Dr. Jörn Günther - Rarebooks / Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and miniatures



			LEONHART FUCHS. De Historia Stirpium Commentarii insignes. Basel: Michael Isengrin, 1542.	Choose:
			First edition. 2°. 355 x 237 mm. 14 leaves, 896 pp., 2 leaves. 4 leaves inserted to the second quire ( ) containing a manuscript index to the depictions of the plants. - With (4 portraits included) 514 contemporary coloured woodcuts by Veit Rudolf Speckle after Albert Meyer and Heinrich Füllmaurer. - Overall a fine and clean copy, slight finger-staining at the beginning. The woodcuts with neat manuscript additions to the botanical names in Latin and French, written by at least two 18^th-century hands. - 18^th-century brown mottled calf, spine on six raised bands, compartments gilt, red edges. Title on spine label: "Fuschius/ De Hist. Plantarum". Worn, corners and extremeties of spine expertly restored. Text: ”The most celebrated herbal” (Horblit). – With his Historia stirpium of 1542 Leonhart Fuchs (1501-1566; Tübingen university professor for medicine, previously physician to margrave Jörg von Brandenburg) had created a herbal which, along with that by Otto Brunfels, marked the turning point in 16th-century botany. In addition to describing plants for their medical use, Fuchs also gives accurate botanical descriptions of more than 400 German and 100 foreign plants. With the foreign ones are the first descriptions of recently discovered American plants, such as maize (mistakenly thought by the author to originate in Turkey), pumpkin, chili pepper, and snap bean. The Latin text of the Historia stirpium, combined with the steep price of 15 gulden per folio volume, reduced the sales prospects. So the printer, to refund his expenses, successfully not only published pocket-editions with smaller illustrations – nicknamed the ‘Small Fuchs’, easy to handle on study outings – in Latin (1545, 1549), and in German (1545), he also brought out Dutch and German editions in folio, containing the large, unsurpassed original woodcuts. “No earlier herbal, even Brunfels’s Herbarum vivae eicones, is so distinguished. A number of the plant species names coined by Fuchs, for example, digitalis, were accepted by Linnaeus and are still in current usage” (Callery, p. 382). About a hundred years after Fuchs’s death, the French botanist Charles Plumier named the now well-known South-American plant with mostly red flowers in his honour ‘fuchsia’. Illustration: Fuchs’s book is particularly important because of the size and beauty of the true to life woodcuts (largely based on plants in Fuchs’s own garden in Tübingen), aiming at an ideal concept, and easy to remember. In some cases the development of a plant, from tender bud, to flower or blossom, to fruit, is demonstrated in a single cut. Full recognition was given to the three men who created the illustration, Füllmaurer (draughtsman), Meyer (drawer on the block), and Speckle (woodcutter), their portraits appearing at the end of the book, - quite astonishing for a period without the habit to refer to a book's collaborators and artists, much less to have their portraits drawn. The Historia originally appeared in both coloured and uncoloured states when first published. The thinness of the lines in the figures was intentional because Fuchs expected the illustrations to be coloured and did not want the natural form of plants to be obliterated by shading. The colouring in our copy is contemporary, and most likely was produced in the publisher's workshop. Leonhart Fuchs became heavily indebted by the book. He worked on a supplement but, unable to contribute to the printing costs, never found a publisher. The woodblocks with their proper finished drawings, yet uncut, were kept in the Tübingen University Library up to about the year 1900, then given to the Botanical Institute. During the time of the great German Inflation (1923) the blocks went to the Academy of Arts in Stuttgart, and many of them were dressed and misused. Only 25 blocks remained in Tübingen, of which 23 have been preserved and were published in 1983 (see below). However, Fuchs’s manuscript of this supplement including 1541 watercolour drawings survived and is now preserved in nine volumes at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna (Cod. 11117-11125). Provenance: During the 18^th century in the possession of a French scholar, most likely a botanist, as the inserted handwritten index, the complemented nomenclature and the binding imply. The author of the index includes a short commentary in French on Fuchs and the illustration of his oeuvre. He notes that he added to the nomenclature the technical terms of Tournefort, Bauhin and Linné. Literature: VD16, F 3242 – Adams F 1099. – PMM, no. 69. – Horblit 33b. – Davies, Fairfax Murray, no. 175. – Fünf Jahrhunderte Buchillustration, Nuremberg 1987, p. 87. – Bernadette C. Callery in Vision of a Collector, pp. 381f: no. 89. – Nissen, Botanische Buchillustration, no. 658. – Schreiber, Kräuterbücher, pp. XXXV-XLI. – Blunt/Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration, revised ed. 1994, pp. 64-72. – Wilfried Blunt/Sandra Raphael, The Illustrated Herbal, London 1979, pp. 123-129. – T. A. Spague/E. Nelmes, ‘The Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs’, in: The Journal of the Linnean Society of London. Botany 48 (1928/31), pp. 545-642. – G. Harig, ‘Zur Einschätzung des Kräuterbuchs von Leonhart Fuchs’, in: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Universität Erfurt, 14 (1968/9), pp. 71-77. – Hieronymus, Oberrheinische Buchillustration II, no. 456a. – Facsimiles: Leipzig 1938, with an appendix: H. Marzell, Leonhart Fuchs und sein New Kräuterbuch (1543); München 1964; Grünwald 1975; Stanford 1999. – For the intended supplement cf. Tübinger Kräuterbuchtafeln des Leonhart Fuchs, with accompanying text by K. Dobat, Tübingen 1983. – Die Kräuterbuchhandschrift des Leonhart Fuchs, ed. by Brigitte Baumann et. al., Stuttgart 2001.