Mattioli was born in Siena to physician Francesco and his wife Lucrezia Buoninsegna. Although belonging to the city elite, the family was economically stressed, with thirteen children. His early studies are unknown but he may have studied in Venice, Siena, and Padua before he received his MD at the
University of Padua in 1523, and subsequently practiced the profession in Siena,
Rome,
Trento and
Gorizia, becoming personal physician of
Ferdinand II, Archduke of Further Austria in
Prague and
Ambras Castle, and of
Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor in
Vienna. In 1527 he moved to Trent in the Val di Non. In 1528 he was a court physician for Bernardo Cles and he then married a woman named Elizabeth and they had a son. In 1539 Cardinal Cles died and the position was taken by Bishop Cristoforo Madruzzo who dismissed Mattioli. In 1542 he moved to
Gorizia where he began to work on the
De Materia Medica of
Dioscorides which was eventually published in Italian in 1544 by Nicolò de Bascarini in Venice. A careful student of
botany, he described 100 new plants and coordinated the
medical botany of his time in his
Discorsi ("Commentaries"). There were several later editions, also in Italian. In 1554 the first edition of the
Commentarii appeared in
Latin, accompanied by a Latin translation of Dioscorides' work that differed only little from the Latin translation that
Jean Ruel had published in 1516, and that had served as the basis for Mattioli's Italian translation. The
Commentarii were translated into
French (Lyon, 1561),
Czech (Prague, 1562), and
German (Prague, 1563). In addition to identifying the plants originally described by Dioscorides, Mattioli added descriptions of some plants not in Dioscorides and not of any known medical use, thus marking a transition from the study of plants as a field of medicine to a study of interest in its own right. In addition, the
woodcuts in Mattioli's work were of a high standard, allowing recognition of the plant even when the text was obscure. A noteworthy inclusion is an early variety of
tomato, the first documented example of the vegetable being grown and eaten in
Europe. In 1703
Charles Plumier named a plant genus
Matthiola in honor of Mattioli. This name was adopted by
Linnaeus in 1753. The genus was later placed in the plant family
Rubiaceae. In 1812
William Townsend Aiton named a plant genus
Mathiola, also in honor of Mattioli. This genus is now placed in the
Brassicaceae. Aiton's name was later conserved against the earlier name of Linnaeus, with the conserved spelling
Matthiola. Mattioli described Dioscorides' use of mercury for curing syphilis. He also described the first case of
cat allergy. His patient was so sensitive to cats that if he was sent into a room with a cat he reacted with agitation, sweating and pallor. Mattioli argued against
Fracastoro's theory of fossils, as well as against his own conclusions, as described as follows in
Charles Lyell's
Principles of Geology: The system of scholastic disputations encouraged in the Universities of the middle ages had unfortunately trained men to habits of indefinite argumentation, and they often preferred absurd and extravagant propositions, because greater skill was required to maintain them; the end and object of such intellectual combats being victory and not truth. ...Andrea Mattioli, for instance, an eminent botanist, the illustrator of
Dioscorides, embraced the notion of
Agricola, a German miner, that a certain 'materia pinguis' or 'fatty matter,' set into fermentation by heat, gave birth to fossil organic shapes. Yet Mattioli had come to the conclusion, from his own observations, that porous bodies, such as bones and shells, might be converted into stone, as being permeable to what he termed the 'lapidifying juice. ==Legacy==