CANEVARI, DEMETRIO. - Italian scholar, physician, philosopher and bibliophile, b. in Genoa on 9 March 1559, d. in Rome on 22 Sept. 1625. He took minor orders in his homeland between 1580 and 1584, then practiced medicine in Rome for fourteen years, receiving from Pope Urban VII the title of pontifical protophysician (archiater). Of his rich library the legal section, left as an inheritance to his nephew Gian Luigi, was completely dispersed; the philosophical and medical section, rich in more than 5000 volumes, diminished by a theft, is today at the Opera pia del sussidio C., founded by testamentary disposition of the scholar.
The C. owes his fame less to his writings on medicine than to the erroneous opinion that a particular type of binding came from his library, highly prized among bibliophiles, in morocco of various colors, more often red, with covers decorated with fillets and ornaments full of the Aldine type; the center is dominated by a cameo with the figure of Apollo on a chariot and whipping the horses (one white and one black) which rear up toward a cliff on whose summit Pegasus stands out. Around the medallion one reads the motto ΟΡΘΟΣ ΚΑΙ ΜΗ ΛΟΞΙΩΣ. The known examples number more than a hundred, in 8vo, in 4to, and in folio; the most conspicuous nucleus is found at the library of the Oratorian fathers of Naples. G. Fumagalli was the first to demonstrate that the attribution of such bindings to the C. was false and that they are of Roman workmanship and must be ascribed to the first half of the 16th century; G. D. Hobson, taking up Fumagalli's thesis, maintained the hypothesis that they were made for the library of Pier Luigi Farnese.
Bibliography4 works
Alessandro Pratesi