Albrecht Meyer also known as Albertus Meyer in Latinised form, was a botanical illustrator noted for his more than 500 plant images in Leonhart Fuchs's epic pre-Linnean publication of 1542, De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes , published in Latin and Greek, and almost immediately translated into German. At the time it was regarded as one of the most beautifully illustrated books on plants and a jewel in the crown of German Renaissance.
Meyer collaborated with the painter Heinricus Füllmaurer and the engraver Veit Rudolph Speckle (d.12 December 1550 Straßburg) in producing the woodcuts for the book, which, unusually for its time, named the contributing artists and included their portraits. Fuchs, whose herbal had been inspired by Brunfels's work "Herbarum vivae imagines" which had appeared twelve years earlier, praised the illustrations as having been carried out with 'great diligence and artifice', and went on to state that 'shading and other less crucial things with which painters sometimes strive for artistic glory' had been shunned in order to make the images truer to nature. The book appeared in both coloured and uncoloured versions. Fuchs planned for the illustrations to be coloured and did not want their appearance disfigured by excessive shading. Although some copies of the work were issued as coloured, many were worked on after publication. The text, like that of Brunfels', was taken from ancient authors. [1] [2] "De Historia" continued a long tradition of herbals - books describing the medicinal uses of plants - but broke with tradition by using lifelike illustrations rather than the schematic and often fanciful representations.
The remarkably detailed woodcuts include the first published images of over 100 new plants from the Americas, such as pumpkin, marigold, maize, squash, chili peppers and tobacco – native to Mexico and brought to Europe from the New World. Leonhart Fuchs was a child prodigy, matriculating from Erfurt University by the age of twelve, and then obtaining a degree in medicine at Ingolstadt. He rendered outstanding medical service during the 1529 Sweating Sickness plague. The illustrations were drawn from nature by Albert Meyer, using mature plants which Fuchs often provided from his garden in Tübingen. The accuracy of the plates which show the flowers, roots and the plant habit, led to its being used as a reference work by European physicians and many famous herbaria of the sixteenth century, notably that of Dodoens. William Morris, the English artist and designer, possessed a copy of the book and some of his designs drew inspiration from the plates. [3]
The "Historia" was published in a German language folio edition a year after the original. The folio editions were bulky and difficult to use, and smaller, pocket editions soon appeared. During Fuchs' lifetime the book went through thirty-nine imprints in Latin, German, French, Spanish and Dutch. The woodblocks were used and copied for a further three hundred years. Fuchs laboured on a greatly expanded version of the work for the final twenty-four years of his life. The manuscript of this work, which was never published, is preserved in the Austrian National Library and is dubbed the 'Vienna Codex'. [4]
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William TurnerMA was an English divine and reformer, a physician and a natural historian. He has been called "The father of English botany." He studied medicine in Italy, and was a friend of the great Swiss naturalist, Conrad Gessner. He was an early herbalist and ornithologist, and it is in these fields that the most interest lies today. He is known as being one of the first "parson-naturalists" in England.
John Gerard was an English herbalist with a large garden in Holborn, now part of London. His 1,484-page illustrated Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, first published in 1597, became a popular gardening and herbal book in English in the 17th century. Except for some added plants from his own garden and from North America, Gerard's Herbal is largely a plagiarized English translation of Rembert Dodoens's 1554 herbal, itself highly popular in Dutch, Latin, French and other English translations. Gerard's Herball drawings of plants and the printer's woodcuts are mainly derived from Continental European sources, but there is an original title page with a copperplate engraving by William Rogers. Two decades after Gerard's death, the book was corrected and expanded to about 1,700 pages.
Leonhart Fuchs, sometimes spelled Leonhard Fuchs, was a German physician and botanist. His chief notability is as the author of a large book about plants and their uses as medicines, a herbal, which was first published in 1542 in Latin. It has about 500 accurate and detailed drawings of plants, which were printed from woodcuts. The drawings are the book's most notable advance on its predecessors. Although drawings had been used in other herbal books, Fuchs' book proved and emphasized high-quality drawings as the most telling way to specify what a plant name stands for.
