On
display in the Carl A. Kroch Library from June 8 through August 8, 2000,
"Nature's Garland" provides a rare opportunity to see some of
Cornell University Library's most beautiful books on botany.
The history of botanical illustration is marked by the movement from
a domestic and practical focus on medicinal herbs to a wide-ranging interest,
both aesthetic and scientific, in plant species from all over the world.
Herbals produced nearly two thousand years ago featured highly realistic
illustrations. In succeeding centuries, however, unintelligent copying
gradually led to debased and stylized figures which were decorative rather
than informative. During the Renaissance, naturalism revived, and the
works of sixteenth-century herbalists such as Brunfels, Fuchs, and Gesner
are notable for their splendid naturalistic woodcuts of plants.
The seventeenth century brought a revolutionary change in the focus of
botanical illustration, from an emphasis on plants' medicinal uses to
intense admiration of their beauty. Instead of depicting common species,
artists were now set to work recording the rare flowers grown in the gardens
of the wealthy. France and Holland dominated in the botanical art of this
century, as Germany had in the previous one. Artists in both countries
fully explored the potential of etching and engraving for plant illustration,
and produced magnificent hand-painted florilegia.
The eighteenth century saw both a continued demand for bright flower
books and the rise of botany as a science, spurred by the publication
of Carl Linnaeus's watershed work, Systema naturae, in 1735. Over the
next hundred years, the artist and the scientific illustrator were seldom
short of work.
Botanical illustration reached a spectacular high point in the early nineteenth
century in the work of Redouté. At the same time, the expansion
of European colonial empires stimulated the production of works depicting
exotic species of plants from the remotest parts of the globe. By 1840,
the great age of flower painting was drawing rapidly to a close, and the
Victorian era was dominated by English and French scientific illustration.
In our own century, the photographer has largely taken over the function
of the botanical artist; happily, however, there are still occasions when
the camera is no match for a skillfully wielded pencil.
Cornell University Library's holdings are particularly strong in eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century botany, including highlights of the period such
as Thornton's Temple of Flora and Redouté's Lilies; but sixteenth-century
herbals also make a strong showing in the collection. The size of these
imposing volumes makes it possible to show only a limited sample of them
in this exhibition, drawn mainly from the History of Science Collection
in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.
Katherine Reagan
Curator of Rare Books
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