The word "herbarium" or "herbal" today refers to two different things: a book that describes and depicts plants, and a collection of plants dried and preserved on sheets. Both have a long and fascinating history, which tells how people have tried to fix the plant world in a lasting object. In this article we follow herbals as works of art and memory, observing how the way of looking at plants and the way of depicting them changed.
The ancient model: Dioscorides
The text that more than any other shaped the tradition is the work of the Greek physician Dioscorides, who lived in the first century AD. His treatise, known by the Latin title De materia medica, described hundreds of plants and substances. For over fifteen centuries it was copied, translated, commented on and illustrated, becoming the essential reference for anyone writing about plants.
Here we are not interested in the technical content of the treatise, but in its life as a book. Precisely because it was so important, Dioscorides's text was the subject of some of the most lavish copies of antiquity.
The Vienna Dioscorides
The most famous manuscript is the so-called Vienna Dioscorides, kept in the Austrian National Library. It was made in Constantinople at the beginning of the sixth century for Anicia Juliana, a noblewoman of imperial lineage and a great patron of the arts. The codex opens with a series of painted pages, including a portrait of Anicia Juliana herself flanked by allegorical figures.
The full-page plant illustrations are of extraordinary quality: many derive from older models and show a surprising naturalistic care. The manuscript is a precious document not only for the history of botany but for the history of late antique painting.
The Pseudo-Apuleius herbal
In the Latin Middle Ages another text was widely circulated, the Herbarius attributed to an author tradition called Apuleius, today known as Pseudo-Apuleius. Its many copies show an interesting phenomenon: by copying and recopying the images, illuminators drifted further and further from the natural model. Plants became stylised, almost ornamental forms, sometimes hard to recognise.
This process should not be read only as decline. The plants of medieval herbals are often symbols more than portraits: signs of an order of the world, set in a book that was also an object of devotion and prestige.
The return to observation
With the invention of printing and the climate of the Renaissance, the way of depicting plants changed profoundly. Authors began to assert the value of direct observation.
A famous example is De historia stirpium by the German Leonhart Fuchs, published in 1542. Its large woodcuts show whole plants, with roots, flowers and fruits, drawn from life. Fuchs also chose to include in the book portraits of the artists who had drawn, transferred and cut the images: a rare acknowledgement of the illustrators' work.
In Italy the work of Pietro Andrea Mattioli, a vast commentary on Dioscorides enriched with illustrations and reprinted many times, enjoyed enormous success.
The hortus siccus
In the same century the herbarium in the second sense was born: the collection of dried plants. The botanist Luca Ghini, who taught at Bologna, is traditionally named as one of the first, if not the first, to press plants and glue them onto sheets of paper to preserve and study them. This technique, called hortus siccus, "dry garden", spread rapidly among his pupils.
Ghini is also linked to the founding of the botanical garden of Pisa in the mid-sixteenth century, in the same years as that of Padua was born. Living garden and dry garden were born together, as two complementary ways of keeping plants.
The charm of the dry garden
The hortus siccus has something poetic about it: it is a garden that no longer withers, a collection of plants withdrawn from the cycle of the seasons. Each sheet is at once a scientific document and a relic, the trace of a distant summer.
Symbolic reading
Studio Esoterico Cornelio sees in herbals an expression of the desire for memory: to hold still what by nature passes away. From Anicia Juliana's painted codex to the sheet with its pressed plant, the herbal is an attempt to make the ephemeral permanent.
| Type of herbal | Period | Characteristic |
|---|---|---|
| Illuminated codex | Late antiquity | Luxury, naturalistic painting |
| Medieval herbal | Middle Ages | Stylised images, symbolic value |
| Printed herbal | Renaissance | Observation from life, woodcuts |
| Hortus siccus | From the 16th century | Real dried plants |
In short
- The word "herbal" or "herbarium" covers both an illustrated book and a collection of dried plants.
- The Vienna Dioscorides was made in Constantinople for Anicia Juliana.
- Medieval herbals stylised plants, turning them almost into symbols.
- The Renaissance, with Fuchs and Mattioli, returned to observation from life.
- Luca Ghini is linked to the birth of the hortus siccus, the "dry garden".
