1 62 Botanical Illustration [ch. 



Waterlily (Text-fig. 65) is remarkable for its rhizome, on 

 which the scars of the leaf bases are faithfully represented. 

 This drawing is of interest, also, on account of its frank 

 disregard of proportion. The flower stalks are drawn not 

 more than twice as long as the breadth of the leaf! We 

 may, I think, safely conclude that the draughtsman knew 

 quite well that he was not representing the plant as it was, 

 and that he intentionally gave a conventional rendering, 

 which did not profess to be more than an indication of 

 certain distinctive features of the plant. This attitude of the 

 artist to his work, which is so different from that of the 

 scientific draughtsman of the present day, is seen with great 

 clearness in many of the drawings in mediaeval manuscripts. 

 For instance, a plant such as the Houseleek may be 

 represented growing on the roof of a house — the plant 

 being about three times the size of the building. No one 

 would imagine that the artist was under the delusion that 

 these proportions held good in nature. The little house was 

 merely introduced in order to convey graphic information 

 as to the habitat of the plant concerned, and the scale on 

 which it was depicted was simply a matter of convenience. 

 Before an art can be appreciated, its conventions must be 

 accepted. It would be as absurd to quarrel with the illus- 

 trations we have just described, on account of their lack 

 of proportion, as to condemn grand opera because, in real 

 life, men and women do not converse in song. The idea 

 of naturalistic drawings, in which the size of the parts 

 should be shown in their true relations, was of compara- 

 tively late growth. 



In 1485, the year following the first appearance of the 

 Latin ' Herbarius,' the very important work known as the 

 German ' Herbarius,' or ' Herbarius zu Teutsch,' made its 

 appearance at Mainz. As we pointed out in Chapter II, 

 its illustrations, which are executed on a large scale, are 

 often of remarkable beauty. Dr Payne considered some 

 of them comparable to those of Brunfels in fidelity of 

 drawing, though very inferior in wood-cutting. They are 

 distinctly more realistic than even those of the Venetian 

 edition of the Latin ' Herbarius,' to which we have just 

 referred. It is interesting, for instance, to compare the 

 drawings of the Dodder (Text-figs. 76 and jy) in the two 



