GIUNTA, Tommaso (1494–1566), editor

The most complete collection of early writings on the construction, history, and curative powers of baths, ranging from antiquity through the Renaissance from both the Christian West and the Islamic East. This beautifully printed and illustrated work incorporates tracts and selections from more than 70 authorities including Averroes, Avicenna, Galen, Gesner, Hippocrates, Vitruvius, Oribasius, Mesue, Pontano, Dioscorides, Seneca, Serapion, Celsus, Pliny, Fuchs, Maimonides, and Savonarola, and descriptions of approximately 200 bathing places then known. Here is the first edition of Gesner’s work on the thermal springs of Switzerland and Germany. This copy contains the supplementary text of Giovanni Antonio Secchi’s De balneis compendium ex Hippocrates et Galeno, which is not present in all copies. It appears after the colophon, and its signature is not included in the register, suggesting that it was added while the work was in press. Its title is also added at the bottom of the Author Index, after “Finis”. The book is an excellent example of Juntine typography (the heirs of Giunta was at this time Tommaso and Giovanni Maria) and contains 5 remarkable full-page woodcuts depicting the plan of a natural bath near Pozzuoli, the machinery for the bath at Fideris in Switzerland, bathers enjoying the bath of Plombières in France, a map of the Adriatic coast in the area of Trieste, and a depiction of a Roman bath at the beginning of the added Secchi text.

Collation: Ff 14, 1-497, lacking the final blank leaf 3q10. The book is not paginated - every leaf is numbered instead. Giunta’s Florentine lily device on title and colophon. Five full-page woodcuts. Historiated, foliated and floral woodcut initials, woodcut headpieces. Register and colophon on fol. 488 recto. Faint pencil notes and underlinings by Carl Curman (1833–1913), who lectured in balneology at the Karolinska Institute and travelled in Europe to study historical and modern bath establishments.

Binding: Contemporary brown calf over wooden boards, tooled in panels with medallion portraits of the Evangelists Marc, Matthew, and John, and of Salvato, Isabella, Sigismund August (King of Poland) and Bona. Clasps missing.

Provenance: Swedish war booty from Poland in the library of Schering Rosenhane (1609–1663), later in the library of his son Johan Rosenhane (1642–1710) at Tistad. In the 1760’s the library was sold to Carl Fredrik von Eckleff (6000 dlr kpmt), whose library was sold at auction in 1769 and 1786, incl. many books from the Jesuit Colleges in Poland. This item was No. 185 in the 1769 auction catalogue. Title with the signature "Johannis Rosenhane 1673". With Eckleff’s engraved bookplate.

References: Garrison Morton 1986; Mortimer, Italian, 214; Durling 1101; Haskell Norman 214; Duveen 42; Osler 1902; Walde, Storhetstidens litterära krigsbyten, vol II, pp 145-176.H.P. Kraus Cat 215/72.