Medici anti-poison oil

Leaving Florence in May 1601 on a secret mission to warn James VI of Scotland of a plot against his life, Henry Wotton carried with him a casket of antidotes from Grand Duke Ferdinand. This included Medici anti-poison oil.

Making direct connections between recipes and objects is often problematic--but in this case the possibilities can be documented. From at least July 1588, the ducal Fonderia was systematically producing such caskets, in walnut or ebony, containing Medici remedies together with printed ricette (prescriptions) giving directions for their use. These caskets were divided into compartments for eight, ten, eighteen or twenty-four medicines.  They were diplomatic gifts--part of the wider exchange of medicines, recipes, ingredients, equipment and skilled practitioners that flowed between courts and coursed through formal and informal channels.

Established by Cosimo I and first situated inside Palazzo Vecchio, the fonderie were laboratories--for the production of alchemical medicines (distilled oils, liquors, elixirs, refined salts, potable gold), distilled waters and perfumes and for conducting research into the full range of practical alchemy-- from metallurgy to pharmacology.  

Ambassadorial reports provide vivid testimony of the direct involvement of Cosimo and Francesco de' Medici in this experimental work. Hercole Cortile reported in July 1576 that the reclusive and melancholic Francesco spent "much of his day in making remedies against the plague, especially oils. And the other day, at the Casino (his city retreat and the relocated site of the Fonderia), he led me into a camerino (small room) with many basins full of live scorpions. He told me there were around seventy thousand, which he fed on "a certain herb". Ercole witnessed the Grand Duke spectacularly plunge scorpions "without them stinging him" into  a glass boccia (flask) containing one hundred-year oil. Cortile was then told that this oil needed to be left in direct sunlight for fifty days. Four months earlier, the Venetian ambassador Andrea Gussoni reported Francesco telling him that "wishing to experiment (fare esperienza) [this oil] on condemned prisoners by giving them poison to drink", he had completely cured them.  

Cosimo himself recommended that Ferrante Gonzaga experiment an untested batch of Medici anti-poison oil on "someone condemned to death". Such grisly controlled trials followed the classical example of King Mithridates and received further sanction in Pietro Andrea Mattioli's influential Commentaries on Dioscorides; a text closely studied by Cosimo, whose heavily annotated copy of the 1544 first edition survives. Mattioli described how his master, the surgeon Gregorio Caravita, had tried out a new poison antidote on two condemned "Corsican assassins" before the Medici Pope Clement VII in 1524.  Both men were given napellum (wolfsbane); only Gianfrancesco received the antidote. He recovered after three days; Ambrogio was watched dying in extreme suffering. Like the later experimentation of poisons on slaves recorded by Della Porta, here "passion for experimental research interwove with a cruel game, an uninhibited divertissement" (Lina Bolzoni).  In August 1563, Cosimo sent his cousin Jacopo d'Appiano, Prince of Piombino, the recipe for "olio di caravita".  

Production and experimentation drew heavily on the services of expert distillers. One key figure was Niccolo Sisti. Twenty-one thousand scorpions were delivered in five consignments to Sisti in July 1580. Alongside distilling medicines, Sisti is best-known for undertaking experiments at the Casino for Francesco into new forms of porcelain and glassmaking. In 1591, under Grand Duke Ferdinand, Niccolo took over the management of the Fonderia. Eleven years later in the same employment, he was documented paying Gabriello d'Antonio da San Ripoli from the countryside outside Pistoia for 25 pounds of scorpions to make "anti-poison oil".

In Renaissance Secrets, the recipe given for Medici anti-poison oil comes from the Florentine apothecary Stefano Rosselli--he claims it to be Cosimo's own formula. This formula does correspond to another for the same oil in a 1556 manuscript collection of recipes supposedly written "by the Duke's hand or in his presence". A key variant in this later recipe (c.1589) is that two ingredients were replaced--hepatic aloes by the higher quality and rarer Socotra aloes and white dittany by Cretan dittany--seemingly because Mattioli had noted that the "true" Cretan dittany advocated and used by Dioscorides had been rediscovered and was now available in Venice . These changes reflect Rosselli's active participation within the community of naturalists and in the lucrative trade in medicinal simples; he established a botanical garden at his villa; he had samples of true costo and Peruvian balsam on display in his museum in his pharmacy; he corresponded with Ulisse Aldrovandi in Bologna, Pietro Antonio Michiel in Venice and Tadeáš Hájek in Prague. Importantly, Rosselli acquired recipes directly from experts within the Fonderia --from Pietro Bertola, Paolo Banchelli, Sebastiano Manzone and Niccolo Sisti. The son of his business partner, Jacopo Dori, was also Sisti's apprentice. Rosselli also copied down a recipe supplied by Bernardo Buontalenti for the poison antidote Mattioli tested for his employer, Archduke Ferdinand, King of Hungary, said to be from Cosimo. He also states that he and Baccio Baldini (Cosimo's physician) tested this powder by order of Duke Francesco (like Mattioli) on a condemned prisoner (using arsenic). However, Rosselli did also improve Medici recipes--he deliberately altered the formula of Cosimo's oil against plague and petechie (petechial typhus), creating his own version, because the sick were offended by its foul smell. 
  

