In Christi nomine amen; Universis et singulis praesens hoc publicum doctoratus privilegium inspecturis, lecturis, vel audituris nos Albertus Ulich... [Manuscript diploma for Joseph Pateani]

[Venice, 10 March 1742]

[4] leaves (the last blank) + wax seal in case | 232 x 165 mm + 75 mm round seal box

A five-page parchment university diploma for one Joseph Pateani of Tarvisio, here honored by the medical college in Venice as a new Doctor of Medicine and Philosophy. It's a typically opulent example of the genre as produced for students in northern Italy, saturated with gold ink, and opening with a full-page shield in shades of red, green, and blue, ready for the owner's coat of arms (never applied). Six witnesses have signed their names at end. ¶ Venice's medical college gathered on the campus of the Church of San Giacomo dell'Orio (here called Jacobus de Luprio), home to the city's anatomy theater since 1507. Our diploma is strikingly similar to a 1765 diploma produced for the same occasion, and surely many others. That one belonged to pioneering physician Sir William Osler, who collected nearly a dozen of these: "diplomas in the form of a small quarto book, with the special style of decoration seen in these, and in a handsome binding seem to have been peculiar to Venice (where they were granted by the College of Physicians and by the Company of Aromatarii of Apothecaries) and the universities of Northern Italy, viz., Padua, Pisa, Pavia, Perugia, and others...the seals are nearly always wanting." Osler further remarked on these in a letter to librarian Charles Sayle at Cambridge University: "of course the North Italian form is attractive and appears to be the most common." ¶ A staple of academic material culture, here in peak form.

PROVENANCE: Old inscription on front fly-leaf (Gasparini[?] N 2). To us from a private American collection, where it had been since at least 1980.

CONDITION: Loosely laid into its contemporary binding of mottled leather, tooled in gold, with a round box containing the (broken) wax seal bound to match and still tethered to the binding. Handwritten in black and gold ink on parchment, all but the first and last page with a gold frame. ¶ The manuscript resewn, preserving some old thread, with a modern endsheet bifolium added; some scattered minor staining to the parchment, and the original endsheet darkened at the edges (reacting to the glue from the turn-ins). Binding extremities just gently worn, and the leather starting to peel away from the bottom of the seal box. Wax seal in half a dozen pieces, and still more pieces presumably lost.

REFERENCES: Jean Cameron, "Sir William Osler and the McGill Medical Library," Sir William Osler Memorial Number (July 1920), p. 88 (cited above, quoting Osler); Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler (1925), p. 571 (cited above, to Sayle); Maria Böhmer, The Man who Crucified Himself: Readings of a Medical Case in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2019), p. 60n46 (positioning the medical college and theater "on the campo S. Giacomo dell'Orio"); Margaret Doody, Tropic of Venice (2007), p. 164 (for the 1507 founding of the theater, "an area still marked by the name Corte dell'Anatomia")

Item #855