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Secrets of the Medici Granducal Pharmacy

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By Ashley Buchanan

The last line of a recipe for a nerve ointment within Anna Maria Luisa’s (1667 – 1743) collection of culinary, alchemical, and medicinal recipes reads: “this being a balm, and particular secret, which is made only in the S.A.R. fonderia, and not in another location, even if others say they have the same recipe.” Five of Anna Maria Luisa’s recipes—two fever waters, one ointment for nerves and another for burns, and a powder to control epilepsy—are attributed to the fonderia of the most serine royal highness, the grand duke of Tuscany. Of these five, three are printed on small sheets of paper and prominently emblazoned with the Medici crest. The printed recipe for fever water stated that this particular water was useful for reoccurring fevers, both malignant and acute. The directions praised the water’s success in moderating the heat of fevers in patients of all ages. It advised giving the water four or five times in the morning, but suggested reducing the dosage based on age.  Of all the recipes in Anna Maria Luisa’s collection, this is the only printed text with multiple copies. The fact that this recipe was printed, and three copies remain in her collection, suggest that this particular fever water was widely used and produced by the Medici palace fonderia, or pharmacy.

Established by Cosimo I in the Palazzo Vecchio, the Medici Granducal fonderia was a laboratory where naturalists, alchemists, herbalists, pharmacists, and distillers experimented with recipes and techniques for medicinal therapeutics in addition to other metallurgical pursuits. Cosimo’s son, Francesco I, moved the fonderia to the Casino di San Marco, and again in 1586 when a new fonderia opened in the Uffizi. In 1643, Grand Duke Ferdinando II donated an additional room in the Uffizi dedicated to curiosities like stuffed exotic animals and even an Egyptian mummy, which also served in the production of medicines.

Il laboratorio dell'alchimista, Giovanni Stradano, studiolo di Francesco I
The studiolo or alchemical laboratory of Francesco I de Medici inside the Palazzo Vecchio (via wikimedia commons)

By the seventeenth century, and continuing well into the eighteenth century, the Uffizi fonderia was famous for its pharmaceutical production. The remedies produced in the Medici fonderia were gifted by the Grand Dukes and Duchesses in precious caskets to nobles and kings of Europe, the Middle East, and even the Americas. Numerous letters within the Medici archive (now available online, thanks to the Medici archive project) attest to the value of Medici medicines as diplomatic gifts. In 1630, Anna Maria Luisa’s great-grandmother, the Grand Duchess Maria Magdalena (Von Hapsburg), sent oils from the fonderia as a diplomatic gift to the Crown Prince of Spain.[1] In 1637 military captain and diplomat Piero della Rena, who at the time of writing was being held captive by the Pasha of Tripoli, wrote Grand Duke Ferdinando II and proposed a plan to negotiate his ransom.  In order to expedite his release, Rena suggested that in addition to money, Ferdinando send an amicable letter, a tent made of damask cloth, and a box of medicinal oils (una cassetta di olii di fonderia).[2] Clearly the products produced by the palace pharmacy were held in high esteem and as such possessed great value—value that could be used for the promotion of the Medici personally and politically.

Anna Maria Luisa’s recipes attest to the avid pursuit of alchemical and technical “secrets” at the Medici court. Later male and female Medici family members set up their own fonderie for the production of medicinal oils and therapeutics. The courtly patronage of science not only highlighted the Medici’s splendor and command of nature, it also produced tangible products, like fever waters. As a member of the Medici family, Anna Maria Luisa had access to these recipes to add to her own collection, to gift for diplomatic relationships, or to exchange for other recipes. The inclusion of the Medici crest and attribution to the Medici palace pharmacy was a way in which Anna Maria Luisa could increase the value of her recipe collection. As I continue my research, I am interested in investigating Anna Maria Luisa’s interaction with the granducal fonderia. Like other Medici dukes and duchesses, did she set up her own fonderia or did she patronize the existing granducal fonderia? Understanding Anna Maria Luisa’s affiliation with the granducal fonderia will reveal whether she was a patient who used and circulated Medici therapies, or if she was also a patron and practitioner of medicine.

[1] ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4962. (Entry 11641 in the Medici Archive Project Documentary Sources database.)

[2] ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4274 folio 196. (Entry 22136 in the Medici Archive Project Documentary Sources database.)

