FRACASTORO, Girolamo. Opera omnia, in unum proxime post illius mortem collecta…
Venice, Apud Juntas, 1574.
£500
Large 4to, ff. (xx) 213 (i), †6 2†8 3†6 A-2C8 2D6, lacking †6 with portrait of the author. Roman and Italic letter, a little Greek. Printer’s device on title page and in large on final leaf, decorated initials, several illustrations. Repair to outer margin of t-p, slightly affecting the table of contents on the verso. Some mould on margins and soiling to blank margins of initial leaves, irregular browning or dampstaining throughout. Elegant marginalia in an early hand on the first book On Sympathy and Antipathy and the book of Joseph. In a modern quarter calf binding with marbled paper over boards, red morocco label to spine in compartments with gilt lettering and fleurons, a.e.b.
This is the second edition of the posthumous opera omnia of Girolamo Fracastoro (Verona, 1476-1478 ca., Affi, 1553), first published by the Giuntas in 1555. Fracastoro was an Italian physician who taught at the University of Padua. Fracastoro was truly a Renaissance man: poet, physician, philosopher, botanist, astronomer, geographer, author of some splendid carmina, verse epics on the Old Testament figure of Joseph and the new plague of syphilis, dialogues on poetics, intellection and the soul, and works on astronomy, febrile crisis, communicable diseases, the flooding of the Nile and the elemental constitution of wine. All serious-minded works, and so all for the consumption of the learned – humanists, fellow doctors and philosophers, and ecclesiastics like the reformist bishop of Verona, Gian Matteo Giberti, the highly educated cardinal Alessandro Farnese, dedicatee of De contagione, and Alessandro’s grandfather, the Farnese pope Paul III, to whom Fracastoro dedicated his work on astronomy, Homocentricorum sive de stellis liber.