Vivian Nutton

Matthioli
and the art of the Commentary

www.alessandrina.librari.beniculturali.it

Icones veterum aliquot ac recentium Medicorum Philosophorumque
Ioannes Sambucus / János Zsámboky
Antverpiae 1574

Matthioli’s Commentary on Dioscorides is one of the great books of the Renaissance. It had a major influence on medicine and botany around Europe, being bought and, one presumes, consulted by scholars from Cambridge to Cracow[1]. In its importance in its subject, it can be compared with Vesalius’ Fabrica in anatomy, or with Fracastoro’s ideas on contagious diseases[2]. As an object of beauty it graces the display cabinets of many libraries, and it may still be studied with profit for the botanical and historical information it contains. Yet how and why Matthioli and his book came to occupy this position of preeminence are questions that have not been adequately examined, for there is always a tendency to assume that the reasons for the success of any literary work are almost self-evident: it was a great success, therefore it must have been a brilliant book. But, as we know, brilliant books may meet with commercial and academic failure; and best-sellers may not be the most deserving of that honour. Why was it that Matthioli’s book and not that of, say, Fuchs or Brasavola came to dominate Renaissance botany? My brief communication will look at one aspect of Matthioli’s work, his activity as a commentator, as a contribution to an answer to this question.

It should be stated at the outset that any answer must take account of chronology: it is not only that the book itself changed as it went through various editions and translations, generally becoming larger with additional material, but Matthioli’s own career and circumstances changed. The doctor at Trento and Gorizia in the 1530’s and 1540’s was not the international figure that he became in the 1550’s; the provincial physician was not the later imperial physician of Archduke Ferdinand, sitting in Prague at the centre of a spider’s web of correspondence. In 1540, when he was preparing the first edition of the Discorsi, Matthioli was far from being the authoritative, even manipulative figure, of the 1560’s, whose influence was such that his disapproval, or even his failure to mention one’s discovery or identification of a new plant, was tantamount to a professional death sentence. The pan-European network of correspondents developed by Matthioli, with the aid of the ubiquitous imperial postal service, was very different from the very local contacts he displayed in the first edition of the Discorsi. Indeed, it was his book’s success that gave him this position of eminence, not the reverse.

Nicolò de Bascarini da Pavone, the publisher of the 1544 edition, was not the most celebrated printer in Venice, for he was only just beginning his career as a printer and this was his first major success[3]. It was only with the second edition of the Discorsi in 1548, published by Vincenzo Valgrisi, that Matthioli found a publisher with a truly international reputation. A glance at the printing privileges obtained for the 1544 and the first Latin edition of 1554 shows a major difference of ambition. In 1544 protection against plagiarism was obtained only from Venice and the Pope: in 1554 this had been extended beyond the Alps with the approval of the King of France, and the greatest patron of them all, the Holy Roman Emperor himself.

Nor can we set the success of the Discorsi down to the quality of the book’s illustrations, for these did not make their appearance until the first Latin edition of 1554, twelve years after Leonhart Fuchs’ beautifully illustrated De historia stirpium and more than twenty years after Brunfels’ Herbarum vivae eicones had shown how the printing press could transform the study of plants. Indeed, the first illustrated Renaissance edition of Dioscorides was not that of Matthioli, but the 1543 Frankfurt edition, supervised by the noted plagiarist Wilhelm Ryff. But Matthioli was far from alone in the relative slowness of his response to the new iconography, or in having his doubts about the value of a drawing of a plant at only one stage in its life. One should not forget that the provision of illustrations on the lavish scale of later editions not only slowed up a book’s production but also added considerably to its cost at first[4].

How then are we to explain the perhaps unexpected success of this work by a provincial physician, trained by no expert herbalist and known, if at all, to the outside world only by a relatively undistinguished treatise on the morbus gallicus and a description of his patron’s Palace at Trento?[5]

I want to look closely at Matthioli’s art of commentary, focussing in particular on the 1544 Discorsi and comparing certain passages in them with the treatment accorded to the same passage by Matthioli’s rivals and later in the first Latin edition of 1554 and as it appeared at the end of his life in the Latin edition of 1583[6].  In so doing, I shall be demonstrating features that have, until now, been little studied, yet which may help to explain why other doctors and scholars came to value his work so highly.