 

 

Alchemy, Apothecaries, Early Modern, Knowledge Transmission, Medical Practitioners, Medicine, Plants and Herbs, Posts, Printed Books, Remedies, Series: Distillation, Series: Germanic Studies, Students, Tools and Techniques

Distilling Vernacular Medicine

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By Tillmann Taape

As Katherine Allen has pointed out in her post, distillation was regarded as a powerful way of separating and purifying earthly matter, and was central to the alchemical pursuit of the philosophers’ stone. And, yes, the odd gallon of whisky was also a much-welcomed product. This view of distillation is reflected in the textual processes that charaterise the Western alchemical tradition. Beginning with twelfth-century translations of Arabic texts into Latin, scholars constantly excerpted, compiled, translated, and digested all available knowledge, identified what was useful, and then compounded it to suit different tastes and purposes.

This double importance of distillation – techical and textual – is highlighted in the first distillation handbook ever printed, the Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus, also known as the Small book of distillation, which was published in 1500 by the Alsatian surgeon and apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig (c.1450–1512). While this book contains numerous recipes for distilled waters, it can also be seen as representing in itself a recipe for acquiring and presenting medical knowledge. Despite its Latin title, it was written in German, and quickly became a best seller, no doubt cashing in on the growing popularity of distilled medicinal waters. To teach his readers the art of distilling, Brunschwig drew on his wide reading (over three thousand books, according to him) and practical experience to concoct ingredients from different traditions of knowledge.

Brunschwig was well-versed in the alchemical literature, which at the time mainly circulated in manuscript form. Publishing his book in print, Brunschwig introduces a broad public to an  alchemical understanding of matter, and how it can be transformed and purified. In fact, the process of distillation itself is defined in these terms, as “nothing but to separate the subtle from the gross and the gross from the subtle, […] to make the physical more spiritual, [so that it] may more easily penetrate the human body with its secret powers and virtues” (SB 1509, fol. 6r.). This extraction of the useful from the superfluous is also an important process in vernacular medical literature, and Brunschwig extracts not only from alchemical sources, but also boils down the essence of the learned medical tradition.

With reference to ancient textual authorities such as Galen and Dioscorides, he briefly explains the workings of the human body in terms of the four humours which govern an individual’s ‘complexion’, with diseases representing a deviation from this humoural balance. This can be readjusted by administering medicines distilled from plants, or even animals, with the appropriate qualities.[1] This precarious balancing act means that a sound knowledge of medical ingredients was essential, which is why a large portion of the Small book  is taken up by a herbal section. It offers some of the best botanical woodcuts produced at the time, paired with encyclopaedic entries listing each plant’s appearance, medicinal qualities, and the distillation process by which these might best be extracted.

The third major source for Brunschwig’s distillation project, artisanry, has closer links with alchemy than one might at first suspect: as historian Pamela Smith has shown, early modern craftsmen subscribed to an alchemical worldview, and were confident that their personal observation and direct physical engagement with natural material was a reliable source of knowledge.[2] Brunschwig shared this view: based on his own experience with distillation procedures, he is able to anticipate pitfalls (e.g. don’t let a heated glass vessel cool down too quickly, or it will crack!), and to dispense practical advice on the quality and proper manipulation of different stills and vessels. This technical know-how boiled down into an easy-to-follow series of short chapters, which really starts from scratch. There is even a life-sized picture of a mould which should be used to shape the curved bricks needed for building a round furnace, and set in its centre, was a poem summarising the key points to remember.

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Res 2 M.med. 35, f. 11v-12r. (http://www.bsb-muenchen.de)

A mould for shaping bricks from Brunschwig’s distillation manual. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Res 2 M.med. 35, f. 11v-12r. (http://www.bsb-muenchen.de)

Brunschwig’s manual, then, not only contains valuable recipes for harnessing nature’s healing powers through distillation, it also represents in itself a recipe for the production of a best-selling and highly usable book: he compounds his knowledge of texts with his own experience and observation. He digests, extracts, and purifies his intellectual and technical ingredients, and where other compilers often produce turgid mixtures of jumbled-up recipes, Brunschwig manages to distill clear and useful knowledge from learned medical, alchemical and artisanal traditions. His example was followed by many early modern compilers of medical printed books, and the Small book itself went through an intriguing series of transformations in its various editions, including an English translation which appeared as early as 1527. But we certainly shouldn’t think that the story of textual digestion and excerption stops there: as Katherine Allen discussed, and as I have seen in the Small book, readers were assiduously annotating their copies. They highlighted what was most useful for them, added to the information, and cross-referenced entries, thus achieving another level of distilling textual knowledge.

[1.] For more on humoral theory and the logic behind materia medica, see Lisa Smith’s post on “Medicinal Compounds, Efficacious in Every Case” and Alun Withey’s post on “‘Weird’ Remedies and the Problem of ‘Folklore‘”.

