Pietro Andrea Mattioli...

Note: this article has now moved to pietro-andrea-mattioli on Cipher Mysteries

Google only finds about ten pages where Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577) is linked with the Voynich Manuscript. Here's a short research note to fill that gap...

If you look at Mattioli's CV, you'll see plenty of echoes with other people linked to the VMs. Though a renowned herbal compiler & writer in his spare time, he was also a physician to the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand II and to Emperor Maximilian II (who was, of course, Rudolph II's father), which is broadly similar to both Hajek and Sinapius.

Brumbaugh once compared Mattioli's famous 1544 herbal (the one that Hajek and Handsch translated in 1562/1563) with the VMs' herbal drawings, and concluded that the two had (I think) at most one half of one plant in common. And so it seems relatively certain there is no connection: neither one is derived from the other, nor do both emanate from a common source.

Yet even though Rene Zandbergen avers demurs in this, I am quite certain (from closely examining it at the Beinecke) that the first word of the faded marginalia at the top of f17r has been emended from "melhor" to read "mattioli". That is, a later owner (who was probably unable to read Occitan and French) misinterpreted the word as a garbled reference to Mattioli, and decided to correct it on the page.

Marcelo Dos Santos' page on f17r (in Spanish) mentions much of this. He also mentions Sean Palmer's assertion that the waterstain on f17r must have happened after the f17r marginalia were added, but before the f116v 'michitonese' marginalia: but no, sorry, I don't accept that idea at all. If you look at the following pages, you can see where the waterstain fades away: it's a localised piece of damage.

Marcelo also pulls down my suggested link with fennel for the picture on f17r (the one with a pair of "eyes" in the roots): yet he seems not to grasp that there the herbal literature of the late Middle Ages / Renaissance repeatedly connects fennel with eyes - finnochio / occhio in Italian, but similarly in Occitan and other languages. Oh well.