Collected Item: “Leonhard Fuchs’s History of Plants (1542) | Sachiko Kusukawa”
Contributing Organisation
Contribution Title
Leonhard Fuchs’s History of Plants (1542) | Sachiko Kusukawa
Description (This can only be plain text, i.e. no links or bullet points.)
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.
Content Type
Video
Subject (1)
History of Science
Subject (2)
History of Medicine
Subject (3)
Art and Architectural History
Geographical Area (1)
Europe
Time Period (2)
16th-17th Century
Contribution URL
https://youtu.be/bN-wLc6Jmx8?si=TjZdjfmRVHgDAYZc