Botanical illustration

The image may be life-size or not, though at times a scale is shown, and may show the life cycle and/or habitat of the plant and its neighbors, the upper and reverse sides of leaves, and details of flowers, bud, seed and root system.

Matthaeus Platearius, a Salerno physician, is credited with the (12th century) "Circa Instans [fr]" manuscript, expanded over time into the Treatise on Herbs, containing 500-900 entries depending on version.

At the end of the 16th century, an illustrated manuscript such as the Erbario Carrarese (British Library, London, Egerton Ms.2020[12]), revealed the increased importance attached to plant observation.

Christian Egenolff attached great importance to the illustrations included in the books he published: Herbarum, arborum, fruticum, frumentorum ac leguminem (Frankfurt, 1546)[14] features 800 woodcuts of plants and animals.

[15] From 1530 onwards (and thanks particularly to German herbalists appeared the first books illustrated with woodcuts based on direct observation of live plants, as opposed to relying on older, often incorrect depictions from ancient texts.

Luca Ghini, an Italian physician and botanist, founded the Orto botanico di Pisa (Europe's first university botanical garden) in 1544 with the support of Cosimo I de' Medici and published his first herbarium that same year.

The work (Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Discorsi, a herbal assembled and illustrated by Gherardo Cibo), dated 1564–1584, is accessible for online viewing on the British Library website.

His Kreuterbuch von Underscheidt, Würckung und Namen der Kreuter, so in teutschen Landen wachsen[18] (1546), written in German, was illustrated by David Kandel.

In the 1570s, Francisco Hernández de Toledo embarked on the first scientific mission in the New World (and particularly New Spain), a study of the region's medicinal plants and animals, and brought back thousands of illustrations for which he was assisted by local artists, "tlacuilo [fr]s".

One way of copying precisely was offered by the Herbarium vivum: images were made by pressing ink-coated objects onto paper, leaving impressions; earlier methods used carbon black from soot.

Further commissions (more than 3000 watercolours in all, engraved by Arnold Nicolaï, then Gerard van Kampen and Cornelis Muller) followed for works by Dodoens, Matthias de l'Obel and Carolus Clusius (a pupil of Guillaume Rondelet, like Gaspard Bauhin as well as Rabelais.

[24] Carolus Clusius, a French-speaking Flemish physician and botanist, created one of the first botanical gardens in Europe, the Hortus botanicus Leiden, and can be considered the world's first mycologist and the founder of horticulture, particularly of the tulip (of which he obtained seeds from Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq).

The 1612 edition includes a preface in which the author gives the two addresses where tulips can be bought, in Frankfurt and Amsterdam : botanical illustration suddenly found a new outlet in the production of nursery catalogues.

Hortus Eystettensis[29] (1613) is a "cabinet book" and, more precisely, a florilegium: it contains engravings of the plants grown in the garden created by the botanist Basilius Besler at the request of the Prince-Bishop of Eichstätt.

At the same time, the idea of the (private) pleasure garden, which originated in Italy, was brought to France during the great period of Hôtel particulier construction, mainly in Paris from the early 17th century onwards.

[32] Pinax theatri botanici (Illustrated Exposition of Plants, Basel, 1623) by Swiss botanist Gaspard Bauhin stands as one of the highest expressions of Renaissance European herbals.

Balthasar Moncornet published a number of works for ornamentalists, including Livre nouveau de fleurs très util pour l'art d'orfèvrerie et autres (a new book of flowers, very useful for the art of goldsmithing and others, Paris, 1645).

Denis Dodart (1634–1707), who oversaw the studies of the French Academy of Sciences from 1670 to 1694, played a pivotal role in the publication of Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des plantes[37] in 1676.

The botanist and draughtsman Charles Plumier, who made four botanical expeditions (the first one in 1689), brought back a (now lost) herbarium and many drawings: Description des plantes de l'Amérique was published after the second voyage (1693), and Nova plantarum americanarum genera (1703) after the third.

At the end of the 17th century, the first manuals for amateur painters appeared: in 1679, Claude Boutet [fr] published École de la mignature : Dans laquelle on peut facilement apprendre à peindre sans maître[38] (Miniature art school: where you can easily learn to paint without a master'.).

A growing number of amateur botanists, gardeners, and natural historians provided a market for floras and other botanical publications and illustrations increased the appeal and accessibility of these to the general reader.

These artists produced over 1,000 hand-coloured mezzotint engravings of several thousand plants, including depictions of tulips, and what to Europeans were then exotic, newly discovered flora and fauna, such as the banana tree, making this book one of the most comprehensive and highly regarded color-plate florilegia of its time.

Haid also worked on the Plantae selectae (1750) of Christoph Jakob Trew, alongside Georg Dionysius Ehret (who also contributed to Hans Sloane's protégé Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1729–1747) (also with coloured engravings).

Jan Kops' first issue of Flora Batava was published in Amsterdam in 1800 (last one 1934), with most of the illustrations in the first three volumes by Georgius Jacobus Johannes van Os), a flower and fruit painter for the Sèvres porcelain factory.

The naturalist Antoine Risso published an essay on lemon trees (1813)[58] that had acclimatized well on the French Riviera, only a few decades after it started becoming a fashionable health resort for the British upper class.

These charts depicted various plant structures, including roots, flowers, and leaves, in great detail and at a large scale, making them useful for teaching botany in classrooms.

His student, Maurice Pillard Verneuil, wrote Etude de la plante : son application aux industries d'art (1903), which featured real, detailed botanical plates.

New botanical specialties emerged and developed: Lichenology (pioneered by Erik Acharius), Phycology (William Henry Harvey), Palaeobotany (Kaspar Maria von Sternberg), and Ecology (Eugenius Warming), along with new fields like Cytogenetics.

Original botanical illustrations rendered in traditional media (with which art conservators are more familiar) can and might serve as reference research materials for endangered species and climate change.

André-Georges Haudricourt and Georges Métailié[72] mention Song Boren, a poet and painter who is best known for Meihua Xishen Pu (Guide to Representing a Plum Blossom), published in 1238.