science and medicine in early modern venice 715
council of Ten. Though he traveled little himself, ramusio managed to
compile a massive compilation of first-hand accounts of travels to the
new World, the Middle east, and asia, Navigationi et Viaggi [naviga-
tions and Voyages], which was published in three volumes by the Giunti
press between 1550 and 1559. ramusio’s great collection of travel accounts
sought to include all the past literature on the voyages of discovery. it was
the first work of its kind and was never superseded in the renaissance.43
yet, for all his interest in the outside world, ramusio’s Navigationi was
a curiously provincial work. against all the evidence before his eyes and
clearly envious of iberian accomplishments, ramusio insisted that the
glory of discovering new worlds went to the italians. enthroning Marco
Polo as the king of explorers, ramusio nostalgically longed for the day
when the republic of Venice would rightfully claim its preeminence
in the world of travel and exploration. Venetians dreamt vividly, but
stayed put.44
New Worlds versus Ancient AuthorityThe geographical expansion of europe shattered the renaissance scholar’s
text-bound world. Prior to the discovery of the americas, the botanical
world of the europeans was limited to the approximately 550 plants that
the Greek physician dioscorides (a.d. c.40–80) described in his De materia
medica [of Medical Material]. in the edition and commentary published
by Piero andrea Mattioli (1501–77), dioscorides’s herbal was, in the words
of historian Paula Findlen, “probably the most well-read scientific book
of the 16th century.”45 yet the larger the world became, the more limited
dioscorides’s image of nature seemed. How much of the world did the
ancients really know, europeans asked? The Mediterranean, certainly, and
parts of africa and the Middle east, but as accounts of the indies poured
into europe in the 16th century, naturalists suddenly found themselves
awash with new facts about nature.
43 a modern edition is: Giovanni Battista ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, ed. Marica
Milanesi, 6 vols (Turin, 1978–88).
44 elizabeth Horodowich, “armchair Travelers and the Venetian discovery of the new
World,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 36 (2005), 1049.
45 Paula Findlen, “The Formation of a Scientific community: natural History in
Sixteenth-century italy,” in a. Grafton and n. Siraisi, eds., Natural Particulars: Nature and
the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe (cambridge, Mass., 1999), p. 373.