From Herbals to Walled Gardens j 261261 261
painting from life.^12 The presence of such blemishes in several illustrations of the Juliana
Anicia Codex could indicate that the practice of painting directly from nature, assumed by
Singer to have died out with the Greeks, continued at least through the sixth century in the
Eastern Empire.^13Seven Centuries of Knock- Offs and Spin- Offs
The seventh- century Codex Neapolitanus is second in importance only to the Juliana Anicia
Codex. The plant illustrations have been greatly simplified, and some of the leaf shapes have
even been altered to suit the taste of the artist, features consistent with the herbal’s having
been copied rather than painted from living specimens (Figure 10.4).
In the ninth century, another Greek herbal of Dioscorides, possibly produced in
Syria, contains illustrations even more stylized than those of the seventh- century Codex
Neapolitanus, indicating that the images were again copied rather than painted from nature
(Figure 10.5).
There is only one surviving illustrated copy of the Latin translation of the five books of
Dioscorides, the Dioskurides Lombardus, also referred to as the “Old Latin Translation,”
which dates to the second half of the tenth century.^14 Most of the extant Latin herbals
are combinations of the text of Dioscorides with that of a certain Apuleius, referred to as
Apuleius Barbarus, Apuleius Platonicus, or Pseudo- Apuleius to distinguish him or her
from the author of The Golden Ass. These texts were anthologies of medical recipes, charms,
spells, and prayers and were probably compiled from Greek material around the beginning
of the fifth century ce. The Apuleian manuscript herbals were the most widely read of the
late classical herbals during the Early Middle Ages. Despite the Christian campaign against
paganism that began about the middle of the fourth century ce, these works frequently
included incantations to the Earth Goddess, clearly a vestige of their pagan roots.^15
The texts of the Latin herbals of Apuleius were less accurate than those of the Greek herb-
als of Dioscorides, and the illustrations were even more schematic compared to the natu-
ralistic drawings of the Juliana Anicia Codex, as indicated in the seventh- century examples
shown in Figure 10.6.
The oldest existing Anglo- Saxon herbal dates from 1050, just sixteen years before the
Battle of Hastings. It may be the first translation of a herbal (the Latin Herbal of Apuleius)
in the vernacular. Two examples showing stylization to the point of iconography are shown
in Figure 10.7. The addition of frames around some of the plant images emphasizes their
purely decorative nature.
In the Near East, Arabic translations of the herbal of Dioscorides first appeared in
Baghdad in the ninth century, while in the tenth century the Byzantine Emperor
Romanus sent, as a gift to the Spanish caliph, a finely illustrated herbal of Dioscorides
in Greek, which was soon translated into Arabic. Many other Herbals of Dioscorides
also made their way into the Islamic Empire, and thus the whole of Arab medicine was
strongly influenced by it.^16 By the twelfth century, the Norman kings had renewed con-
tacts with Italy and Sicily, the Crusades had opened up the Near East to Constantinople,
and a new “Romanesque” style of herbal evolved. These included framed compositions of
historical or mythical figures as well as images of plants stylized almost beyond recogni-
tion (Figure 10.8).