Botanical illustration
Botanical illustration is the art of depicting the form, color, and details of plant species. They are generally meant to be scientifically descriptive about subjects depicted and are often found printed alongside a botanical description in books, magazines, and other media. Some are sold as artworks. Often composed by a botanical illustrator in consultation with a scientific author, their creation requires an understanding of plant morphology and access to specimens and references.
Many illustrations are in watercolour, but may also be in oils, ink, or pencil, or a combination of these and other media. The image may be life-size or not, though at times a scale is shown, and may show the life cycle and/or habitat of the plant and its neighbors, the upper and reverse sides of leaves, and details of flowers, bud, seed and root system.
The fragility of dried or otherwise preserved specimens, and restrictions or impracticalities of transport, saw illustrations used as valuable visual references for taxonomists. In particular, minute plants or other botanical specimens only visible under a microscope were often identified through illustrations. To that end, botanical illustrations used to be generally accepted as types for attribution of a botanical name to a taxon. However, current guidelines state that on or after 1 January 2007, the type must be a specimen 'except where there are technical difficulties of specimen preservation or if it is impossible to preserve a specimen that would show the features attributed to the taxon by the author of the name.' .
History
Up to the 15th century
Early herbals and pharmacopoeia of many cultures include illustrations of plants, as in Ibn al-Baytar's Compendium on Simple Medicaments and Foods. Botanical illustrations in such texts were often created to assist with identification of a species for some medicinal purpose. The earliest surviving illustrated botanical work is the Vienna Dioscurides. It is a copy of Dioscorides's De Materia Medica, and was made in the year 512 for Juliana Anicia, daughter of the former Western Roman Emperor Olybrius. The illustrations did not accurately describe the plants, which was potentially hazardous to medicinal preparations.The oldest surviving manuscript of the 4th-century Pseudo-Apuleius Herbarius, dates back to the 6th century. It includes stylized plant illustrations and their medicinal uses. Among the first people in Europe to take an interest in plants were monks and nuns, and physicians. Medicinal herbs were grown in monastic gardens and used for self-care and for tending to the sick in local communities. Hildegard von Bingen even wrote about natural medicine and cures in Causae et Curae and Physica. Matthaeus Platearius, a Salerno physician, is credited with the "" manuscript, expanded over time into the Treatise on Herbs, containing 500-900 entries depending on version. Later illustrated versions, called Secreta Salernitana, produced from the 14th century onwards influenced later herbals, such as Le Grant Herbier, and its translation, the Grete Herball, the first illustrated herbal in English. The illustrations were in fact copies of a series of woodcuts which first appeared in an earlier German herbal, and the same woodcut could be used to represent several plants.
Another notable medical and botanical manuscript is the "Tacuinum Sanitatis", derived from the Taqwīm aṣ Ṣiḥḥa, an 11th-century Arabic medical text by Ibn Butlan, a physician from Baghdad. The text was translated into Latin in the mid-13th century. It was profusely illustrated and widely circulated in Europe, especially in the 14th and 15th centuries. Four handsomely illustrated complete late 14th-century manuscripts of the Tacuinum, all produced in Lombardy, survive, including one in Paris. The Tacuinum was first printed in 1531.
There are many perfectly identifiable flowers in books like The Book of Hours by the Master of Flowers or Jean Bourdichon's Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany, with 337 plants from the Queen's garden, captioned in Latin and French. These artists' objective was, though, purely artistic.
At the end of the 16th century, an illustrated manuscript such as the Erbario Carrarese, revealed the increased importance attached to plant observation. It is an Italian translation of a Latin translation of the Carrara Herbarium, a medical treatise likely written in Arabic by Serapion the Younger at the end of the 12th century, The Book of Simple Medicaments.
made great strides from the end of the 15th century onwards. 's approach was scientific. Like Bourdichon, he was a miniature painter but he illustrated a book written by a physician and scholar from Conegliano, Nicolò Roccabonella, the Liber de Simplicibus, between 1415 and 1449.
