Guilandino & Pietro Andrea Mattioli's "quarrel" appears to be both professional & highly personal. Apparently Mattioli could not tolerate either rivals or corrections to his work. The naturalists & physicians who dared to disagree or correct his opinions or work did so at their own peril. He seemed to need to destroy anyone who had the courage to disagree with him; & his reputation was sufficiently formidable, that he dod ruin some who took issue with him. Some of the most important men of the day who dared to criticize Mattioli were admonished, rebuked, or even pursued by the Inquisition. Fear of Mattioli's revenge encouraged tolerance for to the long-term domination of Mattioli's version of De Materia Medica throughout the continent, especially in northern Europe.
One of Pietro Andrea Mattioli's most persistent critics was Melchiorre Guilandino. Born in Prussia, Guilandino came to Italy as a young man & quickly developed his interest in botany. By 1554, when Mattioli's 1st illustrated Dioscorides appeared, Guilandino had already carried out botanical collecting & research in Greece & along the coast of Africa.
Guilandino had settled in Padua, where he shared the house of Gabriele Falloppia. Guilandino's friendship with Falloppia, who held the high, supervisory chair of materia medica as well as that of anatomy, was to be the decisive influence in his career.
Gabriele Falloppio (1523-1562) was an Italian Catholic priest & anatomist often known by his Latin name Fallopius. He was one of the most important anatomists & physicians of the 16C.
And then, in a letter to Conrad Gesner of Zurich, who unwisely published it in 1557, Guilandino questioned & criticized several of Mattioli's plant identifications, accusing him of textual mistakes & of overlooking relevant clues tucked away in the works of Galen & others.
Mattioli replied forcefully in an open letter to Falloppia, demanding that he publish an Apology for Guilandino's impertinent criticism. Instead of the demanded apology, Guilandino wrote that Mattioli would have done better to correct errors in his own book "that dung-heap, the edition of 1554," & "in that lurid rag-bag, constantly being retouched, but never complete, which he calls a commentary on Dioscorides."
And then Guilandino went on to attack Mattioli as a plagiarist "who is more greedy" he asked, "in copying the opinions of others?" Not surprisingly, the non-apology drove Mattioli to fury. Mattioli had discovered that Guilando was the ill-bred son of a priest, a man whose poverty, when he 1st came to Italy, had led him to look after donkeys in Sicily, where Mattioli said he picked up "ass-like habits." And when Guilandino soon set off for his long-planned field-work in the Middle East, Mattioli's vengeance pursued him, with attempts to rob him of the patronage of the Venetian ambassador in Constantinople.
Falloppia helped finance Guilandino's ill-fated research trip in the Middle East from 1558. "'God grant," the priest told his students, "that the shrewd & subtle Guilandinus, who has now begun his journey to the East Indies, may come home to us safe." But he did not. He successfully made the journey through Syria , Palestine & Egypt; but on his return he was taken prisoner by Saracen pirates, losing the naturalist specimens he had collected. He was ransomed out of his captivity & his specimens were redeemed after a few years thanks to his friend Falloppio. Returning to Padua, he was appointed prefect of the botanical garden of Padua; & in 1567, he was elevated to a professor of botany at the local university. It was speculated that Falloppia helped him get the post of custodian of the Paduan botanical garden on his return.
Mattioli then aimed his bigoted wrath toward Falloppia's relationship with Guilandino, "that sordid hermaphrodite." On the other hand, Falloppia was said to have been a well-known as a misogynist, whose lectures were full of anti-feminist asides, & who refused to advise women on how to avoid syphilis on the grounds that "it is fitting that there should be...some way in which they pay the price of their crimes."
Falloppia was a fairly easy target for insinuation. And when he carefully kept out of the quarrel, Mattioli was not slow to draw the conclusion that "he loves perhaps the vices of his Guilandino, & the gallantry of so sweet an hermaphrodite, more than truth & my reputation."
In 16C Italian botany, Guilandino was the most traveled of his colleagues. He came to Italy with nothing, but on his death, he bequeathed to Venice a library of 2400 books, with their margins crammed with his botanical notes. Guilandino's prose was strewn with references to classical texts, literary as well as botanical. He had charge of the botanical garden at Padua up to 1589; & his pupils, like Prospero Alpino (1553-1617), a Venetian physician & botanist, continued his work into the 17C. He is buried in the General Cloister of the Basilica of Sant'Antonio di Padova, next to his friend Gabriele Falloppio.
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