314 i Flora Unveiled
link needed to explain the striking spurt of naturalistic botanical illustrations in German
herbals, beginning with Hans Weiditz’s drawings and woodcuts in Otto Brunfels’s
Herbarum vivae icones.” ^55
Otto Brunfels was a German theologian and former Carthusian monk^56 who converted
to Protestantism around 1420. He developed an interest in botany by way of pharmacology
but soon became interested in the natural history of plants. He graduated from medical
school in Basel in 1530 and, in the same year, published Herbarum Vivae Icons, or “Living
Portraits of Plants” based mainly on his own observations of the flora of Germany. Many
(a)Figure 11.7 Woodcuts of Brunfels and Fuchs. A. Pasque- flower (Pulsatilla vulgaris) in Brunfels’s
Herbarium Vivae Eicones, Vol. I, p. 217; B. Turkish Corn (Zea mays) Fuchs’s De Historia Stirpium,
p. 825.