Details
PORTA, Giovanni Battista della (1535-1615). De humana physiognomonia libri IIII. Vico di Sorrento: Giuseppe Cacchi, 1586.
2o (329 x 227 mm). Engraved portrait title, portrait of Cardinal Aloysius d'Este, 85 engraved illustrations, 4 full-page, several woodcut historiated initials. (Tear on Ff2 with old repairs, scattered light spotting, a few stains, early owner's name scrawled out on title.) Contemporary vellum over pasteboard (hinges cracked). Provenance: Don Pedro Ximenez de Murillo, early signatures on title (scrawled over in ink) and his(?) underlinings in text.
FIRST EDITION, with illustrations on R3v and R4r transposed, and illustration on Bb2r of a horse and a man overpasted with a cancel engraving of the ichneumon (as in the NLM and Harvard copies). In this treatise on human physiognomy, Porta clearly established the doctrine of the correspondence between the external form of the body and the internal character of the person. "Della Porta preceded Lavater in attempting to estimate human character by the features. He was the founder of Physiognomy, and this is one of the earliest works on the subject" (Garrison-Morton). Garrison-Morton 150; Harvard/Mortimer Italian 398; Wellcome 5196; Waller 7566; Norman 1723.
2
FIRST EDITION, with illustrations on R3v and R4r transposed, and illustration on Bb2r of a horse and a man overpasted with a cancel engraving of the ichneumon (as in the NLM and Harvard copies). In this treatise on human physiognomy, Porta clearly established the doctrine of the correspondence between the external form of the body and the internal character of the person. "Della Porta preceded Lavater in attempting to estimate human character by the features. He was the founder of Physiognomy, and this is one of the earliest works on the subject" (Garrison-Morton). Garrison-Morton 150; Harvard/Mortimer Italian 398; Wellcome 5196; Waller 7566; Norman 1723.