Anleitung zu der Pflanzenkenntniss
First and only edition of this remarkable work illustrated with 101 beautiful plates of plants in original hand-coloring.
These 101 woodcuts were printed from the original blocks from famous Fuch’s De stirpium Historia (1572).
A beautiful copy preserved in its contemporary binding.
Folio of (1) title-page with a large engraved vignette, (4), 129, (1) pp., 2 engraved plates and 100 wood-cut plates (with 101 illustrations of plants, in fine original hand-coloring, printed on good paper, internally fine and clean. Contemporary half-calf, ribbed spine with gilt filets, lettering-piece in red morocco, red edges.
383 x 235 mm.
Schinz, Salomon. Anleitung zu der Pflanzenkenntniss und derselben nützlichsten Anwendung. Mit hundert illuminirten Tafeln.
Zürich, Verlag des Waysenhauses, 1774.
First and only edition of this remarkable work illustrated with 101 beautiful plates of plants in original hand-coloring.
Dunthorne, 275; Hunt, 640; Nissen, BBI 1761; Stafleu & Cowan, TL2 10722.
The 101 woodcuts are printed from the original blocks of Fuchs 'De Stirpium historia', 1542, the most celebrated herbal ever published.
"The only apparent difference is the removal of the (printed) plant-names from the old plates and the printing of new ones at the bottom. It is interesting to compare the handcoloring in the eighteenth-century volume with that in its great sixteenth-century predecessor" (Hunt).
In the preface Schinz explains how he discovered the original woodblocks of Fuchs and how they were coloured in the Zurich orphanage. The large woodcuts are beautifully hand-coloured.
Christoph Salomon Schinz (1764-1847) was a Swiss physician and botanist at Zürich.
Salomon Schinz, smallpox vaccine pioneer, Zürich´s Medical Institute founder and Botanical Garden main promoter, naturalist and botanist, selected and printed out 101 from the 512 original Leonhart Fuchs´s "De Historia Stirpium" (Basel, 1542) wood blocks; which back then were to be found in the possession of the Gessner family whose heiress: Magdalena, he also had married.
"De Historia Stirpium" is seen as one the most beautiful herbal ever published and definitely as the crown jewel of the German Renaissance. issued in 1542 in Basel.
A beautiful copy, printed on good paper illustrated with 101 plates of plants in original hand-coloring, preserved in its contemporary binding.
