A few days ago I received a call from Anna, a dear friend, the best antiquarian librarian I know: “Antonio, I need you, I have some volumes on botany that I would like you to help me identify”. Intrigued, I went to visit her and found seven museum volumes in front of me: perfect, well preserved, illustrated by a capable hand, both in terms of the finesse of the woodcuts and the skill of those who completed them with watercolours. Browsing through this extraordinary Botanical iconography we pass from a meticulous initial representation to stylization, which transforms the accuracy of the features into more abstract representative forms, so much so that without the binomial nomenclature, it would be difficult to identify the species.
Herbaria, plants, modern herbariums and florilegies by Domitilla Dardi
All this has opened up a world to me, because not all herbariums are the same. Illustrated botanical catalogs unite the world of science, art, history and imagination and can be very different from each other: in terms of content, scope of research, creativity of the authors, and even in terms of representative unscrupulousness. Following this intuition I would like to talk about a beautiful book called Herbaria, plants, modern herbariums and florilegies by Domitilla Dardi. The chapters are divided between real and invented herbaria, which go pleasantly from antiquity to modernity, thanks to the refined iconographic research of Carla Casu. The focus of this book is the question: where does the desire to put plants in order come from?
Ulysses Aldrovandi
It all begins with Ulisse Aldrovandi who, at the end of the 1500s, was the first to pose the problem of how to represent botany. With his alchemical herbarium, the Bolognese naturalist brings together a primordial scientific precision expressed in the realistic aspect of the illustrations, through fantastic representations, often accompanied by a collection of rumors and superstitions. He celebrated his Mandragora, represented in the form of an anthropomorphic root, or rather as a bearded man with arms and legs in the shape of roots with a crown of flowers on his head.
Voynich manuscript
The most mysterious herbarium ever is the Voynich Manuscript: a 15th-century illustrated codex, now housed in Yale’s Rare Book Library, composed of mysterious plants and writing that has never been deciphered. It owes its name to Wilfrid Voynich, a rare book dealer who bought it from the Jesuit college of Mondragone in 1912: inside was hidden a seventeenth-century letter from the rector of the University of Prague who had already sent it to his polygraph friend Athastasius Kircher hoping he would decipher it.
Codex Seraphinianus
It was certainly inspired by the Codex Seraphinianus created between 1976 and 1978 by Luigi Serafini: a fantastic reinterpretation between zoology, botany and mineralogy and much more that fascinated many intellectuals, from Calvino to Zeri, Bonito Oliva, Tim Burton and Federico Fellini .