Plant Drawings and Plant Scholars in the Late Middle Ages

This paper enquires the status of late medieval botanical scholars and their capacity to create botanical illustrations. Were plant scholars in the late Middle Ages able to draw at all? Could their own drawings be helpful for the plant studies they performed? Since Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages, painting plant illustrations had been a thorny issue. The ancient seminal naturalist Pliny d. E. had put the problem in a nutshell in his book Naturalis historia as follows: artists lacked crucial the botanical knowledge when copying plants from nature or even when making copies of other plant illustrations, and hence introduced unwillingly morphological mistakes in their illustrations. Scholars, on the other hand, had good botanical knowledge, but were not able to paint. Hence, scholars who were able to paint or draw would have contributed to resolve this old problem. The paper presents and discusses case studies from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and shows how plant scholars were involved in the creation of plant illustrations.