I discorsi.... nelli sei libri di Pedacio Dioscoride Anazarbeo della materia Medicinale, hora di nuovo dal suo istesso autore ricorretti, & in piu di mille luoghi aumentati by Matthioli, A.. Mattioli Pietro Andrea - 1573

Venice: Heredi di Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1573. Large thick quarto, title page with woodcut device, pp (172), 971, (i), (11), illustrated with many hundreds of woodcuts of plants and animals, the title page has a very old paper repair where a name had been excised, worm hole affects the lower margin of fourteen pages of the preliminaries, without loss of text, ten pages of the preliminaries have a very old neat paper restoration, very occasional age-spotting and foxing, some occasional browning due to paper quality variations, one light tear to pages 257/258 without loss, one ink smear on page 259, a few ink spots on pages 32/33 with very slight loss of text. Overall, however, this is an exceptionally clean, tight copy. Bound in full speckled calf (probably early twentieth-century), with one gilt line around upper and lower cover, raised bands on the spine; the upper joint is cracking but still firm and sound. The Hartland Library copy, with bookplate, stamp and ticket pocket on the front endpaper. Also with the label of Charles Butler of Warren Wood, Hatfield. The Library was formed by Edwin Sydney Hartland, and was a diverse, but major, collection of herbals, archaeology and anthropology. It was donated to Gloucestershire County Council in 1936, and was eventually dispersed around 2010. Hartland purchased this copy from Sotheby's Charles Butler Sale in 1911. [Mattioli was a doctor and naturalist, born in Sienna. A careful student of botany, he described many new plants and coordinated the medical botany of his time in his Discorsi ("Commentaries") on the Materia Medica of Dioscorides. The first edition of Mattioli's work appeared in 1544 in Italian. There were several later editions in Italian and translations into Latin (Venice, 1554), French (Lyon, 1561), Czech, (Prague, 1562), and German (Prague, 1563). In addition to identifying the plants originally described by Dioscorides, Mattioli added descriptions of some plants not in Dioscorides and not of any known medical use, thus marking a transition from the study of plants as a field of medicine to a study of interest in its own right. In addition, the woodcuts in Mattioli's work were of a high standard, allowing recognition of the plant even when the text was obscure. A noteworthy inclusion is an early variety of tomato,the first documented example of the vegetable being grown and eaten in Europe. The plant genus Matthiola was named by Robert Brown in honor of Mattioli. The final section of eleven pages is "Del modo di distillare le acque", with several impressive large woodcuts]. Full Leather. Very Good.