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Plants In Print:
Chicago Botanic Garden
Pick up a leaf; examine it from all sides. To the casual observer it may simply be 'a leaf.' To the botanist, the physician, the gardening expert, it may be something quite different. It may represent a recognized species, with health or healing benefits; a rare find, something to look up in a reference guide; a new ornamental to grace the garden; or for an explorer, a completely new species, whose healthful or economic benefits have yet to be divined. In any of these cases, it is more than simply a leaf: its veins, shape, divisions, color, and texture all bear witness to what it is, and all provide clues by which the botanist may communicate his find to other botanists; the physician, to other physicians. This necessity of orderly communication is the basis of Plants in Print: The Age of Botanical Discovery, and one of the surprise elements of this exhibition is how integrally art and science, grace and functionality became entwined over the four centuries of botanic illustration the exhibition covers. This well-organized exhibition of thirty-three rare printed botanic books from the Chicago Botanic Garden's rare book library packs a great deal into a modest space, without overwhelming the viewer and with offerings of curiosity, rare interest, and considerable and exquisite beauty. Plants in Print: The Age of Botanical Discovery, on exhibition at the Chicago Botanic Garden through November 7, 2004, traces the hand-in-hand development of plant discoveries and illustrated botanic books. Never before, and one may arguably state, never since, were scientific knowledge, economic benefit, and art's beauty so effectively combined. The earliest printed books on botanical subjects were produced in the late 1400s, within only a few decades of the invention of moveable type itself. Printed on paper, set in type, and with simple woodcut illustrations, they were actually considered inferior to the hand-lettered manuscripts on durable vellum which had for centuries been the staple means of book production, and which for centuries longer remained the standard 'deluxe edition' of a book worth having. They did, however, offer one key element: duplicability; and their subject matter, botanic reference, usually for medicinal purposes, shows why. The printer or publisher needed to turn a profit, and for this, he focused on books for which there was already a market. In this case, books on materia medica would be in demand by doctors, apothecaries and barbers. Historia Plantum [History of Plants] (Treviso: Bartholomaeus Confalonerius, 1483) opens the Plants in Print exhibition as one of the first botanical books created with a printing press. Printed in 1483, it is a Latin translation of the classic botanic reference written by Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher and scientist of the 2nd century B.C.. Nearby is an early printed copy of the definitive medieval medical reference, De materia medica (Cologne: Johann Schott, 1529) by Dioscorides, a Greek physician of the 1st century A.D.. These simple pages, primarily text, are easy to overlook. But both represent the quiet revolution that forms the origin of Plants in Print: the mass-production of herbal reference texts in printed form. These works had long been standard references, originating in classical antiquity, and passed down through fifteen hundred centuries of history and social change in manuscript form; both would have been well-known offerings, calculated to appeal to physicians and herbalists of the time. In these and other early works, woodcut prints were the standard medium and satisfied the need for basic, functional illustration. In woodcut printing the image is drawn on a block of wood and the 'blank' areas carved away to a certain depth. The result is a flat wood block with a raised design which, when inked and placed under pressure in a printing press, prints its likeness on the paper. The four irises portrayed in German botanist, Iacobus Theodorus's Eicones plantarum (Frankfurt: Nicolaeus Bassaeus, 1590) have a spare, linear beauty all their own, but show, as well, the limitations of the medium. Woodcut renders in black and white only, and emphasis or detail must be done through use of line. Here, the results are heavily-drawn ribs on each swordlike leaf, and a cabbagelike texture that represents the color-veining of the iris blossoms, both drawn with that slight, inescapable crudeness to the vigor, the 'gouged' quality, characteristic of the medium. The method itself permitted of few refinements, but served its functions: basic identification of a plant in what was intended as a practical, utilitarian reading copy, meant for usage rather than connoisseurship (an individual wealthy enough to be a connoisseur would have commissioned a hand-illustrated manuscript on vellum for his personal use). Still, printed botanic works opened up availability of these references to many people who had never had access to a book before. Now not only the wealthy library or physician, but every struggling apothecary or barber could afford a serviceable copy of the book -- and botanic knowledge could circulate more widely, and accurately, than ever before. The seventeenth century brought changes in the individuals interested in the books themselves, new interests in and attitudes toward science, and newly-developing economies behind the study of botany itself. This added factor of economic interest as fueling botanic illustration, in both technological development, frequency, and beauty, is one of the fascinating insights of Plants in Print. The money that was poured into botanic explorations and studies enabled publishers to employ a new means of illustration in their books, engraving; and the illustrative opportunities offered by engraving, similarly, satisfied the growing demand for scientifically accurate specifics and details. Woodcut's raised design was limited to a rather heavily carved wooden element. But engraving and etching, in which the artist incises a fine line onto a soft copper plate, could illustrate details down to the threadlike stamens of a flower or the hair-fine filaments of a root. And, through crosshatching or certain other processes related to etching, such as acid-wash, both methods could produce prints with remarkable gradations of shadowy tone. The portrait of Linnaeus in fanciful Lapland garb in Robert John Thornton's New illustration of the sexual system of Carolus von Linnaeus (London: T. Bensley, 1807) (the racy title refers merely to Linnaeus's scheme of organizing plants by unique features of their reproductive parts) shows the range of effects that may be obtained in engraving -- from velvety blacks through every conceivable shade of gray, and of course, the plain white of portions of untouched paper.
