Frontispiece

A man sits at a high desk with books, people wait on the floor before him.

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The frontispiece features the commentator, translator, and philologist Petrus de Montagnana. He is portrayed as a prototypical Humanist, a man of books, rather than as a physician. Let’s note, however, that the books in his surroundings are medical and include a dozen captioned volumes calling forth the physician’s great authorities.

In the second and more recognizable reference to medicine which may remind us of today’s doctor’s office: two persons have been waiting to exhaustion. They, and the boy who has just entered, may not even be patients but messengers who have brought, in the prominently displayed baskets, the urines of others for examination.

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