# Galenus - Akakia, Ars medica, Venice, Valgrisi, 1549

**Titolo bibliografico:** Claudii Galeni Pergameni Ars medica, quae et Ars parva, Martino Acakia Catalaunensi Doctore medico interprete & enarratore, multò quàm antea castigatior, & ab infinitis erroribus repurgata

**Autore:** Galenus Claudius; Akakia Martin

**Dati editoriali:** Venice, Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1549

**Codice archivio:** 180

**Prezzo:** 1380.00 USD

**Stato commerciale:** Disponibile

**Link ufficiale:** https://www.govirarebooks.com/products/galen-ars-medica-akakia-1549

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## Descrizione accademica e analisi

8vo (162 × 105 mm). [48], 478, [2] pp. Collation: a-c8 A-GG8. Roman, italic, and Greek types. Woodcut Valgrisi devices on the title-page and the verso of the final leaf. Historiated woodcut initials. Two full-page woodcut diagrams in the text, on pp. 60 and 84. Contemporary limp vellum, title in ink on the spine and lower edge, manuscript annotation on the upper cover; binding slightly darkened and soiled, with traces of ties and a small wormhole in the upper cover. Manuscript marginal annotation on p. 1. Small wormholes in the first three leaves, slightly affecting the text; a worm-track affecting approximately ten leaves in quires EE and FF, with minor textual loss; occasional marginal foxing. Overall, a good, unsophisticated copy. An early Venetian edition of Martin Akakia’s Latin translation and substantial commentary on Galen’s Ars medica. The translation had first appeared at Paris in 1543 and had already been published by Valgrisi in 1544. This volume belongs to the Renaissance reassessment of a work that had long occupied a central position in medical education: the object was not simply to reproduce an ancient authority, but to make its terminology and arguments intelligible through renewed translation and exposition. Known in Greek as the Technē iatrikē and in the medieval Latin tradition as the Tegni or Ars parva, the Ars medica offers a compact exposition of the principles governing medical knowledge. Its brevity should not be mistaken for elementary simplicity: the work combines an introduction to medicine with a closely organized account of its objects, divisions, and methods, which successive generations of teachers and commentators sought to explain. Véronique Boudon’s study of the treatise emphasizes its deliberate educational purpose and its place among Galen’s writings intended for the acquisition of medical knowledge. The opening definition organizes medicine around the healthy, the diseased, and the intermediate or “neutral”, each considered in relation to bodies, causes, and signs. These distinctions establish the framework for identifying a bodily condition, explaining its origin, and recognizing the evidence by which it becomes knowable. The treatise is therefore concerned not merely with naming diseases, but with the relationship between observation and explanation. Its celebrated prologue, distinguishing three ordered forms of teaching, also generated an extensive debate about how medical knowledge should be arranged and communicated. Recent scholarship has shown that this debate cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between medieval logic and Renaissance pedagogy: teaching and demonstration were already closely connected in the scholastic commentary tradition. The subsequent exposition addresses bodily constitution and the signs of different mixtures or temperaments, within the Galenic understanding of health and disease. Its concern with the balance of hot, cold, moist, and dry qualities connects the assessment of individual bodies with the broader principles of Hippocratic medicine. Read and commented upon throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Ars medica remained useful precisely because it brought essential doctrines together while also raising questions about the aims and organization of medical knowledge. It is a theoretical and pedagogical compendium, rather than an anatomical atlas or a collection of prescriptions. Galen, born at Pergamum in 129, combined medical practice with an exceptionally extensive programme of writing on anatomy, physiology, therapeutics, pharmacology, and philosophy. His career included service to gladiators at Pergamum and, subsequently, association with the imperial court at Rome. His authority rested on a synthesis of earlier Greek medicine, anatomical investigation, practical experience, and sustained argument about the causes and purposes of bodily functions. Modern scholarship commonly places his death around 216, rather than accepting the older date of 199 without qualification. The Ars medica had a substantial printed history before Akakia’s