Herbal
Illustrated manuscript on paper
Northern Italy, end of 15th century
202 x 142 mm
119 leaves. 108 watercolours (one plant per page) of herbs mostly on verso pages, with plant names in brown ink in Italian as well as information about the growing environment of the plants.
This is an unknown and unpublished Herbal from Northern Italy that may have been meant as an illustrated manual for alchemical recipes. It is an important example of a Herbal in the late 15th century, whose illustrations were not intended to identify plants, but rather served as symbols of the actually existing plants.
Almost every plant in this volume has been given a name and a short explanation, usually written above the illustration. The plant names are not arranged alphabetically and probably written in a northern Italian vernacular. It is questionable if the writer was a botanist or an apothecary. Judging by the appearance of the script, he was not a professionally trained scribe.
The brief explanations of their occurrence and growth often emphasise high and cold mountain areas, i.e. plants that grow well at high altitudes, in very cold regions or on alpine meadows. In some cases, the author refers to dark beech forests. For the onion, it is claimed that it thrives along the coast and the Castel Sant’Angelo, which presumably refers to Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. A thorough evaluation of these captions could certainly help to determine the place of origin of this manuscript more precisely.
These illustrated herbals are extremely rare on the art market. According to our research, around twenty herbals or pharmacopoeias have been offered for sale at auctions or in antique shops since 1900. Some of them consisted of only a few pages and were probably incomplete. It is difficult to say whether all of these books contained illustrations, as the descriptions in old auction catalogues often provide only sparse information. At least two of the herbariums offered for sale in the last 125 years are now in public collections.
