PANCIROLI, Guido

by Guido Panciroli

£1,450 · Offered by Sokol Books

Later edition of this very popular work on modern inventions, first published in Amberg between 1599 and 1602. It was first written in Italian by the jurist and antiquarian Guido Panciroli (1523-99) at the commission of his patron, Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, and circulated in manuscript before it was translated into Latin with commentaries by Heinrich Salmuth for the publication of 1599-1602, whose edition this is. Divided into two sections, the work in the first focuses on the memorable and lost achievements of the ancient Romans, and in the second, which opens with Columbus s discovery of America in 1492, on recent inventions and those things that were unknown to the ancients, which include porcelain (a long section), artillery, alchemy, clocks, and printing and typography. The attractive frontispiece, which also includes a vignette of a printer s shop, reflects this division of the Old and New worlds, with its depiction of ancient Roman ruins on one side and Indigenous Americans on the other. Much of the force of the work in fact comes from the long commentaries by Salmuth, including a voluminous discussion of the New World and its indigenous peoples, guaiacum and other native plants, their medical uses, etc. This is part of a curious attempt to frame the various circumnavigations of the late fifteenth century by Columbus, Magellan, etc., in terms of ancient colonisations of less developed peoples. Indeed, Salmuth opens by discussing the Spanish justification for w

• Binding: Hardcover

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