Study of Aquilegia vulgaris L., Columbine [Albrecht Dürer, 1526. Drawing in the Albertina, Vienna]. Reduced.
Text-fig. 82. “Asarum” = Asarabacca [Brunfels, Herbarum vivæ eicones, Vol. I. 1530]. Reduced.
Brunfels’ illustrations represent a notable advance on any previous botanical wood-cuts, so much so, indeed, that the suddenness of the improvement seems to call for some special explanation. On taking a broader view of the subject, we find that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, there was a marked advance in all the branches of book illustration, and not merely in the botanical side with which we are here concerned. This impetus seems to have been due to the fact that many of the best artists, above all Albrecht Dürer, began at that period to draw for wood-engraving, whereas in the fifteenth century the ablest men had shown a tendency to despise the craft and to hold aloof from it.
The engravings in Brunfels’ herbal and the fine books which succeeded it, should not be considered as if they were an isolated manifestation, but should be viewed in relation to other contemporary and even earlier plant drawings, which were not intended for book illustrations. Some of the most remarkable are those by Albrecht Dürer, which were produced before the appearance of Brunfels’ herbal, during the first thirty years of the sixteenth century. In each of his coloured drawings of sods of turf, known as “das grosse Rasenstück,” and “das kleine Rasenstück,” a tangled group of growing plants is portrayed exactly as it occurred in nature, with a marvellous combination of artistic charm and scientific accuracy. Prof. Killermann has been at pains to identify the genus and species of almost every plant represented, and has described the drawings as “das erste Denkmal der Pflanzenökologie.” In 1526, Dürer carried out a beautiful series of plant drawings, among the most famous of which are those of the Columbine, and the Greater Celandine. The former is reproduced on a small scale in Plate [XVII]; it is scarcely possible to imagine a more perfect “habit drawing” of a plant.
In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci’s exquisite studies of plants, of which Plate [XVIII] is an example, must also have pointed the way to a better era of herbal illustration. In his work, the artistic interest predominates over the botanical to a greater extent than is the case with Dürer’s drawings. It is strange to think that numerous editions of the ‘Ortus Sanitatis’ and similar books, with their crude and primitive wood-cuts, should have been published while such an artist as Leonardo da Vinci was at the zenith of his powers. If internal evidence alone were available, it might plausibly be maintained that the engravings in the ‘Ortus Sanitatis’ and the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci were centuries apart.
Plate XVIII