Flora Unveiled

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(c)

Figure 11.5 Continued

Italian translation of a much older Arabic herbal, which was presented sometime between

1390 and 1404 to the last Lord of Padua, Francesco Carrara the Younger. The anonymous

artist of the Carrara Herbal broke decisively with medieval tradition by painting highly

naturalistic plant portraits, such as the grape vine shown in Figure 11.5B. After more than

800 years, a medieval herbal was finally produced that equaled and even exceeded the accu-

racy of the Juliana Anicia Codex. The Liber de Simplicibus (Book of Simples), written by

Benedetto Rinio in 1419, continued the tradition of excellence, as illustrated in Figure

11.6C. A new era of Naturalism in the manuscript herbals had dawned. However, these

new naturalistic herbals were costly to produce and to copy, so they remained largely in the

hands of the aristocracy, and their scientific impact on the newly established universities

and medical schools was minimal.

The Printed Illustrated Herbals:

From Iconography to Naturalism

The first Gutenberg Bibles were printed in Germany around 1455, and the new printing tech-

nique soon spread to Italy, where the first printed book with woodcut illustrations, titled

Meditationes de Vita Christi, was published in 1467. The first printed herbal illustrated with

woodcuts, De Viribus Herbarum by Macer Floridus, appeared in Milan in 1482. Its crude,

highly stylized images were a far cry from the hand- painted naturalistic plant portraits of the

manuscript herbals, and, over the next few decades, the woodcut images of the newly printed