Bricolage and the "Modern Order" of the Codex Roccabonella

Around 1445 the artist Andrea Amadio translated the plant imagery of a luxury herbal manuscript into a more extensive, stylistically-diverse illustrative cycle. This new manuscript contains the pharmacopeia of Venetian physician Nicolò Roccabonella (1386–1457), which distils traditional medical texts and compiles lexica of plant names (Bibl. Marciana, Lat. VI, 59 [=2548]). The textual and visual information constitutes his efforts to place the knowledge of plant drugs, as Roccabonella says, into “some more modern order”. In its improvised assemblage of traditions and sources, this “order” can appear disordered. However, the apparent randomness of Roccabonella’s text, while drawing on humanist methods of note-taking and knowledge-building, encourages a new kind of reading practice – one reinforced by the heterogeneity of Amadio’s illustrations. The herbal acts as a bricoleur, putting established artistic, literary, and medical systems into play with emerging forms of experiential knowledge. In form and content, the book creates a generative space for the construction and testing of new knowledge, what Roccabonella calls a “specific foundation” for the development of new fields of botanical and medical inquiry in the early modern era.