uwmspeccoll: The Spectacle of Nature: The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs The other week we hig
uwmspeccoll: The Spectacle of Nature: The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs The other week we highlighted the “Three Founders of Botany” in the West: Otto Brunfels, Leonhart Fuchs, and Hieronymus Bock, whose illustrated herbals contributed to botany becoming a new distinct discipline of scientific study in the 16th century. Today we dig a little bit deeper into one of those illustrated herbals, De historia stirpium commentarii insignes, “Notable Commentaries on the History of Plants” written by Leonhart Fuchs and published in 1542 by Michael Isingrin of Basle. There were illustrated herbals prior to the 16th century in both manuscript and early printed form, but often the illustrations would be useless in actual identification of plants because the images were copied so many times over the years. Leonhart Fuchs (1501-1566) was a German physician who championed the observational method of understanding plants. His herbal De historia stirpium was groundbreaking because it featured accurate illustrations drawn from living plants. The Latin herbal included roughly 400 native German plants and 100 foreign plants. Although Fuchs was primarily the author the text, he exercised a great deal of control over the woodcut images created to illustrate his books. Each illustration was based on a living plant, but it included everything throughout its lifecycle, often simultaneously. Most images include roots, stems, flowers, seeds, and fruits. Fuchs also made sure that his artists did not include any erroneous flourishes that may have produced a more pleasing picture but would have been inaccurate for identification. The images are still idealized in the sense that they are perfect specimens that do not have any blemishes that would naturally occur in real life. There are portraits of the artists and engraver included in the herbal. Fuchs makes a point of praising the accuracy of the engraver Veit Specklin. Keep reading -- source link