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An Early Illustrated Work On Physiognomy
PORTA, Giovanni Battista della. De humana physiognomonica. Vico Equebse, Giuseppe Cacchi, 1586.
Folio [22 x 32.5 cm], (2) ff., including large engraved portrait of author surrounded by human and animal heads, 265 [i.e. 272] pp., including full-page engraved portrait of dedicatee, Cardinal Luigi d'Este, and 81 engravings including numerous repetitions. With transposition of plates on R3 & R4, and with cancel on BB2r. Bound in 17th-century calf, covers ruled, spine with raised bands, with title gilt and tool of a swan (?) in each compartment with floral motifs at corners; tool much abraded, head and tail of spine chipped, front joint slightly cracked at foot but sound. Engraved ex-libris of George Rose. Scored ownership inscription on engraved title; some minor handsoiling and foxing in margin of title and light waterstaining scattered throughout. A good copy, with good impressions of the many engravings in their first printing.
$9,850 Scarce first edition, first issue of one of the first works on physiognomy to be illustrated, "a fore-runner of Lavater in estimating human character by the features" - Garrison, History, p. 231. The basis for character-reading was the doctrine of signatures, namely that facial resemblances between a man and a particular animal were constitutive of character, e.g. a man with a beaked nose was bird-like, etc.
"De humana physiognomonia (1586) achieved remarkable European reputation; by 1655 it had reached some twenty editions, having been translated into several languages." According to Mortimer, copies are known with the errors in the placement of the figures on R3, R4 and BB2r corrected, from which it is inferred that the copies like the present constitute a first issue. The plates were transferred to the Neapolitan publisher Tarquinio Longo, who produced an Italian translation in 1598 and a Latin in 1599/1601. Several later editions appeared with the plates re-worked, and many more editions and translations in reduced format with reduced copies of the plates. For a listing, and a convenient summary of the disposition of the illustrations in editions subsequent to this first, see Gabrieli, Bibliografia Lincea I, pp. 274-77.
Though not rare in census, it is striking that OCLC adds only a single copy of the first edition to institutional holdings, suggesting genuine scarcity.
* Mortimer II.298; Garrison-Morton 150 & History, 231; Heirs of Hippocrates 370; Cosimo Caputo, ?Un Manuale di Semiotica del Cinquecento: Il De Humana Physiognomica di G/B. Porta,? in M. Torrini, ed., G.B. della Porta nell?Europa del suo Tempo, 69-91; Louise G. Clubb, Giovanni Baptista della Porta. Dramatist, 24-6; Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 40-43.
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