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.

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.

In this paper I will focus on the period c. 1530-c.1560 and on a cluster of Italian naturalists, their painters and patrons, in order to address the following two issues. The strong visual turn of natural history and the role of non-printed images in this period; the links in terms of methodology and persons involved between the study of plants and that of (aquatic) animals. Geographically those clusters link Venice, Rome, Padua, Bologna, Trento, and some further towns of northern Italy. Some of the key persons will be Daniele Barbaro, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Pietro Andrea Mattioli and Ippolito Salviani.

In early modern time, vegetal bodies fell under the investigations of natural philosophers, who used plants as tools to investigate nature and, even, to propose an alternative interpretation of nature and overturn the Aristotelian ontology. René Descartes’ mechanical philosophy of nature embodies one of these cases, as he considers plants nothing but living machines deprived of soul and constituted of particles of matter. Within this framework, vegetal bodies are such as clocks or automata, i.e., self-maintaining machines. In this talk, I will inspect Descartes’ interpretation of plants: the mechanical description of their internal structure and functioning in terms of particles and motion, the physiological explanation of their virtues and therapeutic uses, and their geometrical representation. In this case, I will also briefly span from what I consider Descartes’ sources, such as Isaac Beeckman, and followers, such as Henricus Regius and Florent Schuyl. I will then compare Descartes’ study of plants with Pierre Gassendi’s atomistic interpretation of vegetal bodies and Thomas Hobbes’ mechanization of vegetation. I will finally show how much these interpretations affected a mechanical study of plants in the second half of the seventeenth century, and especially in Nehemiah Grew, John Ray, and Marcello Malpighi.

In early modern times, a considerable increase in the knowledge of the exotic medicinal plants enriched the European pharmacopoeia. The introduction and presence of new medicinal botanical species coming from the East and the Americas is testified by their inclusion in the various treatises of medicine, natural history and systematic botany, in the pharmacopoeias, in the apothecary’s shops, and in the European botanical gardens of that period. During the entire sixteenth-century, under the influence of Galen’s theories, a difficult attempt was made to fit these new plants into the pre-existing taxonomy. The Galenic system, which had accommodated both the therapeutic use of the plants whose efficacy had been proved and the mechanical explanation of living bodies, during this century began to be affected by a progressive separation between the two hypotheses. On the one hand, the increasingly substantial natural history treatises that introduced unknown botanical species and, on the other hand, the mechanistic explanations of nature, all became the object of medical studies in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century. The claim that only by experimenting on the bodies of cavies could it be possible to attain the knowledge of the operation of living organisms was agreed upon by most physicians. The effort to find new remedies for old epidemic diseases gave rise to a growing interest in research, in the use of exotic plants, and in the verification of their therapeutic powers.