibians and insects and deals with medical material by the Greek physician and naturalist Dioscorides-Pedanius, born in the first century after Christ in Anazarba in Asia Minor, and active as a military physician under the emperors Claudius and Nero. It is the greatest work of simple medicine. It is the greatest medieval pharmacopoeia treatise. It recalls in simple terms what was the current use of medicinal herbs, being an abbreviation of the Latin phrase “medicamentum simplex” which was the broth of Greek technique. This term, as Galen explained, was indicated “id quod secundum naturam sincerum est” or, in other words, a natural or pure style medicine as opposed to “medicamentum compositum”, or, in other words, a preparation resulting from the union of various substances.
Until the Modern Age, before hyatrochemistry was established, between the 16th and 17th centuries (which would bring a non-vegetable substance, especially more minerals and metals), medicine used as drugs spices to be administered orally, a whole series of substances derived from roots, bulbs, bark, resins, buds, leaves, flowers, flowering fruits, seeds, an unpredictable quantity of trees, bushes, plants, herbs and vegetables in general, from a careful and precise collection of the “simple” ones, therefore, derived a good therapeutic success of the activity of doctors and pharmacists. That is, it uses the importance of collecting in a herbarium, which showed in figure and explained in legend, morphological characteristics and their corresponding therapeutic and organic property of the plants to be collected.
Hence the greatness of Dioscorides’ enterprise, which understands the gathering and systematization of everything empirical practice and popular medicine knew about plants and their own use. To this end, he created an encyclopedic herbal (with notes on foods, balms and cosmetic products on various animals, poisonous species and their relative environments) which, together with coloured drawings of each herb, root and medicinal plant known until then (about 600), brought together in chapters that were useful to know, that is, with one or more names by which they were named, their own characteristics and properties and their use with their curative virtues. By extension and competence of tradition, both botanical and medical, it was the example and model of herbals and pharmaceutical antidotes both in the East and in the West, and its fame has been preserved intact from the medieval era to the Renaissance, with various editions, many translations, brief reworkings up to the imposing edition and printing of the Cinquecento.
Often, as in the case of this codex, iconographic apparatus, arranged alphabetically, was reproduced separately from the text and was used as a botanical atlas for the knowledge of plants, with the names of the most common and local ones often replaced or integrated. The connection with the Dioscorides text is entrusted, as in this codex, to a very brief annotation of appeal that is attached to each illustration.
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