Printed herbals appeared in 1475 ; in 1485 Gart der Gesundheit, by Johannes de Cuba, was published in Mainz: it is the first printed book on natural history.
Sixteenth century
In the 15th and 16th centuries, botany developed as a scientific discipline distinct from herbalism and medicine, although it continued to contribute to both. Several factors contributed to the development and progress of botany during these centuries: the evolution from miniature painting or woodblock printing to more modern techniques; the invention of the printing press, which facilitated the widespread dissemination of botanical knowledge; the advent of paper for the preparation of herbariums; and the development of botanical gardens, which allowed for the cultivation, observation, and study of plants from diverse regions. These developments were closely tied to advancements in navigation and exploration, which led to botanical expeditions that introduced numerous previously unknown species to Europe. As explorers and botanists traveled to new lands, they collected plants and expanded both the scope of botanical knowledge and the range of plants available. Together, these factors significantly increased the number of known plant species and facilitated the global exchange of local and regional botanical knowledge. During this period, Latin remained the universal language of science, ensuring that botanical discoveries could be shared and understood across national and linguistic boundaries.Christian Egenolff attached great importance to the illustrations included in the books he published: Herbarum, arborum, fruticum, frumentorum ac leguminem features 800 woodcuts of plants and animals. Some of the woodcuts used were engraved by Sebald Beham, Heinrich Steiner and Heinrich Köbel while others were reproduced from Otto Brunfels and engraver Hans Weiditz 's Herbarium vivae icones, which prompted Johannes Schott, the printer, to take legal action against him.
From 1530 onwards and Contrafayt Kräuterbuch.
File:Add 22332 f85r.jpg|thumb|Paeony by Gherardo Cibo in Mattioli's Dioscorides illustrated by Cibo, f. 85r
In 1533 the first chair of botany in Europe was established in Padua. Luca Ghini, an Italian physician and botanist, founded the Orto botanico di Pisa in 1544 with the support of Cosimo I de' Medici and published his first herbarium that same year. He is credited with inventing the herbarium, around 1520 or 1530. His compatriot Ulisse Aldrovandi compiled one of the first floras in the mid-16th century. Jacopo Ligozzi worked for both Ghini and Aldovrandi. Pietro Andrea Mattioli's botanical masterpiece was his Commentarii in libros sex Pedacii Dioscoridis, first published in Italian in 1544 with 500, and later 1,200 engravings. This work made a profound impression on the botanist Gherardo Cibo, who then illustrated some of the plants featured in Mattioli's work in close-up set against a backdrop of a real landscape depicting their natural environment. Many of the illustrations also feature two little botanists collecting specimens of the plant illustrated. The work.
Euricius Cordus, one of the founders of botany in Germany, wrote the Botanologicon and his son, Valerius Cordus, was the author of very important works such as the Historia stirpium libri V, published after his death, in which 502 species are described. Like his father, he relied on systematic observation of many of the same plants described by Pedanius Dioscorides.
The Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner devoted much of his life to the study of botany. He published two works in 1541 and 1542, but the remainder of his botanical writings were not published until the middle of the 18th century. The woodcuts that illustrated them were often reused, depicting plants with their roots, flowers and seeds. According to Christine Velut, "specialists agree in attributing the first illustrated plate of tulips to K. Gesner's De Hortis Germaniae Liber... published in 1561".
Hieronymus Bock developed his own system to classify 700 plants. Bock also seems to have observed the plants for himself, since he includes ecological and distributional observations. His Kreuterbuch von Underscheidt, Würckung und Namen der Kreuter, so in teutschen Landen wachsen, written in German, was illustrated by David Kandel.
The Age of Discovery and the introduction of as yet unknown plant species in Europe sparked a great interest in nature. This led to the accumulation of specimens, their classification, the creation of catalogues, botanical works, and the emergence of scientific illustration. The passion for horticulture created a market for floral still lifes and for more scientific miniatures.
The Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis is an Aztec manuscript describing the medicinal properties of various plants used by the Aztecs. It gives the Nahuatl names of the plants and includes an illustration. The Florentine Codex, an encyclopaedia of the Aztec world dating from the mid 16th century, includes a Nahuatl text, a Spanish text and illustrations. Book 11 is a treatise on natural history. In the 1570s, Francisco Hernández de Toledo embarked on the first scientific mission in the New World, a study of the region's medicinal plants and animals, and brought back thousands of illustrations for which he was assisted by local artists, "s".
It was to the Levant that Pierre Belon undertook extensive scientific travels to study fauna and botany. The work that he published in 1553 includes some illustrations.
Leonhart Fuchs published De historia stirpium commentarii insignes, accompanied by illustrations at least as accurate as those by Hans Weiditz. The drawings are by Albrecht Meyer and the engravings by Veit Rudolph Speckle. Fuchs included ornamental plants and plants brought back from the Americas, and had the whole plants, including roots, flowers and fruits, illustrated from life so that they could be identified. His work was reprinted many times and in several languages. The engravings were also widely reused. The book named the contributing artists and included their portraits.
One way of copying precisely was offered by the Herbarium vivum: images were made by pressing ink-coated objects onto paper, leaving impressions; earlier methods used carbon black from soot. Impressions from dried plant materials could then be painted over in colour, pieces too bulky for pressing could be painted or drawn.
Hieronymus Harder started a Herbarium vivum which reached 12 volumes, starting in 1562. Henrik Bernard Oldenland, a Cape Colony botanist assembled a Herbarium vivum of some 13 volumes at the end of the 17th c. Johann Hieronymus Kniphof's Herbarium Vivum of 1759 comprises some 1,200 botanical illustrations. In 1834 the astronomer John Herschel, faced with a similar problem of exact copying, used a camera lucida to copy the outlines of Cape Colony plants in pencil while his wife later painted the details. There are two illustrations on Wikipedia in Spanish.
The Flemish painter Pieter van der Borcht the Elder was one of the first to work in the new medium of copperplate engraving and etching that came into use after 1564. Woodcuts allowed in-text illustrations, unlike intaglio processes. Van der Borcht began illustrating botanical works in 1565, when the Antwerp printer Christophe Plantin commissioned plates from him for the herbarium of Rembert Dodoens. Further commissions followed for works by Dodoens, Matthias de l'Obel and Carolus Clusius.
Dodoens' Florum, coronariarum odoratarumque nonnullarum herbarum historia published by Plantin offers a description of ornamental flowers with engravings showing the whole plant. One whole chapter is devoted to tulips.
In France, Jacques Daléchamps's Historia generalis plantarum is a compilation of all the botanical knowledge of his time, lavishly illustrated with engravings.
Carolus Clusius, a French-speaking Flemish physician and botanist, created one of the first botanical gardens in Europe, the Hortus botanicus Leiden, and can be considered the world's first mycologist and the founder of horticulture, particularly of the tulip. He was also the first to give truly scientific descriptions of plants. He translated the works of Dodoens. Rariorum plantarum historia is a compilation of works on botany published earlier and has a pioneering mycological study on mushrooms from Central Europe.
Joris Hoefnagel was a Flemish illuminator who belonged to the transitional period between medieval illumination and Renaissance still-life painting. He is known for his accurate representations of fruits, flowers and animals, which were taken as models by many other artists in the following centuries. Hoefnagel is also known to have painted birds while working for the court of Emperor Rudolf II, famous for his cabinet of curiosities. His Amoris Monumentum Matri Charissimae shows a floral arrangement that seems to have been perceived at the precise moment when butterflies, caterpillars and snails appeared. The idea was often taken up again. His Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii contains 48 engravings by Jacob based on studies that seem to have been made from life by Joris.