One point should be made clear at the outset. Although there were in Italian universities by the late sixteenth century lectures on Dioscorides, and although the practice of taking Dioscorides along on a herborizing expedition to identify plants was widespread, at the time that Matthioli began his work, most of the renaissance commentaries on Dioscorides were philological enterprises, not the direct result of university lectures, like those on some Galenic and Hippocratic texts[7]. Hence the variety of words used to describe these productions, annotationes, annotamenta, censurae, scholia, as well as commentarii. They are works from the study, not the lecture room, and they display the contemporary apparatus of scholarship, quotations, references, and textual discussions, to a much greater extent than would in general have been the case for a medical commentary.

Although Matthioli’s work takes the form of a commentary, with the text printed in bold Roman type with the commentary beneath in a smaller italic font, it lacks some of the common features of such writings. There is no painstaking explanation of individual words in Dioscorides’ Greek, no line by line explication of the ancient text, such as we find, for instance, in the commentary on the medical poem of Aemilius Macer ascribed to Johannes Atrocianus[8]. Nor is it a series of disconnected notes on Dioscorides, like those of Valerius Cordus. Rather, it is a flowing piece of continuous prose in what I judge to be elegant Italian. It is still constrained by the form of the commentary - there are no literary fancies, such as the dialogue form adopted in his pharmacological writings by Brasavola - but it reads like a disquisition, a true discorso, rather than an academic tome. In place of a set formula for the organisation of each section, as in Ryff’s 1543 commentary, Matthioli employs literary and rhetorical variation to convey the same information. I give one very simple example. All commentators endeavour to identify the plant mentioned in each section and give it a name, sometimes as a separate heading, sometimes in a list of local, regional or national names. Matthioli gives this information almost incidentally in a way that entices the reader to continue further. Here are three consecutive openings:

1 - Chiamasi il soncho uolgarmente in Thoscana Cicerbita e Crespine anchora;

2 - Notissime a tutta Italia sono le Endiuie et le Cicoree....

3 - Non è dubbio che la Condrilla... sia altro che spetie di vera Cicorea.

The name of the plant is given in Italian, but in such a way as to avoid an impression of philological didacticism, and with a pleasing stylistic variatio.

Matthioli’s Latin edition of 1544 is very largely a straightforwardly accurate translation from the Italian. But there are changes in wording, some of them subtle: sonchus in Hetruria, ubi Latinum nomen perdurat, Cicerbita vulgo vocatur.

A minor error (the name Crespine) is quietly corrected, and the doubts of Marcellus Virgilius about the survival of the ancient name in modern Etruria implicitly criticised. The Latin retains much of the stylistic grace of the Italian, even if it falls short of the elegance of Marcellus, but he, as Peter Godman has recently shown us, was a professional stylist as the Chancellor of Florence[9].

Later editions, in Italian or in Latin, keep much of the wording of 1544 or 1554, and they influence one another. A few entries receive a near total reshaping, but far more often the new material is inserted into the old text, a clause here, a sentence there, sometimes a paragraph, and even on rare occasions several pages, before Matthioli returns to his initial wording. But the whole procedure is performed with such skill that the casual reader can hardly detect the joins.

But it is above all the fact that Matthioli published this work in Italian that is most striking. Although translations of classical works on ancient medicine were gradually becoming available in Italian - Fausto da Longiano’s version of Dioscorides was published in 1542, that of Montigiano in 1546, Tarchagnota’s translations of Galen in the late 1540’s -, they were rarely accompanied by scholarship of this detail or this length. Matthioli breaks new ground in publishing his work for an Italian audience, one that was not entirely at home with Latin, but would retain an interest in botany and pharmacology. Its intended audience, one might suppose, is also less wealthy than the average university medical student, although far from poor. A work like this may have gained at least local success because of its choice of Italian, which allowed it to establish itself within N. Italy, but this does not explain its success entirely. There are other qualities which, to my mind, helped it to become the European bestseller that Valgrisi at least had hoped for it once it had been turned into Latin.

