37E Georg Melich and Orazio Guarguanti. Frontispiece to Avertimenti
nelle compositioni de' medicamenti per uso della spetiaria... (Venice,
1605). Fondo Berio; Be.XVII.A.471. National Union Cat; fol. 5246.
Mithridates with his mithridate and Andromachus with his theriac
dominate this frontispiece to a text on drug preparations that was
compiled for the dello Struzzo pharmacy in Venice.
37 F Salomon Kleiner (German, 1703-1761). Illustration of a pharmacy
from Christopheri De Pauli pharmacopoei camera materialum ad
vivum delineata (1751), p. 11. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute,
Special Collections, no. 861133. Mithridate and theriac, stored in
large and elaborate containers, are prominently displayed in the eigh
teenth-century Red Crawfish pharmacy in Vienna designed for the
De Pauli family.
Notes- This attribution results from research done by Peter Fusco and Victoria
Avery. - I would like to thank Simon Stock, Jennifer Montagu, and Richard
Palmer, London, for their assistance in studying these jars. - Other contemporary accounts blame Mithridates' son and successor
Pharnaces, for Mithridates' death (Cassius Dio, Roman History, bk. 37,
11 1 iff.). One source proposes that the more quixotic version was meant
to divert accusations of patricide away form the new king (McGing
1986, 166 n. 98). - C. Galen, On Antidotes, bk. 1, chaps. 1-2 (translated in Brock 1929,
196-200). - These include Antidotes I, Antidotes II, and Theriake to Pamphilianus
(Watson 1966, 3). - Palmer 1985, 100-117.
- Swann 1985, 457.
- Carosi et al. 1988, 120.
- Micca 1970, 706.
- See, for example, the elegant contortion of figures and the male facial
type in Sansovino's Resurrection relief of the Porta della Sagrestia, San
Marco, Venice, or the dynamic yet linear quality of drapery in his Saint
Mark Dragged by Infidels relief on the Cantoria, San Marco, Venice. - Suggested by Manfred Leithe-Jasper, former director, Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna, in correspondence, 1990. - This artist is not related to the Fontana family of ceramists mentioned
in nos. 34-35. See, in particular, Fontana's Birth of the Virgin relief
in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan; Nativity relief in the Contini-
Bonacossi collection, Florence; and figures in cartouches on the shafts
of the candlesticks in the Certosa, Pavia. - Watson 1966, 102.
210 Drug Jars