Plant Nature-Printing in Florence of the 1520s: Response to High Demand of Herbal Knowledge

• In Event: The Circulation of Plant Sources: Manuscripts, Prints, Herbaria in Modern Europe, 1400–1700 II

Abstract

I present my recent research results of the otherwise almost uninvestigated nature print corpus of the Florentine “aromatarius” Zenobius Pacinus, active in the 1520s. The herbal illustrations he executed employing this technique were produced and sold in masses on single sheets of paper or as whole manuscripts. The buyers seem to have been pharmacists, doctors and humanist scholars. Although the “modus procedendi” of nature printing normally produces authentic imprints and in spite of the organic and natural appearance of the Zenobius prints, they were composed in a highly artificial way. The results were generic illustrations that at the same time provided authenticity of the plants’ appearance. The high sales of his imprints point to a high demand of accurate illustrations in northern Italy. Furthermore, amongst the Zenobius imprints there are American plants that demonstrate an intense trading activity in the Medici Republic.

Author

• Dominic Olariu, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte