A native of Piacenza, Giorgio Valla was a fifteenth-century Italian humanist, translator, philologist and mathematician. He had great interest in ancient Greek and Latin literature, but chiefly focused on Greek scientific texts (which he translated into Latin) lecturing in mathematics, physics, and classical languages at the Universities of Pavia and Venice.

The De expetendis et fugiendis rebus opus (‘a work about things to pursue and to avoid’) was his crowning achievement: an enormous encyclopaedic work concerning arithmetic, geometry, astrology, physiology, and medicine, as well as economics, politics, moral philosophy, poetry, music, rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar. Much of the content is drawn from Valla’s knowledge of Greek texts, and in some cases preserves the essence of works that are otherwise now lost to us. Contemporary mathematicians such as Copernicus were influenced by it, and it is believed that Leonardo da Vinci had a copy of this work in his private library.

This is a copy of the first edition, printed in Venice by Aldus Manutius a year after Valla’s death.