[2.] P. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Idem., “In a Sixteenth-Century Goldsmith’s workshop”, in L. Roberts, S. Schaffer and P. Dear (eds.), The Mindful Hand (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007), pp. 33–57; Idem., “What is a Secret? Secrets and Craft Knowledge in Early Modern Europe”, in E. Leong and A. Rankin (eds.) Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 47–66.

Alchemy, Art, Early Modern, Series: Italian Studies, Series: Metals, Tools and Techniques

Cipriano Piccolpasso’s Recipe for the Transmutation of Matter

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By Steve Wharton

Cipriano Piccolpasso, Tav. 20, illustrations associated with the making of ‘lustres’, I Tre Libri Dell’Arte Del Vasajo… (1556-75), Dallo Stabilimento Tipografico, 1857.

Certain recipes can tell us a great deal about the cultural and sometimes the technological contexts within which they were compiled and disseminated. In his mid-sixteenth century Italian treatise, the Three Books of the Art of the Potter.., Cipriano Piccolpasso (1523-79) discussed and illustrated the technology and the manufacturing processes that were central to the making of tin-glazed earthenware pottery.[1] Frequently described as having been produced between the years 1556 and 1558, though revised throughout his lifetime, and as an instruction manual, the manuscript was unpublished until the mid-nineteenth century.[2] Today, it is considered the authentic voice of the sixteenth-century Italian potter. However, as I have discussed elsewhere, Piccolpasso’s descriptions are based on observation of the techniques and processes employed by the potters of Castel Durante, rather than practice. Nevertheless his treatise is consistently and frequently cited in highly technical physical and chemical analyses of Renaissance glaze and related technology.[3] The recipes discussed include those for colour as well as those for ‘ruby’ and ‘gold’ lustres: that is the addition of pristine metallic surfaces to otherwise finished ware. Piccolpasso says of them: ‘…I do not intend to go on further until I have discoursed to you upon gold maiolica, from what I have heard of it from others, not that I have ever made it or even seen it being done. I do know that it is painted over finished wares…’

While Piccolpasso is passing on hearsay, he nevertheless includes a recipe for what he calls Rosso da Maiolica [red maiolica]:

A            B

Red earth                           oz           3             6

Armenian Bole                 oz           1             0

Ferretto of Spain             oz           2             3

Cinnabar                            oz           0             3

to which he adds: ‘…with this last mixture ‘B’, include a calcined silver carlino [a burnt coin]’. In his marginal notes he confirms that ‘…this last mixture “B” is called golden maiolica’.

The inclusion of particularly cinnabar is at first a mystery; it has no function in a recipe such as this. It is only when we know that cinnabar is a compound of mercury and sulphur and that all the ingredients are ground together in a pot of red [i.e. strong] vinegar, one of the ‘sharp waters’ employed by alchemists, that things begin to make a little more sense. During the period, what were described as the ‘arts of fire’, which included the making of pottery, were also used to make not only high status bronze-cast sculpture and gold-cast jewellery, for example, but also to manufacture and prepare more ubiquitous substances such as pigments and other colouring agents for an array of manufacturing techniques. These included easel and fresco painting, tesserae for mosaics, fabric dyes and the decoration of glass and indeed pottery. As has been observed, alchemy, in terms of practical chemistry, was primarily concerned with the making of industrial products by using chemical processes; it was not necessarily concerned with the occult, the mystical or the spiritual.[4]

What Piccolpasso described was and is still known as a ‘transmutation lustre’ [my emphasis] in which a paste based upon raw clay is applied to the surface of a pot. It is a well-known technique: the fifteenth-century Hispano-Moresque potters used a red ochre clay corresponding exactly to that included in this recipe. A silver salt was added, in the form of a calcined carlino, together with a copper compound, known as Ferretto of Spain, to produce ‘gold’ lustre. No gold was ever used and in that sense it is the perception of gold that becomes significant.

The transmutation of base material into gold, however, was central to one of the alchemists’ most important aims, and mercury, sulphur and ‘sharp water’ were all part of the process. In his discussion of this recipe, Piccolpasso may well have been relying on what he knew of the presence of alchemy in all kinds of chemical and physical practice, including the production of gold maiolica. More specifically, he raises the question: to what extent might the potters of north-central Italy, in employing their own art of fire, be considered alchemists? What is more certain is that the philosophy associated with alchemy provides an insight into the ways in which knowledge and what kinds of knowledge were gathered and transmitted during the period. Ultimately, Piccolpasso’s record of what he understood as the recipe for ‘gold’ lustre reflected the endeavours of contemporary scholars and indeed pottery practitioners to cope with the challenges of defining and connecting all the different kinds and parts of knowledge that were circulating at that time.

