Herbal facts and thoughts / by Arnold C. Klebs.

  • Arnold Klebs
Date:
[1925]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Herbal facts and thoughts / by Arnold C. Klebs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    palaige +3 erg emcee Ulrich Han, another early Roman printer, had given the example by illustrating his editions of the Meditationes of Cardinal Torquemada (in 1467, 1473 and 1478), usually considered the first illustrated book printed in Italy. Then between 1470 and 1480 appeared from other presses the Mirabilia Romae, a guide book for pilgrims, with woodcut views. Lignamine himself, as we know from his Sibylline portraits in the opuscula of his Sicilian friend and compatriot Barbieri, had in 1481 exploited the work of an engraver whose name we ignore but who, to judge by the style of his work, was probably an Italian. For reasons which it would take too long to recite here, I believe that it is not at all impossible that Lignamine actually published the Herbarium of Apuleius at the same time or shortly before the opuscula by Barbieri, that is before December 1481 and not in 1483 or 4 as has been heretofore asserted on the basis of certain dates given in the printed introduction *). The fixation of the date of the issue of Lignamine’s Herbarium has a certain importance, for had it appeared only at the end of 1483 or in 1484, it could hardly have had any influence on the next step in herbal production which was taken by Peter Schoffer in Mainz early in 1484. As we now see the matter, a printed copy of the Apuleius had ample time to reach Mainz and directly suggest to the shrewd pupil and partner of Gutenberg a venture in which he was to prove himself eminently successful. But even if there was time for Schoffer to get his inspiration from the Roman book we will be told that the two books bear no comparison, that the Apuleius was a crude product and Schoffer’s Herbarius an infinitely finer production. When we lay the two books side by side, as we can in this collection, we have to be powerfully prejudiced if we cannot detect the striking points of resemblance. We find 131 plants in the Apuleius and 150 in the Herbarius. A serial number at the top, the plant picture below, then its name and synonymes, vestiges of a description, its habitat with its medicinal uses. That is the arrangement of the material in both books, an arrangement that had been consecrated through centuries by generations of copyists, and now in printed form opened routes for the further development which was to set in with truly vertiginous speed. It is beside the mark to claim that the pictures *) How Schreiber in the latest review of the subject: Kriuterbiicher des XV. und XVI. Jahrhunderts, Miinchen 1924, p. IV, manages to date Lignamine’s edition 1493 is as little understandable as his characterization of the pictures as “frightfully crude and notable chiefly because of the black snake-like worms curling around the roots of the plants [!]”.
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