The full title of the book is: I discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli sanese, medico cesareo, et del serenissimo principe Ferdinando archiduca d'Austria &c. nelli sei libri di Pedacio Discoride Anazarbeo della materia medicinale In Venetia.

Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501-1578) was a Sienese physician, author of what in some ways can be called the first "best seller" of ancient botany, given its more than sixty editions in different languages ​​(Latin, English, French, Italian vernacular…). The book, published for the first time in 1544 in the Italian vernacular and in Latin in 1554, remained a fundamental reference for botanists for at least the entire seventeenth century.

It is an enormous work (the edition presented here, published in 1568 in vernacular Italian, has more than 1,600 pages), in which Mattioli expresses his views on what the ancients said, particularly Dioscorides about medicinal plants (and others) and medical matters: therefore, there was no longer uncritical acceptance of what had been said in the past, but critical and updated analysis based on the new knowledge gained over the centuries and from a philological study on the original Greek text, purged of its medieval interpolations.

Compared to the Dioscoridean work containing the description of almost 600 species, the text of Mattioli describes roughly 1,200 species, including plants from exotic places or from the New World and thus unknown to the authors of classical antiquity.

The text, universally known by the Latin title Commentarii in sex libros Pedacii Dioscoridis Anazarbei de materia medica, is enriched by a thousand, large, highly accurate and precise xylographic images, resulting from live observation of plants, drawn by Giorgio Liberale from Udine and engraved on wood by Wolfgang Meyerpeck, German engraver.

View the entire volume in Internet Archive (digitised copy by Getty Research Institute).

Go to the catalogue entry.

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