 

[1] Piccolpasso, Cipriano, Li tre libri dell’arte del vasaio nei quai si tratta non solo la pratica, ma brevemente tutti gli secreti di essa cosa che persino al dè d’oggi è stata sempre tenuta ascosta…ecc., National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London, MSL/1861/7446

[2] Caiani, A., 1857, I Tre Libri dell’Arte del Vasajo, Roma, dallo Stabilimento Tipografico, Via del Corso, num. 387.

[3] See, for example, G. Padeletti, G. M. Ingo et al, ‘First-time Observation of Maestro Giorgio Masterpieces by Means of non-destructive Techniques’, Applied Physics. A, Materials Science & Processing, 0947-8396, Padeletti, 2006, vol. 83 issue, 4, pp. 475-483; B. Brunetti et al., ‘Copper in Glazes of Renaissance Luster Pottery: Nanoparticles, Ions and Local Environment’, Journal of Applied Physics, 93/12, 2003, pp. 10058–63

[4] A. Y. Al-Hassan, Studies in al-Kimya’, 2009, p. 8; see also L. Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998, p. 11.

18th Century, Alchemy, British Studies, Family and Household, Manuscripts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Remedies, Series: Distillation, Tools and Techniques

‘The Art of Distillation’: Alchemy in Eighteenth-Century Recipe Books

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By Katherine Allen

Two aspects of eighteenth-century recipe books that interest me are the use of distillation in domestic medicine and the relationship between print and manuscript sources of medical and scientific knowledge. Rebecca Tallamy’s recipe book beautifully illustrates the union of both these aspects as she recorded her recipes in a 1691 edition of John French’s ‘The Art of Distillation’. This alchemical guide was one of many published in late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, and it reflects the popularity of Paracelsianism and the growth of distillation in industry. We can therefore use this manuscript to explore briefly the ways in which the household acted as a space where domestic knowledge interacted with social and cultural developments in distillation.

The Art of Distillation
Wellcome, WMS 4759, f. 1r.

Like many recipe books, this manuscript was a family collection. The ownership tag ‘Rebecca Tallamy her book of Receipts’ appears several times, however Patience and William Tallamy were also named as owners. Evidently, the Paracelsian alchemical guide was owned by a member of the Tallamy family and presumably handed down until Rebecca gained ownership, recording her recipes between the years 1735-38. A few recipes were added by a later hand in the early nineteenth century, thus emphasising the multi-generational use of this distillation text/recipe collection.

Rebecca Tallamy's Title
Wellcome, WMS 4759, f. 40v.

But, what is distillation? Distillation is a process used to separate mixtures and purify liquids that was used by alchemists and natural philosophers to experiment in hopes of making gold, the Elixir of Life, and a range of medical cures. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries some elite households had stills for making medical waters, which were used to combat indigestion and low spirits.

What is distillation?
Wellcome, WMS 4759, f. 2r.

The manuscript is approximately 500 pages, and the majority of the pages contain printed text with handwritten additions scribbled in the margins, between figures, and overtop of text. The remaining recipes were recorded on the blank pages added at the end of the book. Rebecca’s additions included culinary recipes, housekeeping notes, and a standard collection of medicinal recipes like ‘For a Feaverish Disorder in Children or others’, which involved a poultice of tobacco and currants wrapped on the wrists (f. 28v.). This simple recipe is juxtaposed beside a detailed figure of a distillation furnace and signifies that, through the act of recording recipes, Rebecca Tallamy engaged with technical instructions on distillation. Moreover, some of her recipes were traditional cordial waters prepared via distillation. I should note it is likely that Rebecca copied at least some of her material from other sources simply because there are many duplicate recipes. There are also a number of copied botanical descriptions at the end of the manuscript resembling those found in Nicholas Culpeper’s ‘The English Physician’. Far from being purely a collection of recipes, Rebecca Tallamy’s book encompasses several genres and text types, demonstrating the scope of natural knowledge used in the home.

Distillation Furnace
Wellcome, WMS 4759, f. 28v.

The combination of manuscript and print within one material source highlights the active transmission of knowledge between textul media as well as the value placed on technical guides as sources of household information. Rebecca’s choice to record her recipes on the pages of an alchemical text shows that women were exposed to and could own ‘scientific’ and technical guides, but also indicates her interest in distillation and, more broadly, the continued presence of distillation in the household. Even by the eighteenth century, alchemy had a place in domestic knowledge.