Pietro Mattioli - The Angry Naturalist

A physician, court humanist, and the most influential Renaissance commentator on Dioscorides’ De materia medica

Pietro Andrea Mattioli (Siena, 1501 – Trento, 1578) was a physician, court humanist, and the most influential Renaissance commentator on Dioscorides’ De materia medica. Trained at Padua (MD 1523), he served at the princely court of Trento and later the Habsburg court in Prague. Beginning with an Italian vernacular Discorsi (1544) and expanding into the Latin Commentarii (1554), Mattioli fused classical pharmacology with contemporary observation, new-world materia medica, and extensive illustration programs (Giorgio Liberale drawings, W. Meyerpeck cuts). His works spread via multiple languages—including scarce French editions—shaping European botany, pharmacy, and natural history. Polemical but meticulous, Mattioli helped move learned medicine from Latin into the vernacular, making Dioscoridean science legible to physicians and apothecaries across Europe.
He was however known for his short temper, quick to insult rivals in print, especially the Portuguese botanist Amatus Lusitanus (João Rodrigues de Castelo Branco). Their feud over plant identifications turned thorny when Mattioli accused Amatus of ignorance, Amatus called Mattioli a plagiarist. Their pamphlet war filled entire prefaces of later editions of the Commentarii. In one exchange Mattioli wrote that Amatus “should return to the apothecaries’ benches, for there he belongs.”

He lived long enough to see all his major works through print, but died of plague at Trento in 1578, on a visit home. His sons later erected a monument within the Trento Duomo, still visible today.

1. H. Leclerc, Un naturaliste irascible: P.A. Mattioli de Sienne, Ianus, vol. XXXI (1927), pp. 336–345.
   → This article coined the phrase “naturaliste irascible.”

2. J. Stannard, P.A. Mattioli, Sixteenth-Century Commentator on Dioscorides, Bibliographical Contributions, University of Kansas, 1969, pp. 59–81.
   → Provides analysis of his temperament and the Latin–vernacular polemics.

3. Cesare Preti, “Mattioli, Pietro Andrea,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 72, 2008.
   → Summarises the Amatus and Guilandini disputes as emblematic of his “fiery personality and polemical style.”