Milestones of Science Books

PLINIUS SECUNDUS, Gaius.

Historia Naturalis, Caius plinius marco suo salutem.

Venice: Marinus Saracenus, 1487.

Hardcover. Very Good. Item #002658

14 May 1487. Chancery folio (311 x 216 mm). 272 unnumbered leaves. Signatures: aa8 bb6 a-z8 &8 A-G8 H10. Colophon on H7v, with first and final blank. Roman type, 57 lines and headline; initial spaces with guides, spaces left for Greek, two large contemporary illuminated opening initials in pink, green, blue and heightened in gold, from Northern Italy at beginning of first and second book, rubricated in red and sometimes red and black. Leaves partially untrimmed. Contemporary German richly blind-tooled calf over wooden boards, metal clasps, later A.M. initials and stork on spine (rebacked and repaired with parts of the original spine retained). Very little, mainly marginal, browning and spotting throughout (final two leaves stronger), occasional light waterstaining to lower blank corners (heavier to leaves s4-5), leaf l5 with large brown stain possibly from lamp oil with offsetting to adjacent leaves, a few early ink annotations and text markings. Provenance: Rappaport, Rome (bookseller's ticket); Count Alessandro Magnaguti, Mantua (1887-1966; initials on binding and bookplate to front pastedown); Italian export seal issued by the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome. An outstanding, wide-margined copy in contemporary original binding. ----

HC(Add) *13096; BMC V 413; BSB-Ink P-606; Klebs 786.10; Goff P-795, PMM (1st ed. 1469). - An early edition of Pliny, edited by Philippus Beroaldus, with two contemporary illuminated opening initials and rubrication. The printer Marinus Saracenus first appeared as a collaborator of Foxius in 1485. Early in 1486 he produced alone a Monte Rocherii and then started working on four works published in 1487. Very rare at auction with the last copy sold in 2001 (Sothebys New York, lot 436, the Pillone family copy, sold for $110.000).
In his great encyclopaedia, the Historia naturalis, being the first comprehensive examination of the natural sciences and the arts, Pliny set forth by his own count 20,000 facts compiled from 2,000 different works, all of which he scrupulously cited in his remarkably thorough indices. The 36 books of this vast compilation, the only extant work of more than 100 said to have been composed by Pliny, cover cosmology, mathematics, geography, medicine, zoology, agriculture, botany, history, philosophy, anthropology, mineralogy, and the arts and literature. When Pliny died at the age of 56 while observing the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, the work was still unfinished. The importance of the Historia naturalis for the study of ancient art has somewhat been overshadowed by its renown as the first encyclopaedia of natural history. In fact, the Historia remains a principal source of information on the development of sculpture and painting and the techniques of metalworking and silversmithing in antiquity, topics covered in the last four books. Together with Vitruvius' De architectura, Pliny's work is one of few extant testimonies to the flowering of art criticism and art historical study in the Roman period.

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