Siliceo, Ottaviano (15.. – 15..?)

« Ottaviano Siliceo was born in Troia in the province of Foggia, Puglia (Apulia, southern Italy). There is hardly any further information available on him. In 1598 his book Scuola de’cavalieri, a treatise on the proportions, properties, training, nursing and breeding of (military) horses, was published in Orvieto.
As by his own admission (p. 17) he had participated in the battle of Pavia in 1525 he must have been born in the first decade of the 16th century; at any rate he died before the publication of the present book (1598), as it was edited by his nephew Giovanni Battista Siliceo. Siliceo’s work, which circulated in manuscript copies in Italy and France in the second half of the 16th century before it was published in 1598, can be linked to the work of Giovan Battista Pignatelli, who may have been his master. It is certain that Siliceo had also been a pupil of the famous horse trainer Giovan Battista Ferraro : on p. 39 of his book, Siliceo himself writes that Ferraro was his first master. On p. 153 he refers to a stay in Germany where he participated in the battle of Mühlberg in 1546. Siliceo’s book was never translated into any other language. » Dejager (2014)