lyo Botanical Illustration [ch. 



ablest men had shown a tendency to despise the craft and 

 to hold aloof from it. 



The engravings in Brunfels' herbal and the fine books 

 which succeeded it, should not be considered as if they were 

 an isolated manifestation, but should be viewed in relation 

 to other contemporary and even earlier plant drawings, which 

 were not intended for book illustrations. Some of the 

 most remarkable are those by Albrecht Diirer, which were 

 produced before the appearance of Brunfels' herbal, during 

 the first thirty years of the sixteenth century. In each 

 of his coloured drawings of sods of turf, known as " das 

 grosse Rasenstiick," and "das kleine Rasenstiick," a tangled 

 group of growing plants is portrayed exactly as it occurred 

 in nature, with a marvellous combination of artistic charm 

 and scientific accuracy. Prof Killermann has been at pains 

 to identify the genus and species of almost every plant 

 represented, and has described the drawings as "das erste 

 Denkmal der Pflanzenokologie." In 1526, Diirer carried 

 out a beautiful series of plant drawings, among the most 

 famous of which are those of the Columbine, and the 

 Greater Celandine. The former is reproduced on a small 

 scale in Plate XVII ; it is scarcely possible to imagine a 

 more perfect "habit drawing" of a plant. 



In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci's exquisite studies of plants, 

 of which Plate XVII I is an example, must also have pointed 

 the way to a better era of herbal illustration. In his work, 

 the artistic interest predominates over the botanical to a 

 greater extent than is the case with Diirer's drawings. It 

 is strange to think that numerous editions of the ' Ortus 

 Sanitatis ' and similar books, with their crude and primitive 

 wood-cuts, should have been published while such an artist 

 as Leonardo da Vinci was at the zenith of his powers. 

 If internal evidence alone were available, it might plausibly 

 be maintained that the engravings in the ' Ortus Sanitatis ' 

 and the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci were centuries 

 apart. 



We are thus led to the conclusion that, though the 

 engravings in Brunfels' herbal are separated from previous 

 botanical figures by an almost impassable gulf, they should 

 not be regarded as a sudden and inexplicable develop- 

 ment. The art of naturalistic plant drawing had arrived 