A herbal is a book containing the names and descriptions of plants, usually with information on their medicinal, tonic, culinary, toxic, hallucinatory, aromatic, or magical powers, and the legends associated with them. A herbal may also classify the plants it describes, may give recipes for herbal extracts, tinctures, or potions, and sometimes include mineral and animal medicaments in addition to those obtained from plants. Herbals were often illustrated to assist plant identification.
Charles de l'Écluse,L'Escluse, or Carolus Clusius, seigneur de Watènes, was an Artois doctor and pioneering botanist, perhaps the most influential of all 16th-century scientific horticulturists.
Rembert Dodoens was a Flemish physician and botanist, also known under his Latinized name Rembertus Dodonaeus. He has been called the father of botany. The standard author abbreviation Dodoens is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Mathias de l'Obel, Mathias de Lobel or Matthaeus Lobelius was a Flemish physician and plant enthusiast who was born in Lille, Flanders, in what is now Hauts-de-France, France, and died at Highgate, London, England. He studied at the University of Montpellier and practiced medicine in the low countries and England, including positions as personal physicians to two monarchs. A member of the sixteenth-century Flemish School of Botany, he wrote a series of major treatises on plants in both Latin and Dutch. He was the first botanist to appreciate the distinction between monocotyledons and dicotyledons. The Lobelia plant is named after him.
The Nuremberg Chronicle is an illustrated encyclopedia consisting of world historical accounts, as well as accounts told through biblical paraphrase. Subjects include human history in relation to the Bible, illustrated mythological creatures, and the histories of important Christian and secular cities from antiquity. Finished in 1493, it was originally written in Latin by Hartmann Schedel, and a German version was translated by Georg Alt. It is one of the best-documented early printed books – an incunabulum – and one of the first to successfully integrate illustrations and text.
This article lists notable events in the history of botany in Britain.
Otto Brunfels was a German theologian and botanist. Carl von Linné listed him among the "Fathers of Botany".
Erhard Reuwich was a Dutch artist, as a designer of woodcuts, and a printer, who came from Utrecht but then worked in Mainz. His dates and places of birth and death are unknown, but he was active in the 1480s.
Elizabeth Blackwell was a Scottish botanical illustrator and author who was best known as both the artist and engraver for the plates of "A Curious Herbal", published between 1737 and 1739. The book illustrated medicinal plants, and was designed as a reference work for the use of physicians and apothecaries.
Hortus Eystettensis is the short title of a codex produced by Basilius Besler, a Nuremberg apothecary and botanist, in 1613 describing the plants of the garden of the Prince-Bishop of Eichstätt in Bavaria. The Renaissance style garden was located at the bishop's palace at the Willibaldsburg and was created over eight terraces overlooking the city of Eichstätt. It was the first botanical garden in germany, and the only one outside of Italy. The bishop had brought plants from all over the world for his garden, and it was thought that it contained examples of all of the shrubs and flowering plants known to horticulturalists at the time.
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The year 1542 in science and technology included a number of events, some of which are listed here.
De historia stirpium commentarii insignes is a book by Leonhart Fuchs on herbal plants published in Basel in 1542. The work covers about 497 plants and has over 500 woodcut illustrations. Over 100 of the plants in the book were first descriptions.
Theophrastus's Enquiry into Plants or Historia Plantarum was, along with his mentor Aristotle's History of Animals, Pliny the Elder's Natural History and Dioscorides's De materia medica, one of the most important books of natural history written in ancient times, and like them it was influential in the Renaissance. Theophrastus looks at plant structure, reproduction and growth; the varieties of plant around the world; wood; wild and cultivated plants; and their uses. Book 9 in particular, on the medicinal uses of plants, is one of the first herbals, describing juices, gums and resins extracted from plants, and how to gather them.
Gherardo Cibo also known by the alias of Ulisse Severini da Cingoli was an artist and a herbalist from Italy. The herbarium that he began in 1532 is the oldest surviving example of the method invented in Italy by his contemporaries and is preserved in Rome. His illustrations of plants show plants in the foreground with landscapes and details of people and places in the background.
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