But what of the content? The 1544 edition is not a particularly grand achievement as far as the technical side of its production goes. The type is not always clear, the paper is of middling quality, the aids to the reader are confined to a single index of plant names and an even briefer index of Tuscan words. The 1554 Latin edition expands the indexes to give a fuller list of contents, but, curiously, it does not implement one change already in the 1550 Italian edition that was to become part of the later Latin editions. In those the indexes have been transformed into a guide to medicine: alongside the list of contents, of weights and measures, and of plates, there are detailed indexes giving references to the properties of the drugs and their usages. One gives the parts of the body for which they are appropriate, another the type of disease, including ulcers, poisoning, and fractures; another the drugs that can be used as emetics; another those useful as beauty aids. Together these lists allow the book to be easily consulted, if one starts from a medical problem, and not from one of botanical or zoological identification.

But what of Matthioli’s own scholarship as revealed in 1544, for it was this that gave him credibility among his peers? We may divide this into two, his own botanical expertise and academic learning. The former is easily evident throughout. On the Potamogeto, he says: “Hollo piu volte veduto io spetialmente in alcuni laghi della valle Anania (the modern Val di Non) e ritoltolo con le proprie mani.” Rhubarb he compares with other odourless plants he has seen growing in Germany and Styria. He reports the large sea eagles, the agrotti, he has seen in the lagoons at Orbetello ‘nelle nostre Maremme di Siena’, a passing hit at Marcellus, who had emphasised that Dioscorides’ description of the ‘ossifrago uccello’  was second-hand and could be entirely legendary. Matthioli tells jokes about Etruscan peasants who have foolishly attempted to remove the skin from asses who have fallen into a stupor from eating hemlock, and who have been frightened when the animal suddenly woke up and bellowed. Practical details are offered along with personal reminiscence: “Veggansi il mese di Marzo fiorite tutte le spezie preddette dell’ elleboro nero l’una appresso all’altra della grandissima selva, che si passa di andare da Gorizizia à Lubiana, città di Carniola, ove l’ho spesso tolto per i bisogni.” His account of mandragora takes us into the world of ‘Ciurmadori et Cerretani’, who produce fake roots for sale in Rome for 25 or 30 ducats a time, and whose secrets were revealed to him by a travelling herbalist he had treated for syphilis. His description of aconito is full of vigorous description and reminiscences of it growing in the mountains near Trento, and sold on Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome. Most striking of all is his story of the experiments carried out by his master Gregorio Caravita before the Pope in November 1524 on two Corsican assassins. Caravita had invented an antidote, which he gave to one man, who had eaten large quantities of the poisonous plant in a marzapane: he recovered in three days. The other, who had taken far less of the poison but none of the antidote, died in agony after 17 hours, exactly as Avicenna had described.

These memories serve three purposes. They establish Matthioli’s credentials as a practical observer; they provide witnesses or the means of authenticating his statements; and they break up an otherwise bald exposition. But, it should be noted, in this Matthioli was doing nothing unusual: personal reminiscences can be found in the work of Brasavola at Ferrara, Valerius Cordus at Wittenberg, or the English botanist William Turner, to name but three contemporaries. Another Englishman, the natural historian and Galenist Edward Wotton, was specifically criticised by Conrad Gessner of Zurich for obtaining his data entirely from books - and not doing it particularly well. Gessner, and his English friend John Caius, were avid students of botany and zoology in life as well as in the library. In his willingness to record his own experiences with plants, animals, and birds, Matthioli, then, is little different from his immediate competitors. He is a man of the 1540’s, not the 1520’s, and much had changed since 1492 when Leoniceno had delivered his demand for a return to Dioscorides as the true guide to pharmacology.

