Gymnastics reborn
De Arte Gymnastica (Of the art of gymnastics), by Girolamo Mercuriale. Printed in Florence by Leo S. Olschki, 2008. Lower Library, L.37.52
After being forgotten for centuries gymnastics came back to its former glory in the Renaissance when, thanks to a renewed interest for antiquity, authors like Méndez, Gazi, Fuchs and Mercuriale brought forward the idea that an active lifestyle could improve general health.1
Girolamo Mercuriale (1530–1606) was an Italian physician, educated in Bologna, Padua and Venice. Once he received his doctorate he kept studying ancient Greek and Roman medicine, focusing on its attitude towards diet, exercise and hygiene.
The first publication of his work De Arte Gymnastica in 1569 was an instant success and a second illustrated edition, with several additions, was published in 1573. It is considered to be ‘the first comprehensive examination of exercise and athletics in the post-Classical world’.2
The goal of Mercuriale was to give gymnastics its former importance and expand its use in everyday medicine to maintain and improve health.
De Arte Gymnastica, in imitation of one of its models, Galen’s On the Preservation of Health, is divided into six books. It classifies gymnastics according to its effects on the body and divides all exercises into three groups: regular (which includes medical use), military and athletic.
It describes dancing, ball games, walking, running, jumping, discus, dumbbell, throwing, singing, horseback riding, swimming, wrestling, boxing, and even fishing and hunting. Each form is described with its advantages.3
Strangely enough Mercuriale was hostile to athletics and sport competitions like the Olympic Games. Despite writing a whole chapter about the athletes’ habits of training, eating and competing, he believed, like Galen, that athletes were ‘overconcerned with beefing-up their bodies and gaining greater strength, and produced minds and senses that were dull, torpid and slow’ and that they ‘habitually competed and exposed their lives to myriad kinds of death for the sake of a prize’.4
Mercuriale’s work was translated into Italian for the first time in 1960 for the Olympiad in Rome, and into English in 2008 for the fourth centenary of Mercuriale’s death and the Beijing Olympic Games. Since our scholarly edition is in copyright, we gratefully reproduce public domain images from a 1587 edition by the .
Roads to victory << Gymnastics reborn >> Health in our hands
- Ioan Emanuel Stavarache et al., , Medicine and Pharmacy Reports 95, no. 4 (2022): 478.
- Hugh M. Lee, ‘The Role of Physicians (Galen, Mercuriale and Brookes) in the History of Greek Sport and the Olympic Revival’, in , eds. Donald Lateiner, Barbara K. Gold and Judith Perkins (New York: Routledge, 2013), 198.
- Philippe Campillo and Daniel Caballero, , Hektoen International (blog), 15 December 2020.
- Girolamo Mercuriale, De Arte Gymnastica (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2008), 177.
