New Kreuterbuch

In-folio de 444 ff. ornés de 522 gravures sur bois dont 515 de plantes à pleine page, 2 plus petites, une marque et 4 portraits, qq. ff. restaurés. Peau de truie moderne réutilisant une reliure ancienne sur ais de bois.

347 x 230 mm.

Édition originale de l’édition allemande imprimée en 1543 enrichie de nouvelles gravures de plantes au nombre ici de 517 par rapport à l’édition latine de 1542. Fuchs (1501-1566) possédait un exemplaire de cette édition de 1543.

« Bien qu'étant une référence scientifique fiable, The New Herbal de 1543 s'est surtout fait connaître par le détail et la qualité de ses illustrations. Parallèlement à des essais décrivant les caractéristiques, les origines et les pouvoirs médicinaux des plantes, Fuchs a présenté chaque plante avec des illustrations méticuleuses de gravures sur bois, affinant la capacité d'identification rapide des espèces et établissant de nouvelles normes de précision et de qualité dans les publications botaniques.

Depuis l'âge de la grande exploration, The New Herbal a également documenté les types de plantes du Nouveau Monde récemment découvert, offrant le premier enregistrement visuel du tabac, du maïs, du haricot rouge et du cactus. Cette édition est basée sur la copie personnelle de Fuchs, coloriée à la main, qui a miraculeusement survécu à quatre siècles et demi en parfait état. Fascinant pour les historiens de la médecine et de l'art, les jardiniers, et toute personne intéressée par la phytothérapie, le volume comprend plus de 500 illustrations splendides et un essai explorant l'histoire des herbes médicinales » [A propos de la réédition de 2022].

From classical times to the early sixteenth century not much progress had been made in medical botany. It all stemmed from. Dioscorides (20). Text and illustrations of botanical works—both manuscript and printed— were derived from classical sources and had on the whole altered only for the worse, through continued copying from generation to generation. Consequently the numerous printed herbals of the fifteenth century, books such as the Hortus Sanitatis, were crude in text and woodcuts. But a change took place early in the sixteenth century. It is first manifested in the work of Brunfels, who engaged the artist Hans Weiditz to illustrate his Herbarum Vivae Icônes, Strasbourg, 1530-6. This in turn inspired Leonhard Fuchs to publish his « Commentaries on the History of Plants », perhaps the most celebrated and most beautiful herbal ever published.

Fuchs was professer of medicine at Tübingen ; and as such his primary objectives were to improve the know-ledge of materia medica and to show the largest possible number of plants useful as drugs and herbs. He described four hundred German and one hundred foreign plants and illustrated them in five hundred and twelve superb woodcuts. These were designed by Heinrich Fullmauer and Albert Meyer, and executed by Veit Rudolph Speckle, whose portraits appear in the book—one of the earliest examples of such a tribute paid to artists in a printed book. Yet Fuchs’s interest in plants was not wholly pharmacological ; he dilates upon the beauties of nature, and he is enough of a true botanist to describe the characteristics of plants, their habits, habitats, and forms.

In the text the plants are arranged in alphabetical order : there is no classification, no plant geography, nothing about their relations with otherliving things. Fuchs's text still draws heavily on classical learning—he was a Renaissance man—but he was acquainted with north-western European species and even American plants like maize. The fuchsia, when it was brought from America, was named after him. However, the air of modernity is clearest in the woodcuts, based on first-hand observation of the living plant and establishing a standard of plant illustration which has been followed until our own day. Fuchs's Herbal, as it is generally known, was an immediate success ; it was frequently reprinted and freely translated at first in folio, but later in pocket edtions.

« The illustrations are perhaps the most influential set in botanical history, being used or copied in various formes for several centuries ». Cat. Arpad Plesch, I, 272.

A complete copy in delicate contemporary coloring (only the four portraits and the rear printer's device uncolored) and of the many marginal notes. Goodmargins, but bound in rather tightly and some very occasional cropping to woodcuts or ms. Notes, a few ll. repaired. In modem pigskin binding over wooden boards using blind-tooled 16^th-century covers, two clasps.