Naples Dioscurides
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Folio 90v of the Naples Dioscurides with illustrations of the Mandrake. |
The
Naples Dioscurides in the Biblioteca Nazionale,
Naples[It is Cod. Gr. 1.], is an early
7th century Greek herbal based on the
De Materia Medica of the first-century Greek military physician
Dioscurides. The Naples Dioscurides contains the descriptions of plants and their medicinal uses. Unlike
De Materia Medica, the text is arranged alphabetically by plant. The
codex derives independently
[David H. Wright, "Traditio and Inventio in Iconographic Transmission," Eighth Byzantine Studies Conference, Chicago 1982] from the same model as the
Vienna Dioscurides, composed ca. 512 for a Byzantine princess, but differs from it significantly: though the illustrations follow the same model, they are rendered more naturalistically in the Naples Dioscurides. Additionally, in the Naples manuscript, the illustrations occupy the top half of each folio, rather than being full page miniatures as in the Vienna Dioscurides. The plant descriptions are recorded below the illustration in two or three columns. The
style of Greek script used in the manuscript indicate that it was probably written in Byzantine-ruled southern
Italy, where ancient Greek cultural traditions remained strong, although it is not known exactly where it was produced. Marginal notes indicate that the manuscript had contact with the medical school at
Salerno in the
fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries.
A luxurious facsimile has been published by Salerno Editrice, Rome, in collaboration with Akademische Druck of Graz, Austria, publishers of a comparable facsimile of the Vienna Dioscurides.
*Crinelli, Lorenzo.
Treasures from Italy's Great Libraries. New York, The Vendome Press, 1997.
