ABSTRACT
Francesca Marchetti investigates the diffusion and use of medical illustrated manuscripts in late Palaiologan Constantinople, and their reception in sixteenth-century Italy. The author analyses the complex process of appropriation of illustrations belonging to the ancient Greek medical heritage, that became popular among Byzantine scholars and physicians in the second half of the fifteenth century. Subsequently they also attracted the interest of western humanists, and that resulted in the creation of new, scientifically reliable images, updated to the aesthetic criteria of the time.
