A Sixteenth-Century Herbal with Original Woodblock and Preserved Floral Specimen, 1563
This book was Andrea Mattioli’s masterpiece. Whereas many of the herbals of his contemporaries were printed in small, portable pocket volumes for field reference, the so-called Grand Mattioli was very much an encyclopedic “table book” that could scarcely be conveniently carried into Mother Nature. The visually stunning, intricately bound folio volume with over eight hundred separate, large-scale woodcut illustrations was executed by the master imperial court engravers Giorgio Liberale and Wolfgang Meyerpeck.
An updated, polyglot translation of the ancient Greek botanical text of Dioscorides on the medicinal properties of plants, Mattioli’s work enumerates precise properties of each plant through painstakingly detailed images that trace the delicate veins of leaves and conformation of flower petals as well as intricate stem and root systems. All are accompanied by explanatory texts that also provide multiple plant names in both German and Latin, aided by the use of alternating black-letter and roman letterforms. At the end of the volume even appear six technological woodcuts illustrating machinery used to extract and distill oils from plants for their incorporation in medicinal tonics.
Andrea Mattioli occupied a prestigious position at the Imperial Court as physician to Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria, and later to the Holy Roman Emperor himself, Maximilian II. He used his influence to conduct unprecedented studies on the properties of the plants he collected, and in addition to being well-respected by many was a famously formidable figure in the world of botanical study. He would not hesitate to viciously attack those who might openly question or challenge his conclusions. Mattioli first published his edition of Dioscorides, which illustrated a hundred newly identified plants, in Italian in 1544. Ten years later that work appeared in Latin, and thereafter in French (Lyon, 1561), Czech (Prague, 1562), and, as seen in this edition, German (Prague, 1563).
Unlike many heavily marked-up copies of practical botanical field guides by Leonhart Fuchs and others, the Peabody Library’s copy of the first Czech edition of Mattioli’s masterwork is almost pristine in its preservation, revealing but a handful of small marginalia. The reader nevertheless will note, in the appropriate place in this volume, a fabulous early dried specimen of a flowering Great Yellow Gentian nestled in the gutter of the corresponding opening that describes it as a sovereign cure for digestive maladies, fevers, parasites, malaria, and even cancer.
The existence of the gentian plant inside this book speaks to its use, but another wonderful object in JHU’s collections hearkens back to its very creation. Some five years prior to the Peabody Library’s acquisition of the Prague edition of Mattioli’s great work, Hopkins managed to acquire at auction one of the original sixteenth-century pear-wood woodblocks used to illustrate the Chameleon Plant (Houttuynia cordata)—a leafy vegetable indigenous to Asia that is still eaten today and has traditionally been used to treat pneumonia. Thus, four and a half centuries after this very woodblock was pressed onto the page of this very book, the two were finally reunited in Baltimore at the Peabody Library.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Brent Elliott, “The World of the Renaissance Herbal,” Renaissance Studies 25:1 (February 2011), 24–41; Alain Touwaide, “Botany and Humanism in the Renaissance: Background, Interaction, Contradictions,” Studies in the History of Art 69 (2008), esp. 45–54; 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.191–98.
