Leonhard Fuchs’s History of Plants (1542) | Sachiko Kusukawa

Title

Leonhard Fuchs’s History of Plants (1542) | Sachiko Kusukawa

Description

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.

Detail from Leonard Fuch's History of Plants (1542). Copyright: The Linnean Society of London.

Content

View Content

Contributor

Linnean Society of London

Type

Video

Date

2025

Subject

History of Science

History of Medicine

Art and Architectural History

Period

16th-17th Century

Geographical Area

Europe

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This item was submitted on September 22, 2025 by [anonymous user] using the form “Contribution” on the site “History Day”: https://exhibitions.london.ac.uk/s/history-day-discover-collections