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Title
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Leonhard Fuchs’s History of Plants (1542) | Sachiko Kusukawa
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Description
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Leonhard Fuchs’s History of Plants, published in 1542, was a landmark in Renaissance book-printing. It contained more than five hundred large woodcuts of plants, accompanied by their morphological description and medicinal uses. Typical of its time, Fuchs’s study was based on a classical work on the medicinal uses of plants by Dioscorides (first century AD). Unusually for its time, Fuchs’s book contained an illustration of the artists that were involved in the production of the images. Fuchs had good reason to be proud of the artists, as they created for him the beautiful illustrations that functioned in multiple ways to aid the study of plants. I will introduce the ways in which illustrations mattered in Fuchs’s History of Plants before having a look at the copy now at the Linnean Society.
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Detail from Leonard Fuch's History of Plants (1542). Copyright: The Linnean Society of London.
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Type
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Video
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Date
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2025
Linnean Society of London
