Tacuinum Sanitatis: An Early Renaissance Guide to Health

by Alixe Bovey

This book is a complete catalogue and commentary on a remarkable series of 130 colored drawings executed in North Italy, almost certainly Padua, in the 1450s by a group of artists in the circle of Andrea Mantegna. The drawings illustrate subjects from the Tacuinum Sanitatis or Table of Health. Subjects touched on include medicine, sport, farming, animal husbandry, natural history, shopping, cooking and manufacturing – constituting an extraordinary record of everyday life (and life style) in early Renaissance Italy. This manuscript is one of four known series of the kind, and the only one not published.

64 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 2005

About the author

Alixe Bovey FSA (born 1950) is a Canadian medieval art historian and Dean and Deputy Director at the Courtauld Institute of Art, a college of the University of London. Her research has been chiefly concerned with pictorial narratives and their cultural and literary context. She has also written on medieval monsters.

In 2008, Bovey presented the BBC television series In Search of Medieval Britain, in which she retraced a series of journeys through Britain in the Middle Ages using the Gough Map.