Giovanni Dondi Dell'Orologio - Written Works

Written Works

Dondi wrote on a wide range of subjects. His most celebrated work is the Tractatus astrarii or Planetarium, which describes the Astrarium. It is the earliest surviving description of its kind; the Albion of Richard of Wallingford predates it, but is lost. In the introduction, Dondi writes that his machine was built in accordance with the 13th-century Theorica planetarum of Campano di Novara, and to demonstrate the validity of the descriptions of the motion of heavenly bodies of Aristotle and Avicenna. The Tractatus survives in twelve manuscript sources. The autograph in the Biblioteca Capitolare of Padua (MS. D39) and a copy of it, also in Padua, are certainly the work of Dondi. The other sources are rewritten versions of the autograph, to which Dondi's contribution is as yet unclear. The autograph manuscript was published in 1987 in a critical edition with colour facsimile and French translation by Poulle as the first volume of the Opera omnia of Jacopo and Giovanni Dondi.

Of the twenty-nine lectures on medical topics, the Sermones and Colationes, delivered between 1356 and 1388, only the titles survive, with the exception of one, the Sermo in conventu magistri Iohannis ab Aquila in medicina 1367 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Lat. 9637), and some passages from that in Bologna in the same year cited by Francesco Scipione Dondi dall'Orologio.

The twenty-four Quaestiones super libris Tegni, dating from about 1356, are preserved in a manuscript begun in 1370 by Tommaso da Crema and now in the Biblioteca Palatina of Parma (Parmense 1065); Tegne was the mediaeval name for the summary by Galenus of the works of Hippocrates. The Quaestiones are to date unpublished, as are Dondi's Experimenta or medical prescriptions, conserved in a manuscript of Iohannes de Livonia dated 1453 and now in the Biblioteca Civica of Padua (C.M. 172).

Another lost work, a tractatulum Galieni occultam seriem explicantem in distinctione dispositionum corporum humanorum, quorum in libro Microtegni sub brevitate restrinxit reales differentias inter illas, preterquani in paucis assignatum, was probably written at Pavia during the plague of 1383, and may have discussed the De complexionibus of Galenus.

The short practical treatise on the avoidance of plague, De modo vivendi tempore pestilentiali, was written shortly afterwards; it was published, in Italian, by Zambrini in 1866,and by Sudhoff in 1911.

In natural science, Dondi wrote De fontibus calidis agri Patavini, dedicated to his friend Iacopino da Angarano, and preserved in autograph manuscript in the Biblioteca del Seminario of Padua (ms. 358) and in a copy in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (H 107 sup.). Together with the Tractatus de causa salsedinis aquarum et modo conficiendi sal artificiale ex aquis Thermalibus Euganeis by his father Jacopo, it was published by Tommaso Giunti in De balneis omnia quae extant apud Graecos, Latinos et Arabas in 1553.

A manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (Ms. lat. XIV 223 (4340)), though not in Dondi's hand, contains both his own literary work and selections copied from that of others. It contains his Iter Romanum, which describes the Roman monuments of Rimini and Rome in a scientific manner, with measurements and transcriptions of inscriptions, and was published by Rossi in 1888; his Epistolario of twenty-eight letters, of which the two to Petrarch have attracted particular attention; and his Rime, consisting of forty-two sonnets, five madrigals and three ballate, published by Medin in 1895 and Daniele in 1990.

Dondi's quaedani apostillae or notes on a letter of Seneca, mentioned in a manuscript of Gasparino Barzizza from 1411, have not been traced.