Plate XV
‘Phasiolos’ = Bean [Dioscorides, Codex Aniciæ Julianæ, circa A.D. 500]. Reduced.
This work contains coloured drawings of exceptional beauty, which are smaller than those in the Vienna manuscript, but quite equally realistic.
It is however with the history of botanical figures since the invention of the printing press that we are here more especially concerned. From this epoch onwards, the history of botanical illustration is intimately bound up with the history of wood-engraving, until, at the extreme end of the sixteenth century, engraving on metal first came into use to illustrate herbals. During the seventeenth century, metal-engravings and wood-cuts existed side by side, but wood-engraving gradually declined, and was in great measure superseded by engraving on metal. The finest period of plant illustration was during the sixteenth century, when wood-engraving was at its zenith.
Botanical wood-engravings may be regarded as belonging to two schools, but it should be understood that the distinction between them is somewhat arbitrary and must not be pressed very far. One of these may perhaps be regarded as representing the last, decadent expression of that school of late classical art which, a thousand years earlier, had given rise to the drawings in the Vienna manuscript. Probably no original wood-cuts of this school were produced after the close of the fifteenth century. In the second phase, on the other hand, which culminated, artistically, if not scientifically, in the sixteenth century, we find a renaissance of the art, due to a more direct study of nature.
The first school, of which we may take the cuts in the Roman edition of the ‘Herbarium’ of Apuleius Platonicus (? 1484) as typical examples, has, as Dr Payne has pointed out, certain very well-marked characteristics. The figures of the plants (see Plates [IV], [V], [XVI], and Text-figs. [1] and [2]), which occupy square or oblong spaces, are very formal and are often represented with complete bilateral symmetry. They show no sign of having been drawn directly from nature, but look as if they were founded on previous work. They have a decorative rather than a naturalistic appearance; it seems, indeed, as if the principle of decorative symmetry controlled the artist almost against his will. These drawings are somewhat of the nature of diagrams by a draughtsman “who generalized his knowledge of the object.” In Dr Payne’s own words, “Such figures, passing through the hands of a hundred copyists, became more and more conventional, till they reached their last and most degraded form in the rude cuts of the Roman Herbarium, which represent not the infancy, but the old age of art. Uncouth as they are, we may regard them with some respect, both as being the images of flowers that bloomed many centuries ago, and also as the last ripple of the receding tide of Classical Art.”
The illustrations of the ‘Herbarium’ of Apuleius were copied from pre-existing manuscripts, and the age of the originals is no doubt much greater than that of the printed work. Those here reproduced are taken from a copy in the British Museum, in which the pictures were coloured, probably at the time when the book was published.