Details
Hortus Sanitatis. Venice: Bernardino Benalio and Giovanni de Tridino alias Tacuino, 11 August, 1511.
Folio, 298 x 209 mm., later vellum over pasteboards, lacking last leaf blank, G2 supplied from a shorter, washed copy (margins skilfully extended), occasional mostly marginal dampstaining, stain to A7, bifolia S3.4 and T2.5 browned.
Fifth edition, gothic type, double column, title within Tacuino's floriated woodcut border, on verso a full-page woodcut of a group of physicians, 1062 column-width text woodcuts, of which 528 of plants, the remainder of animals and genre scenes, full-page skeleton cut on verso of "Tractatus de Animalibus" divisional title (A1v), full-page cut of doctors consulting with a child and pair of attendants presenting them with specimens on verso of "De Urinis" divisional title, the physician woodcuts each within a different white-on-black woodcut border, spaces for initials with guide letters.
FIRST EDITION PRINTED IN ITALY, and the first to include the pseudo-Galenic tract De facile acquisibilibus. Tacuino's woodcut title-border, which incorporates dolphins' heads in the floral design, was used in several works from that press and became "one of the most influential pieces of ornamentation of the sixteenth-century" (Mortimer). The small plant woodcuts are reverse copies of the cuts from Prüss's editions; the skeleton was also copied from these Strassburg editions. Both of the full-page physican woodcuts were previously used in earlier Venetian medical books: the first was cut for the 1504 edition of Guglielmo Saliceto's Cirurgia, while the second copies, with some differences, an illustration in Ketham's Fasciculo de medicina, 1493.
Adams H-1016; Essling 1723; Harvard/Mortimer Italian 238; Hunt 12; Nissen BBI 2368; NLM/Durling 2468.
Provenance: Kenneth K. Mackenzie; Horticultural Society of New York, bookplate.
Folio, 298 x 209 mm., later vellum over pasteboards, lacking last leaf blank, G2 supplied from a shorter, washed copy (margins skilfully extended), occasional mostly marginal dampstaining, stain to A7, bifolia S3.4 and T2.5 browned.
Fifth edition, gothic type, double column, title within Tacuino's floriated woodcut border, on verso a full-page woodcut of a group of physicians, 1062 column-width text woodcuts, of which 528 of plants, the remainder of animals and genre scenes, full-page skeleton cut on verso of "Tractatus de Animalibus" divisional title (A1v), full-page cut of doctors consulting with a child and pair of attendants presenting them with specimens on verso of "De Urinis" divisional title, the physician woodcuts each within a different white-on-black woodcut border, spaces for initials with guide letters.
FIRST EDITION PRINTED IN ITALY, and the first to include the pseudo-Galenic tract De facile acquisibilibus. Tacuino's woodcut title-border, which incorporates dolphins' heads in the floral design, was used in several works from that press and became "one of the most influential pieces of ornamentation of the sixteenth-century" (Mortimer). The small plant woodcuts are reverse copies of the cuts from Prüss's editions; the skeleton was also copied from these Strassburg editions. Both of the full-page physican woodcuts were previously used in earlier Venetian medical books: the first was cut for the 1504 edition of Guglielmo Saliceto's Cirurgia, while the second copies, with some differences, an illustration in Ketham's Fasciculo de medicina, 1493.
Adams H-1016; Essling 1723; Harvard/Mortimer Italian 238; Hunt 12; Nissen BBI 2368; NLM/Durling 2468.
Provenance: Kenneth K. Mackenzie; Horticultural Society of New York, bookplate.