But it is the second type of scholarship, Matthioli’s own academic learning, that may give us the clue to the success of the 1544 Discorsi. It is not that Matthioli shows himself to be a particularly learned or a particularly ignorant botanist[10]: what is striking is the balance that he manages to keep between necessary exposition and superfluous information. We know a good deal about his sources: Fuchs, Brasavola, Leoniceno, Manardi, Barbaro, and Ruelle (whose Latin translation forms the basis for his own Italian). Above all, he is influenced, far more than he admits, by Marcellus Virgilius. It is Marcellus who points out that the drug ‘kyphi’ is an anomaly in the standard text of Dioscorides: it is a compound drug, not a simple herb, and, it is not included in the oldest manuscripts or in Paul of Aegina’s repetition of this section. It is also Marcellus who convinces Matthioli not to spend time on a discussion of the rice plant, oryza, as it is ‘familiarissimo’ on any Italian table. But how he uses these source is worth noting. He rarely indulges in long quotations or a series of references. When he does cite Galen or other classical authorities verbatim, he does so briefly. He mentions that rhubarb, rhabarbarum, is thought to come from Pontus near the river Rha, described by Ammianus Marcellinus, but he does not, like Cordus or Marcellus, quote the passage at its full length. His scholarship is not as obtrusive as that of Barbarus or of many other commentators. When discussing the lark, la lodola, alauda, Matthioli does not talk at length, as his predecessors had done, on the usage of the word in classical literature or on the famous Roman legion of Julius Caesar that bore the name of Alauda. His comments are brief and to the point: they relate to modern Italy and the habits of the bird. Larks, he says, are terrified of sparrowhawks and will even fly into the clothing of humans in order to escape: tenendosi per cantare i maschi nelle gabbie, diventano spesso ciechi d’un occhio, come per esperienza vede.

Similarly, birds and plants that he believes are not longer to be found or where Dioscorides’ description is too vague for precise identification are dismissed curtly, without a long list of possible modern names. Matthioli does not make a fetish out of nomenclature. At times, it is enough for him to make identification clear simply by his translation and by including the name in his first sentence. There are not the long lists of names that can be found in other commentaries, and which, in the later editions of his own commentary, form a regular coda to each entry, giving the name in a variety of languages, including Bohemian and Polish as well as Italian, Spanish and German. But a comparison with other commentators shows how little of significance Matthioli has missed. He also has a gift for summarising complex issues clearly. His discussion of rhubarb sets out clearly the terms of the debate; he notes the difficulty of identification of the species described by Dioscorides, and that Manardi changed his mind when he thought he had acquired from Muscovy the genuine article (far superior to that grown widely in Italian gardens). Matthioli comments on the ease with which rhubarb can be bought at Venice - and its high price, its own weight in gold, almost certainly the result of speziali exaggerating its healing powers. He also wonders about this alleged potency, since in Italy it is often given to small children and pregnant women with no obvious major side-effects.

Here I suggest is a very good reason for the success of the 1544 commentary: its gift for precise and balanced exposition. Like the rules of Gaelic vowel harmony, it is always ‘slender with slender, broad with broad’. Where Matthioli has something important to say, he says it; when he has not, he does not burden us with the irrelevancies of others. Matthioli is, in short, a commentator of genius.

Subsequent editions bring their own advantages and disadvantages. The 1554 Latin edition shows a transition to a slightly different book, a more academic and scholarly production. Quotations from Galen or Hippocrates are expanded, and there is more attention paid to textual questions. For example, Matthioli notes, following Marcellus, that the younger manuscripts of Dioscorides do not have the word ‘kenos’, ‘hollow’, in their account of the sonchos: some Latin translators have the word ‘inanis’, and it is found also in Pliny’s description of the plant, which depends closely on its Greek model. But since the word is found in Oribasius and in the oldest codices, it is unlikely to be a medieval addition taken over from a comment in Pliny. There is expansion and also correction of his own errors: the androsace now grows in Syria, not near Soria in Italy, and, thanks to Luca Ghini, Matthioli can offer for the first time an identification with an Italian plant, one growing on the shores of Etruria. The discussion on the kyphi becomes more erudite, as does that on the mysterious Ossifragus. Here the quotations from Aristotle and Pliny are given in full, and Albertus Magnus is cited for the habits of the sea eagle in Etruria, an observation confirmed by Matthioli’s further personal experiences. Unfortunately, this ‘discovery’ of Matthioli was no discovery at all. As he was forced to admit later, his own copy of Albertus had the word ‘ossifragus’ instead of ‘osina’, a dreadful blunder by a scribe that he condemns at some length. The commentary is now illustrated, admittedly in restricted format, and is now becoming a major repository of the findings of others. Relatively few friends had given Matthioli their advice and conclusions in 1544; the 1554 edition, by contrast is full of new information on plants, drawing especially on the researches of Luca Ghini, the Pisan botanist, Anguillara, Melchiori, and many others. It is well on the way to becoming a work of European-wide collaboration, and something very different from an exposition of an ancient text.

