Introduction
This exhibit showcases selections from Galter Library’s collection of illustrated botanical books. Medical libraries typically collected herbals—books that systematically describe the appearance, properties, and uses of plants—because physicians would have consulted them for herbal remedies. But physicians’ interests extended beyond the curative qualities of plants, and many collected non-medicinal botanical books for their stunning illustrations. Eclipsing the collectors were those who were also naturalists, studying and writing about the natural world in addition to their medical work.
Credits
Curated and designed by Emma Florio, MLIS, Archives & Research Specialist, and Katie Lattal, MA, Special Collections Librarian.
Color plays many roles in botanical illustration. It can add information to help identify plants and distinguish them from each other, aiding in botanical study and medicinal use by a layperson. It can increase the readability of a complex, highly detailed image, allowing the viewer to better understand what they are seeing. It can also be purely aesthetic, adding to the beauty of an illustration.
Color in printed illustrations comes in two basic varieties—hand-coloring and mechanically printed color, sometimes in combination with each other. Before the 19th century, when innovations in printing technology made color printing feasible on a large scale, most coloring was done by hand, whether by a skilled artist under the direction of the author, which was expensive, or by the owner of the book for their own use. Color printing made book production cheaper, thus allowing more people to own colorfully illustrated books.
Flores frumentorum Cornflower
Flores sancti Johannis St. John's wort
Fistula pastoris Shepherd's pipe, common water plantain
Gladiolus Schlottenkrut German bearded iris
Hortus Sanitatis, Germanice: Gart der Gesundheit. Strasbourg: Reinhard Beck, 1515. Author and artists unknown.
Hortus Sanitatis (Garden of health) is an early Renaissance encyclopedia of natural history, with entries on the medicinal uses of plants, animal products, and other substances found in nature. The woodcut illustrations are highly stylized, with the parts of the plant laid out in a way that makes them easy to identify, rather than depicting them as they would truly appear in nature. Like almost all printed European books of its era, the illustrations in this book are colored by hand with typically chalky and opaque pigments, which can sometimes obscure the details of the woodcut. The colorist here uses multiple colors to give a more accurate representation of the plants depicted.