GUIDI, Guido (Vidius) - Chirurgia e Graeco in Latinum conver - Lot 269

GUIDI, Guido (Vidius) - Chirurgia e Graeco in Latinum conversa. Paris, Pierre Gaultier, 1544. In-folio, (18) ff, 534 pp, 210 woodcuts of which 30 on pl. page, qqs. clear angular or marginal wetnesses, qqs. yellowed leaves, skin turned over in water-green color, pastiche binding imitating the old one, spine with nerves ornamented in cold. G.-M. 4406.1. DURLING 2204. NORMAN 954. MORTIMER 542. First edition dedicated to François I. Guidi was his physician from 1542 until the death of the king in 1547. Professor at the Collège de France, he lived in Paris with Benvenuto Cellini at the Petit-Nesle, where the printer Pierre Gaultier was also established. Translation of the 10th century Greek Codex of the physician Nicetas the Byzantine, containing excerpts with commentary from the works of Hippocrates, Galen and Oribasius, mainly on fractures and dislocations. The illustrations, according to a note in the original manuscript by Guidi, would be by Primaticcio but more likely by the school of Francesco Salviati (1510-1563). Some were engraved by Denys Janot, Jean Jollat and perhaps by Champfleury. The volume is sumptuously printed with the Gros-Romain typeface of Claude Garamont, brother-in-law of Pierre Gaultier. The figures handed down by Nicetas come from an ancient commentary by Apollonius of Kitium (ca. 100 BC) and offer an important testimony of the Hippocratic surgical practices of antiquity. They show all kinds of ligatures and bandages, as well as surgical instruments for reducing fractures and dislocations.