The transformation is complete by Matthioli’s death. Although the form and much of the wording is still that of the commentary, the organisation, layout and feel of the huge double volume of 1583 have all altered. Although the discussions about manuscripts are both fuller and more sophisticated, not least because of Matthioli’s access to two early Viennese manuscripts of the Greek Dioscorides, one the celebrated sixth century Codex of Julia Anicia, the emphasis is less on Dioscorides than on the materia medica and its uses. As I have already remarked, the book’s indexes make medical consultation considerably easier. Gaps are filled wherever possible: oryza at last receives a full botanical treatment, and, thanks to Ghini, the stratiotes can be finally identified. The plates are both larger, more numerous, and better drawn. The list of his collaborators grows ever longer, from Francesco and Andrea Calzolari to Girolamo Donzellini and Ulisse Aldrovandi. The mysterious plant androsace, for which Ghini had suggested one identification, has now two, provided by Cortusio from his knowledge of Syrian plants. Two substantial plates dominate the relatively small amount of text in which Cortusio’s discovery is recorded.

As the book grew in size, so too did Matthioli’s ego. The tendency, already visible in the second edition, to point up the failings of others in marginal headings and to magnify his own achievement is now unmistakable. He is only too well aware of the eminence and importance of this book as a compendium of the botanical and medical lore of the sixteenth century, and of his part in it. His own error over the ‘ossifragus’ (now beautifully illustrated) is blamed on the wickedness of scribes. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the entry for aconitum, which is expanded to twice the length of the original entry in 1544. This is in part the reflection of a massive debate over the correct identification of Dioscorides’ plant that involved most of the leading botanists of Europe, as well as the wholesale slaughter of small animals and of chicken as the poisonous powers of one herb after another were tested. Matthioli’s original views remain unchanged, despite the assault on them by Fuchs and Gessner. He responds in three ways. First, thanks to Cortusio and Donzellini, he includes detailed pictures of the plant at different stages of its life. Secondly he retells his own experiences, including a gruesome account of his own experiment with an antidote. He tried it out in 1561 on two criminals at Prague, one of whom lived, but only just, the other of whom suffered long agonies before finally succumbing. Matthioli was, of course, repeating the experiment of his old master, Caravita, but his description is more detailed and more cold-blooded in its details. It is preceded by an appeal, several lines long, to witnesses to Matthioli’s veracity: imperial courtiers, royal physicians like Alessandrino and Crato von Craftheim, ambassors and the like are summoned to confirm what Matthioli had shown and taught them. The language and style of this new passage indicates that its focus is not Dioscorides but Matthioli, and its purpose is not to explicate Dioscorides but to defend Matthioli. How could anyone believe that he, the great Matthioli, the imperial physician, was telling tales? ‘Come touch and see that Matthioli is not describing legends’.

This huge entry, seventeen pages long, exemplifies what Matthioli and his book came to stand for: an authoritative, comprehensive, experiential, learned, and beautifully illustrated account of all that was known about materia medica. But, as I have suggested, we should not read all this back into the first edition of the Discorsi of 1544, or automatically assume that this explains the success of the earlier volume. As I have argued today, we must look at that book on its own merits against the background of other discussions of Dioscorides. By doing that, we may come to a proper appreciation of Matthioli’s art of the commentary.