Bryn Mawr College Library Special Collections holds a large number of illustrated botanical books printed before 1900, ranging from Renaissance medicinal guides and Enlightenment taxonomic treatises to the garden books and field guides popular among hobbyists and amateur botanists of the nineteenth century. The illustrations in these books cover the full spectrum of printing techniques, from descriptive woodcuts intended to aid in plant identification to colorful lithographs of artfully arranged flowers.
The
earliest post-classical botanical illustrations are found in herbals,
which identify plants and their practical, usually medicinal, uses.
Authors of early herbals follow the authority of classical writers in
both text and illustration, and most illustrators worked not from
life but from drawings in other herbals. The Hortus
Sanitatis (ca. 1500) was one of the earliest printed herbals
in Europe and provided images for many subsequent herbals. The
unreliable, derivative illustrations were usually of little practical
use to the reader and many herbals forego illustrations altogether.
The copying and recopying of classically derived texts and
illustrations became especially problematic when authors and
illustrators attempted to use descriptions of Mediterranean plants to
describe Northern European plants, and were further complicated by
the introduction of new specimens from abroad. Problems such as these
would become the catalysts for the creation of modern botanical
classification systems in the eighteenth century.
The Herbarum Vivae Eicones (1530-36), by Otto Brunfels (1488-1534), was an important herbal in the development toward the modern scientific study of plants because of its innovative illustrator, Hans Weiditz (fl. 1516-1536?). Weiditz, a pupil of Albrecht Dürer, created exactingly faithful images of the real plant specimens he studied. The influential herbalist Leonhart Fuchs (1501-1566) also studied plant specimens to create useful and accurate drawings in his De Historia Stirpium (1545). Fuchs' illustrators created life-sized, idealized images of plants and included different life cycle stages so that readers could easily match a real specimen with its printed description.
Another
early type of illustrated botanical book is the florilegium of the
early seventeenth century. In the medieval period, the term
"florilegia" had referred to collections of excerpts from the Bible
or from sermons, the metaphorical flowers of Christian knowledge. By
the seventeenth century a florilegium instead contained visual
depictions of literal flowers and was more closely related to the
emerging practice of horticulture than to theology. During this
period, flowering plants began to be valued more for their beauty
than for their practical use, and gardens became symbols of wealth
and status. A florilegium could catalogue the collection of flowers
in a specific garden or include horticultural information on the
plants depicted, as in the Hortus
Floridus (1614) by Crispin de Passe the Younger
(1597/98-after 1670). Florilegia also functioned as pattern books for
designers of formal gardens. In later florilegia, the illustration of
the plant became more important than the text describing it, which
was sometimes reduced to a simple caption.
The
systematic study of plants that became the modern science of botany
developed largely as the result of European exploration. Images
recorded by the artists who accompanied colonization and exploration
voyages from the mid-sixteenth century, and specimens collected on
later voyages, forced Europeans to realize plants existed which could
not be placed into existing schemes of knowledge. These plants were
not described by previous writers, nor were their medicinal
properties known, so they could not be placed into any known category
with certainty. Books about plants began to be organized according to
shared physical characteristics rather than shared uses, as in the
herbal, or shared season of flowering, as in the florilegium.
Although there had been earlier attempts at botanical classification
based on physical characteristics, most notably by Joseph Pitton de
Tournefort (1656-1708) in his Institutiones
Rei Herbariae (1700), the system devised by Carl Linneaus
(1707-1778) became the dominant system. Linneaus' method, which
initiated the system of binomial nomenclature still in use today, was
based on the description and classification of the reproductive
organs. His Hortus Cliffortianus (1738) was the first book to include
details of floral dissection, crucial for this method of plant
identification. This new emphasis on the faithful depiction of the
flower gave rise to decorative but scientifically accurate flower
painters, perhaps the most famous of whom is Pierre Joseph
Redouté (1759-1840) (Les
Roses, 1824).
In
many popular eighteenth and nineteenth century horticultural books,
catalogs and magazines, plants are grouped according to color, as
they would be placed in a floral arrangement, garden or exhibition.
The illustrations in publications such as the journal The
Florist and Pomologist (1854-1859) might be considered heirs
to the tradition of the florilegia, since they were not intended to
aid in scientific classification but existed for more decorative
purposes. Structural details are suppressed and the flowers, whether
individual or grouped into a bouquet, are idealized, flattened and
frequently isolated from the rest of the plant. Victorian flower
books, collections of sentimental poetry and anecdotal information
related to the plants illustrated in their pages, are a genre
associated with the popularity of gardening and flowers in this
period but are not included in this census unless they are very early
examples, such as Robert John Thornton's Temple of Flora
(1799).
Yet another later genre which included botanical illustrations are field guides produced to aid amateur botanists in identifying plant specimens. Some of these, like the early Flora Danicae (1761) by Georg Christian Oeder (1728-1791), were dedicated to identifying the flora of a specific region. The illustrations contained in these books were not only useful, but beautiful as well.
Bryn Mawr College Library Special Collections holds over one hundred illustrated botanical books. Many of these books were donated to the College by alumnae, including an especially generous donation from the family of Ethelinda Schaefer Castle, Class of 1908. The Michaelis Collection, donated by J. Philip Gibbs, Jr., also includes many illustrated botanical books.
Bridson, Gavin D. R and James J. White. Plant, Animal and Anatomical Illustration in Art and Science: a Bibliographical Guide from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day. Winchester: St Paul's Bibliographies in association with Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation; Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1990.
Blunt, Wilfrid and William T. Stearn. The Art of Botanical Illustration. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club in association with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1994.
Saunders, Gill. Picturing Plants: An Analytical History of Botanical Illustration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
by Claire E. Pingel
Web implementation: Marianne Hansen
(mhansen@brynmawr.edu)
Last updated June 19, 2001.