intervention. In its medieval Latin form, accompanied by the commentary of ʿAlī ibn Riḍwān, known in the Latin West as Hali, it was included in the Articella, the collection of medical texts represented by the Padua edition of 1476. The Articella brought together works associated with Johannitius, Hippocrates, Galen, and other authorities, providing a compact body of texts for medical study. Akakia’s translation must consequently be understood as a new treatment of an established curricular work, not its first appearance in Latin or in print. The Greek text appeared in the Aldine edition of Galen’s works, Venice, 1525, in volume III, second part, ff. 147–155. The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy’s bibliographical repertory also records its presence in the Basel Greek edition of 1538 and identifies a succession of Latin translators, including Niccolò Leoniceno, Giovanni Manardi, and Martin Akakia. The sixteenth-century history of the work thus involves competing translations and interpretations, rather than the repeated reproduction of one unchanging Latin text. Akakia’s translation and commentary first appeared at Paris on 1 October 1543. The printer was Michel de Vascosan together with Simon de Colines and Regnault Chaudière. A royal privilege dated 15 May 1543, granted to Akakia for six years and transferred to Chaudière, documents the translator’s direct involvement in the publishing arrangements. Valgrisi’s 1544 Venetian edition, bearing the imprint Ex Officina Erasmiana, apud Vincentium Vaugris, followed promptly. A further edition appeared at Lyon in 1548, published by Guillaume Rouillé, before the present Venetian printing of 1549. These editions establish the rapid circulation of Akakia’s work between the Parisian, Venetian, and Lyonnais book trades. Martin Akakia the Elder, identified on the title as Catalaunensis, was a native of Châlons, in Champagne. He studied medicine at Paris, becoming bachelor in 1523, licentiate in 1525, and doctor in 1526; he was elected ordinary lecturer in 1529 and served among the physicians of François I. His career united university teaching, court medicine, and the humanist restoration of Greek medical writings. He should be distinguished from his son, also Martin Akakia, who was born in 1539 and subsequently occupied a royal chair in surgery. The translator of the present work is the elder physician, who died in 1551. The two full-page diagrams have a particularly precise place in modern scholarship. Ian Maclean reproduces both from this very 1549 edition in Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine: the diagram on original p. 60 appears as figure 5.5, p. 180, and that on original p. 84 as figure 5.6, p. 182. Their inclusion in the section “Beyond logic: geometry, proportion, quantity” provides a directly relevant scholarly context for examining the book’s visual apparatus and its contribution to the organization of medical knowledge. The publication is also characteristic of Vincenzo Valgrisi’s role in transmitting contemporary medical scholarship to the Italian market. Born Vincent Vaugris in the Lyonnais region, he acquired an interest in the Venetian bookshop at the sign of Erasmus in 1532. His catalogue subsequently combined editions of ancient authorities with translations, commentaries, and recent medical works from northern Europe. Ilaria Andreoli’s reconstruction of his publishing activity emphasizes both the importance of medicine and pharmacology in his list and his attention to the material presentation of books, including types, figured initials, and illustrations. Akakia’s Galen fits that programme closely: a classical text offered through the work of a contemporary French physician, in a portable Venetian edition.

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## Bibliografia di riferimento

Edit 16, CNCE20187; USTC, 831461; R.J. Durling, “A Chronological Census of Renaissance Editions and Translations of Galen”, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 24, 1961, pp. 230-305; V. Boudon, “Médecine et enseignement dans l’Art médical de Galien”, in Revue des Études Grecques, 106, 1993, pp. 120-141; I. Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine, Cambridge, 2002, especially pp. 180 and 182, figs. 5.5-5.6; Galen, On the Constitution of the Art of Medicine. The Art of Medicine. A Method of Medicine to Glaucon, edited and translated by I. Johnston, Cambridge, MA, and London, , 2016, pp. 156-317; O. Utamura, “Revisiting the Exegetical Tradition of Galen’s Prologue to the Art of Medicine before Leoniceno: Logic, Teaching, and Didactics in Pietro Torrigiano’s Plusquam commentum”, in History and Philosophy of Logic, 41, no. 4, 2020, pp. 352-375.

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