Hernandez, Francisco, edd. Nardo Antonio Recchi and Johannes Faber

Ioannis Fabri Lyncei Bambergensis, medici et professoris romani, Et iam quinque Summis Pontificibus ab Herbarijs studijs Animalia Mexicana Descriptionibus, scholijsq. exposita. Thesauri rerum medicarum Novae Hispania, seu plantarum, animalium, mineralium mexicanorum historiae Francisci Hernandi novi orbis medici primarii, et Nardi Antonii Recchi montecorvinatis Philippi II. Hispaniarum & Indiarum &c. Regis Medici, & Neap. Regni Archiatri generalis: à Lynceis, notis, commentarijs, auctarijs illustratae, & editæ: scilicet primi Tomi pars. Ad illustriss. et reverendiss. d. d. Franciscum Barberinum, S.R.E. Card. Amplissimum WITH [Rerum medicarum Novæ Hispaniæ thesaurus seu plantarum animalium mineralium Mexicanorum]

THE RARE FIRST PUBLICATION OF 
THE ACCADEMIA DEI LINCEI: 
THE TESORO MESSICANO 

Animalia: Rome: Jacobus Mascardus, 1628. First edition.

[Rerum medicarum]: [Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1651]. Parts 2-4.

Animalia Mexicana: folio in 6s (12 ½” x 8 3/8”, 316mm x 213mm): π² Qq-Aaaa⁶ [$3 signed; –Qq1]. 194 leaves, pp. [6] (title, blank, imprimatur, blank, section title, dedication), 459-840.

Bound in later (XVIIIc) stabbed vellum panelled gilt, with gilt scrollwork center-piece and corner-ornaments. On the spine, five pairs of gilt fillets. All edges of the text-block gilt.

Some patches of wear at the spine, and at much of the gilding (a corrosive bole?). Splits to the extremities of the boards. Mildly evenly tanned, with some passages of heavier tanning. Signs of damp to the lower fore-edge Sss1-Yyy1. Marginal worming Ddd3-Sss4; mostly a single track but larger Ooo1-Ppp3, affecting a few side-notes. Ink marginalia in an early hand to pp. 692 and 797. Ink corrections in a (distinct?) early hand to pp. 807 and 809. Ink manuscript index of (some) images to the recto of the rear free end-paper, apparently in the same hand as the marginalia. “8 Maggio 1747” in ink manuscript to the recto of the first free end-paper. “1451” mechanically stamped to the tail of the final page of text (840). A leaf with manuscript recto and verso within a double ink border on three sides laid in loose.

 

[Rerum medicarum]: folio in 6s and 4s (12 ¾” x 8 5/8”, 325mm x 220mm): Bbbb⁶(Bbbb3+“Bbbb3”) Cccc-Ffff⁶ Gggg⁶(Gggg2+“Gggg2”) Hhhh⁶(Hhhh2+χ1) Iiiii-Kkkk⁶ Llll², A-M⁴ [6s $3 signed, 4s $2 signed; –Bbbb1, Bbbb2, Gggg1]. 107 leaves, pp. 841-842 843-846, ₂845-846, 847-899 900-902 (blank, section title of the first part of the Phytosophicae Tabulae, imprimatur) 903-904, ₂903-904, 905-916, [2] (appendix to p. 917, appendix to p. 918), 917-950, [2] (to the reader, index of images); 1-90, [6] (5pp. index, errata). [=116, ii; 90, vi]

Bound in (later?) panelled calf, with extensive floral scrollwork blind. On the spine, five raised bands. Title (“COLUM/RES/NOVÆ/HISPA”) gilt to red calf in the second panel. All edges of the text-block stained blue.

Front hinge split, with losses to the bands and to the head- and tail-pieces. Extremities rubbed, with wear to the fore-corners. Passages of moderate tanning, but otherwise quite bright, especially the “Liber unicus.” Occasional foxing. Shelfmark (“XI.b.19”) to the front paste-down. Mostly obliterated ownership inscription to the recto of Bbbb1^r (p. 841) beginning with “Collegij” and the first line ending “1654.”


In 1570, Philip II of Spain appointed his 56-year-old personal physician, Francisco Hernández de Toledo (1514–1587), to make the first scientific expedition to the New World. Over the course of seven years, Hernández with his son Juan collected thousands of specimens, describing for the first time as part of a systematic assessment of New World plants pineapple, cocoa and corn (maize) among others. Himself a scholar and translator of Pliny’s Historia naturalis, Hernández sought to treat the natural history of the New World broadly, including animals and minerals as well as plants.

From this broad assemblage of seven years of notes, drawings and specimens, Hernández’s anticipated project was vast and — according to some contemporary accounts — not to the liking of his patron, the king. Well before Hernández’s death, his manuscript was entrusted to Nardo (i.e., Leonardo) Antonio Recchi (Salerno, ca. 1540–1594), who succeeded him as archiater or doctor of the royal house. Recchi’s edition of the work, divided into four books in the mode of Theophrastus, survives only in manuscript (now at the John Carter Brown Library, Codex Lat 5). Recchi returned to Naples and died without publishing his work; his nephew then passed the manuscript to (Prince) Federico Cesi, founder of the Accademia dei Lincei.

The Lincei (Italian for lynx, chosen for its sharp vision) — whose leading light, Galileo, appended “Linceo” to his signature — were the preeminent academic society, and it is through their members’ hands that the work finally came to print. Indeed, so important was the material and so illuminating to natural science that the Lincei sought to make the work — eventually as the Tesoro Messicano (being roughly equivalent to Novæ Hispaniæ thesaurus) — their inaugural publication.

