Читать книгу Memory of the World: The treasures that record our history from 1700 BC to the present day - UNESCO - Страница 20

Vienna Dioscurides

Inscribed 1997

What is it

A Byzantine illuminated manuscript of De Materia Medica by Dioscorides, a Greek physician, pharmacologist and botanist of the 1st century AD. The manuscript was written in the early 6th century and has 491 folios of parchment with more than 400 colour pictures of plants and animals.

Why was it inscribed

The Vienna Dioscurides can be considered as the most important pharmaceutical source of the Ancient World. It was used from early medieval times into the early modern period as a dictionary for medical practitioners. It forms the basis of medical herbal therapeutic knowledge and is possibly the most important, enduring and comprehensive work on herbal and other remedies in the West.

The manuscript itself is a masterpiece of the book art from later Classical Antiquity.

Where is it

Austrian National Library, Vienna, Austria

The Vienna Dioscurides is the oldest and most famous copy of Dioscorides’s 1st century AD work, De Materia Medica. It was copied in the early 6th century for Juliana Anicia, daughter of Flavius Anicius Olybrius, emperor of the Western Roman Empire, in recognition of her patronage in building a church in Constantinople. This same copy passed through many hands that made annotations in Greek, Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew. In 1519 the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II bought the book for the Habsburg Imperial Library.

De Materia Medica was the most important pharmaceutical source of the Ancient World and through medieval times. It was in active use for 1000 years as a pharmacopoeia and reference work for medical practitioners. There are indications that it was first regarded as a luxury copy and later as a medical textbook in daily use in a Constantinople hospital; these changes in use throw some light on social and cultural progress through the centuries. The information it contains also reveals how plant and herbal remedies were used from antiquity through to early modern times.

Dioscorides with a student seated at his feet.

Written ‘on the preparation, properties and testing of drugs’, the book lists more than 1000 natural substances and their medicinal properties. Most of these are botanical, although some mineral- and animal-based remedies are also included. There are more than 400 colour illustrations, the vast majority being of plants; each illustrated plant appears on a page facing the description of medicinal properties. Other full-page illustrations in the book feature Anicia and Dioscorides himself, both in an author portrait and seated among seven noted physicians.

The Vienna Dioscurides also contains five supplementary texts including Dionysius’s Ornithiaca, describing more than forty birds, with illustrations.