The Ragusan connection

In 1561, the first book of secrets attributed to a woman, the Secreti della Signora Isabella Cortese was published in Venice. In Renaissance Secrets, I claim she was a fictitious author, but didn’t explain why. Now I want to set out the evidence behind that judgement.

No details about an actual Isabella Cortese or her life have ever emerged.

Instead three men--Giovanni Bariletto, Curtio Troiano di Navò and Mario Caboga—can all be connected to this edition. Links between them stretch from Venice to Ragusa (Dubrovnik) to Brescia.

Bariletto was a printer/publisher who came to Venice from the Riviera di Salò on Lake Garda around 1550; his imprint “at the sign of Prudence on the Stagnaria” appears from 1559. That year he published a book of secrets entitled Della summa de'secreti universali in ogni materia parte prima […] di Don Timoteo Rossello.

Curtio Troiano di Navò was his brother-in-law. He is described as a “book merchant” and printer/publisher operating in Venice “at the sign of the Lion”. Like Bariletto, he was a fellow Brescian who had moved to the city. Though his father Troiano had passed the firm “at the sign of Prudence” onto Bariletto he nonetheless retained a hands-on role. Significantly, it was Curtio in 1560 that applied for print privileges for the Secreti of Isabella Cortese, for the second and third parts of the Secreti of Timoteo Rossello and an expanded edition of the Siennese metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio’s (1480–c.1539) Pirotechnia.

Curtio Navò dedicated his third edition of the Pirotechnia to the Archdeacon of Ragusa, Mario (o Marino Caboga). The dedication states that all three editions been “embellished and amended” by Caboga and reveals that the dedicatees of the first two editions were fictitious. Navò himself is documented trading in books in Ragusa in 1559 and 1560 so a Ragusan connection between the two men is highly probable. 

Significantly, both the Secreti of Isabella Cortese and the Secreti of Timoteo Rossello are dedicated to Caboga.

“The identity of both books is manifest. Their form, style, background reveal the same source, the same origin” (Armand Baschet and Félix-Sébastien Feuillet de Conches 1865). Future scholarship could build on this fundamental insight. My own working hypothesis is that these two books are printers’ compilations and that both authors are fictitious.

Bibliography

Della summa de'secreti uniuersali in ogni materia parte prima di Don Timotheo Rossello si per homini & donne, di alto ingegno, come ancora per medici, & ogni sorte di artefici industriosi, con molte galantarie ad ogni persona gentile accommodate (In Venetia, appresso Giovanni Bariletto, 1559).

Della summa de'secreti uniuersali in ogni materia parte prima [-seconda], di Don Timotheo Rossello si per huomini e donne, di alto ingegno, come ancora per medici, e ogni sorte di artefici industriosi e a ogni persone virtuosa accommodate (In Vinegia: per Giouanni Bariletto, 1561).

I secreti de la signora Isabella Cortese ne' quali si contengono cose minerali, medicinali, arteficiose, et alchimiche, et molte de l'arte profumatoria, appartenenti a ogni gran signora. Con privilegio (In Venetia, appresso Giouanni Bariletto, 1561).

Pirotechnia. Li diece libri della pirotechnia nelli quali si tratta non solo la diuersità delle minere, ma ancho quanto si ricerca alla prattica di esse: e di quanto s'appartiene all'arte della fusione ouer getto de metalli, e d'ogni altra cosa a questa somigliante. Composta per il s. Vannuccio Biringoccio, nobile senese. [Venezia: Curtio Troiano Navò], 1558, title page (In Vinegia: per Comin da Trino di Monferrato: [Curtio Troiano Navò], 1559, colophon). The dedication is dated 15 April 1558.

Horatio C.Brown, “Privilegi veneziani per la stampa concessa dal 1527 al 1597." Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Mss. Ital. Cl. VII, 2500-2502 (12077-12079). The original privilege copied by Brown is in Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Senato, Terra, r.42, 1559-60, Speciales Personae, c.148r, approved on 17 August 1560.

Claire Lesage, ‘La litterature des "secrets" et I secreti d'Isabella Cortese’, Chroniques italiennes, Université Paris III, 1993.

Corrado Marciani, ‘Troiano Navo di Brescia e suo figlio Curzio librai-editori del secolo XVI’, La Bibliofilia, 73 (1971), disp.1, 49-60

NB Further links between Bariletto and Curtio Troiano can be found in Il fiore della retorica di messer Girolamo mascher mantovano (in Vinegia: per Giovanni Bariletto, 1560). This includes a papal privilege granted to "Curtio Troiano mercante de libri venetiano" (May 1560) and privileges obtained by Bariletto from the Venetian Senate for this book and Il Luminare maggiore translated by Pietro Lauro (29/07/1559). The dedication by Pietro Lauro to Andrea Babali in this work (1559) states this was at the urging of Curtio Troiano. Like the Caboga/Kaboga, the Babali/Bobaljevic were a leading Ragusan patrician family. Giacomo di Andrea Baballi, a merchant is documented in Venice from 1558 : six years later, the eighteen-year-old Veronica Franco gave him full custody of yet her unborn child in her first will: see Margaret Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth Venice, n.46, p.293