A Work-Book Blueprint of the Botanical Garden at Padua, 1591
This delightful pocket-format book—possibly the earliest comprehensive catalogue of a botanical garden and the first book to feature engravings of the floorplan of a garden—is designed to guide the practical student of botany and medicine through the storied botanical garden at Padua. Readers could follow the numbered parterre plans through five fold-out engravings: one a plan of the entire garden; the others representing each of the four principal sections. Working from this volume’s alphabetical list of each plant in the garden, students could follow each parterre section in these maps visually, then take notes in specially keyed and ruled sections on the plants encountered as they physically navigated this incredibly intricate natural space. The Hopkins copy of this book uniquely preserves at least one early manuscript marginalia denoting the name of a plant identified within the garden’s spaldo terzo. The annotator’s elusive initials (“Y.V.”?) also appear on the title page of this volume. The Hopkins copy is made even more attractive by the presence, unrecorded in many other copies, of a specially inserted “Note to Readers,” as well as an extra-illustration featuring a second large-paper, folding engraved portrait of Giacomo Antonio Cortusi.
Even before the first construction of its formal botanical garden, Padua was central to the growth of botany as a subject of natural philosophical inquiry. In 1533, Francesco Bonafede became Padua University’s first fully fledged professor of botany. Twelve years later, the Venetian senate granted him authority to construct the botanical garden proper at Padua. The garden’s ground plan notably deviates from the traditional design of a quadripartite quadrangle—a rectangular area divided into four parts that could be expanded over time. Instead, the Paduan blueprint consisted of four squares within a circular space, considered by Neoplatonists and sacred geometers to constitute an ideal form and symbol both of the temporal Garden of Eden and of the eternal Heavenly City. Each section of the circular layout housed garden beds containing plants cultivated for their various pharmacological or dietary applications.
Porro dedicated his book to Giacomo Antonio Cortusi, whose work as a professor and director of the botanical garden at Padua had helped to elevate the site as the first garden of scientific prominence in Europe and to solidify the study of botany as a serious and rigorous scientific discipline. Cortusi cultivated not only exotic plants but also interpersonal relationships with natural philosophers and medical doctors and apothecaries across the Italian peninsula, including Andrea Mattioli, whose sumptuously illustrated herbal containing over eight hundred plants can be explored at the George Peabody Library alongside one of its original woodcut blocks, and even a flattened plant specimen recently discovered hidden in the gutter of one of the book’s many openings. Porro’s workbook is a fitting tribute to the man so dedicated to the study and teaching of plants and their medicinal properties and a wonderful example of the beauty and utility of early prints.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Donald A. Rakow and Sharon A. Lee, “Western Botanical Gardens: History and Evolution,” in Jules Janick (ed.), Horticultural Reviews, vol. 43 (Wiley, 2015), esp. 277–80; Volker R. Remmert, “The Art of Garden and Landscape Design and the Mathematical Sciences in the Early Modern Period,” in Hubertus Fischer et al. (eds.), Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period (Springer, 2016), 9–28; Dennis Rhodes, “The Botanical Garden of Padua: The First Hundred Years,” The Journal of Garden History 4:4 (1984), 327–31; Elsa M. Terwen-Dionisius, “Date and Design of the Botanical Garden in Padua,” Journal of Garden History (1994), 213–35; Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, “The Origins, Function and Role of the Botanical Garden in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Italy,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 25: 2 (2005), 103–15; Alessandro Tosi, “Botanical Illustrations and the Idea of the Garden in the Sixteenth Century Between Imitation and Imagination,” in Hubertus Fischer et al. (eds.), Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period (Springer, 2016), esp. 198–206.
