November 26, 2006
The Naming of Names
About five months ago, dhruva passed on a link about an interesting-looking book (The Naming of Names, by Anna Pavord) to peacay, who passed it along to me. A couple of weeks later, a copy arrived from Amazon, and, over the following months I slowly read it, eventually reaching the end a couple of weeks ago. It’s an absorbing history of the study, classification and illustration of plants, from the time of Theophrastus and Dioscorides, up to the birth of modern botany at the end of the 17th Century. It’s a beautifully-illustrated book, featuring over 150 plates of pages from mediæval and early-modern herbals—details from five of these follow below:
#1: Part of a bramble, from the manuscript oftenest known as the ‘Vienna Dioscorides’ This ‘is an illuminated Byzantine manuscript produced about AD 512 for Anicia Juliana, [Pavord calls the manuscript Juliana’s Book’] the daughter of Flavius Anicius Olybrius, who had been emperor of the western empire in AD 472. Presented in appreciation for her patronage in the construction of a district church in Constantinople, the parchment codex comprises 491 folios (or almost a thousand pages) and almost four hundred color illustrations, each occupying a full page facing a description of the plant’s pharmacological properties.’ The manuscript, which is now in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, is remarkable for the vividness and lifelikeness of its illustrations, which achieved a degree of verisimiltude that would not be equalled for more than eight hundred years…
#2 Part of a vine, from folio 27v of the so-called Carrara Herbal, a manuscript made in Padua at the end of the fourteenth century, which is now in the British Library. The text in this codex was a translation into Italian of the Liber aggregatus in medicinis simplicibus by the ninth-century Arab physician Serapion the Younger, ‘a sort of synthesis between Dioscorides and Galen's teaching’ This manuscript reflects the slow absorption of Arab botanical knowledge at Italian universities, first at Salerno from the late 13th Century, then later at Padua; its illustrations reflect a concern with attention to natural detail quite absent from the majority of mediæval herbals.
#3: Poppies, from the manuscript called the Codice Rinio, after Benedetto Rinio, its second owner, or the Codice Roccobonella, after the Padua-based physician Nicolò Roccabonella, who commissioned it ca. 1445. Its illustrations, about twenty of which are thought to have been copied from the Carrara Herbal were the work of a painter named Andrea Amadio. This codex is currently in the Biblioteca Marciana of Venice. It contains more than four hundred herbs ‘illustrated with remarkable precision in every morphological detail.’ Despite these advances in illustrative fidelity, the study of plants had scarcely advanced since Dioscorides’ day, and was still squarely subordinate to the study of medicine: plants with no perceived pharmacological effect (or agricultural utility) were considered not to be worth writing about.
#4: Detail showing the flowers of the tobacco-plant, from a manuscript compiled under the direction of Leonhart Fuchs (1501-66), professor of medicine at the university of Tübingen. Fuchs was one of the first men to study plants for their own sake, as well as for their medical applications. His De historia stirpium commentarii insignes of 1542 was the second notable printed herbal produced in Germany, supplanting Otto Brunfels’ Herbarum vivae icones (1530-36), even though the illustrations in the older work were of a higher quality. Fuchs laboured for the last twenty-four years of his life in the compilation of a much larger botanical encyclopædia, commissioning and collecting hundreds of high-quality illustrations, which included some of the earliest known depictions of such novelties as the tomato and tobacco plants: but this opus never made it to the press.
#5: Various forms of daisy, from the Florilegium renovatum et auctum, issued in Frankfurt by Matthæus Merian for the house of de Bry, in 1641. This was an enlarged and revised version of the Florilegium novum that his father-in-law J. T. de Bry had issued in 1610. Many of the ‘new’ floral illustrations added by Merian were apparently adapted by Merian from Cornelis Bloemaert’s engravings for the De florum cultura by Giovanni Battista Ferrari. Merian’s engravings were likewise recycled in later publications, such as Michael Bernhard Valentini’s 1719 Viridarium Reformatum.
Click on the details above to see them enlarged, and in full.
November 09, 2006
‘Master L. D.’ and ‘Juste de Juste’
My mumbled apologies for the dull silence emanating from this site over the past couple of weeks. May I offer, as an attempt to slap this blog awake, some more scans from my copy of Henri Zerner’s The School of Fontainebleau; Etchings and Engravings, (Thames and Hudson, 1969). The first eight of the images below are details from graphic works associated with an artist known only as ‘Master L.D.’ from these same initials which adorn a number of Fontainebleau-related prints. According to Zerner, it is possible that the initials stood for a Léon Daven (or Davent), but such is the paucity of documentary evidence that this identification must necessarily be a tentative one.
Zerner reckons L.D. to have been the finest etcher of the Fontainebleau school. Several dozen of his etchings (and a smaller number of engravings) have surived. The majority of these follow paintings or designs by Francesco Primaticcio, many of whose compositions were crowded with obscure classical allusions. The engraving shown in the detail above, for example, illustrates ‘The Garden of Vertumnus’ and is based on one of the frescoes by Primaticcio (since destroyed) which once adorned Fontainebleau’s Pavillon de Pomone.
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Primaticcio’s work (and hence the Master L.D’s) is notable for its frequent and up-front deployment of erotic themes. In the etchings at least, these themes are disconcertingly often set in a coercive light, where Ledas grapple with swans, Jupiters overwhelm Sémélés, and more-or-less reluctant nymphs are put upon by rapacious satyrs. The first of the pair of etchings above is a typical example, where just such a nymph is being carried to a libidinous satyr. The second etching provides an altogether atypical symmetry, by depicting a satyr being manhandled, in turn, to a libidinous nymph…
Primaticcio and L.D.’s partnership seems to have flourished for a relatively brief period, ca. 1542-8, and, according to Zerner, inspired the graphic artist’s finest work. L.D. is also known to have produced etchings after designs by Agostino Veneziano (for example the one shown in the detail above), and by another of the Fontainebleau painters, Luca Penni. A series of illustrations by Penni of the seven deadly sins was etched by L.D., although the ‘sloth’ and ‘lust’ images in the set (which, conicidentally, are the ones I picked out for display here—below) are thought to have been completed by another hand, perhaps Penni’s own.
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L.D. is also supposed to have produced one set of images not associated with Fontainebleau: these are the woodcut illustrations for a book by one Nicolas de Nicolay entitled Les quatre premiers livres des Navigations et pérégrinations orientales… which was published at Lyons in 1567-8, but which had been prepared for the press some eleven years earlier. The details below depict, respectively, a Greek villager and a Turkish judge. More of the designs from this book can be found here.
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Another group of etchings associated with the Fontainebleau school is a singularly odd set of images of stylised nude male figures. Five prints (such as the pair shown in the details immediately below) display these figures, who despite their exaggerated musculatures seem bonily emaciated, in improbably acrobatic ‘human pyramids.’ Twelve further etchings depict similar figures singly, in a variety of poses. The attribution of these images to Juste de Juste (1505-1559), a sculptor who worked as an assistant of Rosso’s at Fontainebleau, depends on a monogram printed at the bottom of certain of these prints being in reverse as ÈIVSTE…
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Zerner, hesitant to accept so uncertain an attribution, refers to these etchings’ author as ‘the supposed Juste de Juste.’ He goes on to remark that these ‘curious documents’ mark one of the outer limits of mannerist eccentricity, and while they ‘are not by a great artist,’ ‘they are by a clever draughtsman and a great original who was able to state the impossible with conviction.’ Click on the details to see the images enlarged, and in full.
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