MATTIOLI, PIETRO ANDREA GREGORIO

born March 23, 1500, Siena, Italy died , January/February 1577, Trento Italian physician and botanist whose Di Pedacio Dioscoride Anazarbeo libri cinque (1544) is an Italian translation, with critical commentary, of Dioscorides' classical 1st-century Greek herbal. It served as one of the bases for the development of modern botany. Mattioli received a medical degree from the University of Padua in 1523. His first work, De morbi gallici curandi ratione, dialogus (1530), was a traditional examination of the origins and treatment of syphilis. He served as physician and adviser to Bernardo Cardinal Clesio, bishop of Trento; in 1554 he became physician to Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, and later to Maximilian II. Di Pedacio Dioscoride provided physicians, apothecaries, and herbalists with a practical scientific treatise in Italian; its commentary allowed them to identify and use medicinal plants. Mattioli's Latin version of the text, published in 1554, made Dioscorides accessible to many European scholars. It included extensive annotations and commentary based on Mattioli's own observations and those of others, carefully detailed illustrations, and plant-name synonyms in several languages.