A group of the Lincei, Giovanni Fabri (Johannes Faber of Bamberg), Fabio Colonna, Johannes Schreck (also known as Terrentio) and Theophilus Müller (Teofilo Molinatore), joined Cesi in making order from the chaos of the Hernández-Recchi material. The various sections of the work correspond, essentially, to their individual commentaries. The first part to be published was the present item: Faber’s 1628 Animalia Mexicana. It is quite rare; Nissen records three copies of the 1628 first edition (British Library 443.f.3, the Accademia dei Lincei and the National Library of Medicine 2363015R), but there are now a handful more (in various states of completeness) recorded.[1]

With some 30 woodcut illustrations of animals (some repeated), the wonders of the New World — including a muskrat with an extraordinary bottom (pp. 580–581), the first ever depiction of a  hummingbird (“hoitzitziltototl” or huitzitzilin, p. 705), and a “Dracunculus Monoceros”[2] or a single-horned little dragon — were made vivid to the eyes of the most scholarly Europeans.

Hunt, whose account of the work is among the best and most concise, reports that “all was ready for publication in 1628 when Prince Federico himself died, leaving the project without funds, and it is thought that only a few copies of that “edition” ever reached the world at large…” (I, p. 266). Hunt, citing Schullian, confirms that the sheets for the work were largely printed and, for reasons that are not entirely clear, unsold for some twenty or more years. Don Alfonso Turiano, Spain’s ambassador to Rome, supplied the funds for the work to be brought to completion; dates vary from 1649–1651, presumably because it took rather a long time to compile such a piece-meal work.

The present set has the immediately subsequent sheets bound as a second volume. That volume continues pagination (840 in volume one followed by 841-2 843 in volume two), but contains some clear additions, viz. pp. ₂845-846 (an additional dedication to Cesi, dated 1628) and pp. ₂903-904 (Francesco Stelluti’s dedication to Don Rodrigo de Mendoza, dated 1651). The first work in the volume is Fabio Colonna’s “annotations and additions” to Recchi’s edition of Hernández’s main botanical treatise. Next, with continuous pagination (pp. 901–952), is the first part of the Phytosophicae Tabulae or botanical tables of Cesi himself. This is considered the first work of general botany, and the closest to the realization of Philip II’s desire for a systematic description of the plants of the New World. Pagination restarts for the Historiae animalium et mineralium Novae Hispaniae Liber Vnicus (the sole book of the history of the animals and minerals of New Spain; 90pp. with 5pp. index and 1p. errata), which is broken into six chapters: quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, insects, fish and minerals.

Altogether, the exceptionally rare 1628 first volume and its continuation from sheets likely printed in 1628 but finished up around 1651 are the first footsteps of systematic natural history, emanating from the intellectual center of XVIIc Italy and focusing on the New World, a sort of clean slate. Its peculiar bibliography — Alden & Landis and Palau both give incomplete entries, suggesting that they might not have even seen an example — reflects the infancy of the discipline. Hernández, sometimes celebrated as the Pliny of the New World, was, to use modern parlance, the great botanical disruptor, overturning the works of Theophrastus and Dioscorides, and opening Europe’s eyes to the natural novelty of the New World.

The provenance of the set is tantalizing if inconclusive. The first volume was in the hands of an Italian on 8 May 1747. This appears to be the same hand that created the manuscript (partial) index of images at the end of the volume. Although the pen is slightly different, that same hand seems also to have made the marginal comments. The first, p. 693 (on the mole’s blindness) reads: “Talpa est oculata, sed oculi non prominent cum intrô sint, profecta exiqui, sed [?]” and the second, p. 797 (against a woodcut of the “Amphisbæa Europæa”) reads: “In utero materna coniunctæ sunt per bellâ amborum caudæ serpentium et ecce [?] amphisbena quæ necessariê apparere biceps Tibet(?).” These indicate a reader with external knowledge of the subject.

Because the ownership inscription at the beginning of the second volume has been obliterated — leaving an indication only that it was collegiate, and in their hands as early as 1654 — it is difficult to determine how early the two volumes came together. The manuscript leaf laid in to the first volume quotes Navarete’s 1842 Coleccion de documentos inéditos para la Historia de España (vol. II, pp. 362–363), which describes the circumstances of the king’s commissioning Hernández; the hand is broadly XIXc, and so does not help with the XVIIc or XVIIIc marks of ownership.

Purchased at Christie’s New York 24 June 2009, lot 108.

 

Alden & Landis 628; Hunt 247; Nissen, BBI 861; Nissen, ZBI 1908; Palau 113536; Sabin 31515.

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[1] 9 additional examples, bringing the institutional total to 12: Harvard, Ernst Mayr Library 8663425 and Dumbarton Oaks alma668315; Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Fol M 128 F *; Basel, Universitätsbibliothek UBH Bot 309; Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España R/40122 and R/40123; Los Angeles, Autry Museum of the American West 91.972 F33i, 1628; Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale BVEE0409080; Fermo, Biblioteca civica ‘R. Spezioli’ 1 m 7 3196; University of Oklahoma Library ALMA10083920.

[2] Dedicated to Cardinal Barberini; Hunt notes that because of shifting political winds, this image is often excised or censored to remove Barberini’s name.

Item #JLR0450

Price: $145,000