See also
Look up florilegium in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
In medieval Latin, a florilegium (plural florilegia) was a compilation of excerpts or sententia from other writings and is an offshoot of the commonplacing tradition. The word is from the Latin flos (flower) and legere (to gather): literally a gathering of flowers, or collection of fine extracts from the body of a larger work. It was adapted from the Greek anthologia (ἀνθολογία) "anthology", with the same etymological meaning.
Medieval florilegia were systematic collections of extracts taken mainly from the writings of the Church Fathers from early Christian authors, also pagan philosophers such as Aristotle, and sometimes classical writings. A prime example is the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland, which was completed at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The purpose was to take passages that illustrated certain topics, doctrines or themes. After the medieval period, the term was extended to apply to any miscellany or compilation of literary or scientific character.
The term florilegia also applied literally to a treatise on flowers or medieval books that are dedicated to ornamental rather than the medicinal or widely useful plants covered by herbals. [1] The emergence of botanical illustration as a genre of art dates back to the 15th century, when herbals (books describing the culinary and medicinal uses of plants) were printed containing illustrations of flowers. As printing techniques advanced, and new plants came to Europe from Ottoman Turkey in the 16th century, wealthy individuals and botanic gardens commissioned artists to record the beauty of these exotics in Florilegia. [2] Florilegia flourished in the 17th century when they were created to portray rare and exotic plants from far afield. Modern florilegia seek to record collections of plants, often now endangered, from within a particular garden or place. Florilegia are among the most lavish and expensive of books because of all the work required to produce them.
The word applies especially to:
In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs, or related fiction/non-fiction excerpts by different authors.
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 plagiarised 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.
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.
William Thomas Stearn was a British botanist. Born in Cambridge in 1911, he was largely self-educated and developed an early interest in books and natural history. His initial work experience was at a Cambridge bookshop, but he also had a position as an assistant in the university botany department. At the age of 29 he married Eldwyth Ruth Alford, who later became his collaborator, and he died in London in 2001.
Margaret Ursula Mee, MBE was a British botanical artist who specialised in plants from the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest. She was also one of the first environmentalists to draw attention to the impact of large-scale mining and deforestation on the Amazon Basin.
Elizabeth Twining (1805–1889) was an English painter, author, and botanical illustrator. She is best known for her detailed botanical illustrations, especially the two-volume Illustrations of the Natural Order of Plants, which was published between 1849 and 1855. She was an heiress of the Twinings family of tea merchants and was a philanthropist.
Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt, known simply as Wilfrid Blunt, was an art teacher, writer, artist and a curator of the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, from 1959 until 1983.
Franz Andreas Bauer was an Austrian microscopist and botanical artist. The standard author abbreviation F.A.Bauer is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
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.
Matilda Smith (1854–1926) was a botanical artist whose work appeared in Curtis's Botanical Magazine for over forty years. She became the first artist to depict New Zealand's flora in depth, the first official artist of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and the second woman to become an associate of the Linnaean Society. The standard author abbreviation M.Sm. is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Emanuel Sweerts (1552–1612) was a Dutch painter and nurseryman noted for his publication in 1612 at Frankfurt-am-Main of Florilegium Amplissimum et Selectissimum.
Kew Gardens is a botanic garden in southwest London that houses the "largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world". Founded in 1840, from the exotic garden at Kew Park, its living collections include some of the 27,000 taxa curated by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, while the herbarium, one of the largest in the world, has over 8.5 million preserved plant and fungal specimens. The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London's top tourist attractions and is a World Heritage Site.
Shirley Angela Sherwood is a British writer, botanist and philanthropist.
Roderick McEwen, known as Rory McEwen, was a Scottish artist and musician.
Alexander Marshal was an English entomologist, gardener and botanical artist, noted for four albums of paintings, including the florilegium he compiled, consisting of some 160 folios of plants cultivated in English gardens, and finally presented to George IV in the 1820s.
Margaret Roscoe was an early 19th-century English botanical illustrator and author. She was a mother to Margaret Sandbach and wife to Edward Roscoe.
Edward Martyn Rix is a British botanist, collector, horticulturist and author. Following completion of a PhD on Fritillaria at Cambridge University, he worked in Zurich, Switzerland and at the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Wisley. He is the author of many books and articles on plants and horticulture and is the editor of Curtis's Botanical Magazine, based at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London.
Jessica Rosemary Shepherd FLS is a painter, artist, publisher and botanist who works under the names of Úrsula Romero and Inky Leaves.
Beverly Allen is an Australian artist specializing in botanical paintings. Her works are typically life size pieces of plants from her garden or native to Australia. Her artworks have been recognized internationally and collected in many private and public collections. She does workshops at the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney between her art collaborations and exhibitions.
Rosane Quintella was a Brazilian botanical artist and teacher.
| Authority control databases: National |
|---|
