DIOSCORIDES and Ermalao BARBARO

In hoc voluminae haec continentur. Joannis Baptistae Egnatii Veneti In Dioscoridem ab Hermolao Barbaro tralatum annotamenta, quibus morborum et remediorum vocabulae obscuriora ... explicantur...

      Venice, Aloysius and Franciscus Barbari, 1516 Folio (316 x 220 mm), ff [36] 134; 106; a fine, crispcopy, with many sheets with their deckle, contemporary annotations throughout, in contemporary limp vellum, remains of ties, blue edges, labelled in ink on spine ëEII Egnatius in Dioscoridem S:V:í with paper shelf label, lettered in ink in caps ëDIOSC. HERMOí on inside of the back cover. £4500 First printing of Barbaroís definitive translation of Dioscorides, accompanied by the first edition of his Corollarii, his commentary on the plants described by Dioscorides. In this work, Barbaro collates classical descriptions of plants and provides his own observations. ëErmolao seems to have been the very first in the history of the revival of botany to have added anything at all of his own to that which had been handed down through the long ages. His is the first pioneer of a new phytography... Barbaro begins to tell things before untold about familiar plants that have been too succinctly written of during fifteen or twenty centuries; a kind of innovation in botany which was of profound important, and one with which Ruel, Valerius Cordus, Tragus, and Conrad Gesner, of a generation later, have been accredited as first pioneersí (Greene, Landmarks in botanical history). Dioscoridesí text, De medicinali materia, was first printed in Latin in 1479 (the original Greek text was not printed until 1499) and was the most highly regarded classical source of botanical knowledge until well into the seventeenth century. However, as Dioscorides was describing, and often very cursorily, an eastern Mediterranean flora, later European botanists and physicians often found it difficult to match their local floras with that in Dioscorides. It is in part to remedy this deficit that Barbaro composed his Corollaries. ëErmolao Barbaro (Hermolaus Barbarus), 1454-1493, the translator, was a Venetian scholar and diplomat prior to his appointment to the Patriarchate of Aquileia. Although the translation is believed to have been made c. 1489, this is the first printed edition. ëAccompanying the translation is the first printed text of Barbaroís Corollarium, in which he attempted to supply students of Dioscorides with all that had been written by Greek and Roman authors on the plants discussed in that workí (Johnston, The Cleveland herbal collection p 25). This edition was edited by Giovanni Battista Egnazios, who wrote the preface to the Corollarii. See Edward Lee Green, Landmarks in botanical history, chapter 13 ëErmolao Barbaro 1454-1493, pp 553-568, for a detailed analysis of Barbaro as a pioneer phytographer in his Corollaries. Provenance: two early inscriptions on title, the first ëAd usum ...?í, the second ëex libris Capucinorum Montii Aviumí; contemporary annotations in a single hand throughout, more extensive in the Corollarii, indexing plants and their medicinal uses, and kinds of preparation. Durling 1140; Johnston 28; Wellcome 1794 ; OCLC records Johns Hopkins, Florida State, Kansas, and Chicago