Die Krauterbuchhandschrift des Leonhart Fuchs (review)

When Leonhart Fuchs published his beautifully illustrated herbal, De historia stirpium, in 1542 (with a German edition in 1543), he regarded it as the first installment of a much larger project. The Tübingen physician-botanist continued to describe additional plants and to commission drawings and woodcuts of them, but he could not find a patron or a printer willing to underwrite the massive investment that publication would require. At his death in 1566, Fuchs left three folio volumes of manuscript, watercolors, and woodcut proofs—more than 4,500 pages in all—which eventually found their way to the Austrian National Library in Vienna.

Fuchs would be gratified at the continuing interest in his work half a millennium after his birth. In recent years, black-and-white near-facsimiles of De historia stirpium have appeared in print and on CD-ROM (from Stanford University Press and Octavo, respectively), and Taschen has published a near-facsimile of Fuchs's own brilliantly colored copy of the German version. The massive commentary by Frederick G. Meyer, John L. Heller, and Emily Emmart Trueblood that accompanied the Stanford facsimile elucidated an array of complex botanical and bibliographical matters.

The book that would have most pleased Fuchs, I think, is this new publication about his manuscript herbal. After all, he had already enjoyed acclaim for the printed herbals, but the unpublished manuscript had never reached the audience it deserved. This commentary adds an enormous amount of information and analysis and quite properly emphasizes the pictures. Fuchs was deeply proud of his herbal's illustrations, and paid a unique tribute to his artists by including their portraits in De historia stirpium. He would be very happy that the complete set of 1,500-plus images is finally available in some form to the world, although he would be understandably disappointed that, even now, most of the figures appear only in black-and-white reproductions at roughly one-sixth the size of the originals.

Fuchs would also be delighted at the editorial team's care in explicating his accomplishment. After two hundred pages of impressive commentary, the editors systematically provide, for each reduced figure, a remarkable amount of information in telegraphic form. These condensed entries give Fuchs's Latin and German plant names; his notes on where the plant grew (valuable for plant geography and ecology); tentative identification of the artist and dating of the watercolor; corresponding woodcuts in the 1542 and 1543 herbals; notes on other sixteenth-century illustrations of the plant; later uses of Fuchs's image; the modern scientific name; and references to modern botanical literature.

For the color plates, thirty-odd watercolors (mostly full-size) have been intelligently chosen to exemplify as many issues as possible concerning the botanical significance and production of the images. It is particularly interesting to see Fuchs communicating with his artists: when a watercolor needed correction, he drew a little stylized hand pointing to a detail, with a brief German note telling what needed attention; on the painting of Populus nigra, his own confident pen seems to have added the line drawing of the proper recurved shape of the black poplar leaf.

The commentary is very good in drawing the connections between Fuchs's manuscript and the work of other naturalists. His restless student Leonhart Rauwolff, for example, left Tübingen and botanized from university to university through France, northern Italy, and Switzerland before taking up a post in Augsburg. On facing pages, the editors contrast photographs of Rauwolff's dried specimens with black-and-white reproductions of corresponding watercolors in Fuchs's manuscript. It is instantly obvious that Fuchs had the use of the herbarium and that the artist, Jerg Ziegler, departed very little from the arrangement of the dried plant on the page—except when he had to extrapolate a whole tree from the sprig of leaves on Rauwolff's herbarium sheet.

For all the riches of this...