Gross distinctions -- good enough for the early herbalists and their woodcuts -- had been replaced by a need for greater levels of refinement. Where formerly there was just 'tea', just a 'tulip', now one distinguished different sub-varieties, each with its own subtle characteristics. With engraving, the distinctions of close species' leaves, flowers, roots, and seeds could all be rendered with greater accuracy. Woodcuts could not have satisfied the rising interest in scientific detail, not could it have provided the specifics and subtleties of distinction demanded by these new disciplines; engraving could, and did. At the same time plants were developing into an international trading commodity, and botanists and scientists rushed to discover, catalogue, understand and exploit these resources, identifying thousands of new species. The contributions of Swedish botanist, Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), covered in some detail in the exhibition and including several examples of his works in print, led to the worldwide adoption of what is now known as 'binomial nomenclature' -- a standardized, two-name system that permitted the classification of all the known plants in the world, and remains the basis for our scientific naming of plants to this day. Supplied with "a common language for discovery," botanic study and the combing of the earth for new and rare plants took off as never before. Likewise, the market for botanic works was no longer individuals or guilds seeking reference herbals; now whole governments became involved, with a dawning recognition of botany as a source of revenue or strategic advantage for European nations. Men set out or were sent out on expeditions and brought back thousands of specimens for eager governments seeking something new to sell at a profit. Asia, Africa, and the New World yielded valuable drugs such as quinine, trees to replenish European forests, and exports such as cane sugar, spices, and bananas. Instructive tracts such as John Evelyn's Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest Trees (London: R. Scott, 1664) discussed the economic issues of England's deforestation, while encyclopedic botanic guides such as John Parkinson's Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestrus (London: R.M., 1656) attempted to catalogue the thousands of known species. The published botanic guides of returning expeditions served as 'stock indexes', catalogues of the resources available for exploitation: what might be profitably grown back at home, exported in trade, or be serviceable for medical or industrial use. Books of botanic expeditions in Plants in Print include those focused on European interest in America, followed by Americans' own interest in their own native plants. In an echo of early herbals, several of the American works involve medical plant lore gathered from Native Americans, such as William Barton's Vegetable materia medica of the United States (Philadelphia: M. Carey and Son, 1817-1818). The exhibition includes a print of the American plant that most fired European imagination: the Venus's fly-trap, portrayed in John Ellis's Directions for bringing over seeds and plants (London: L. Davis, 1770). But the heights of Plants in Print's offerings are to be found in several nineteenth-century works which represent botanic printing at its finest. Lithography and its sister technique, chromolithography, brought further refinements to the illustrative process; the catalyst for their usage was connoissurship, as men of wealth invested in expeditions for personal gain, and wanted to showcase their finds (other books were funded through subscription, in which a number of persons contributed money toward the publishing project). The printed image itself developed an elegance that has not been equaled before or since. Lithography itself is a planographic printing process; no etching or raised design, but rather, use of a waxy lithographer's crayon to draw the image directly onto a flat stone. Good draughtsmanship comes to the fore, with an even greater freedom of control over line and shading. Chromolithography is a full-color version of the same process, requiring multiple stones for the same image, one for each color. An illustration from Volume I of Robert Warner's The Orchid Album (London: B.S. Williams, 1882), exemplifies this melding of fine-art printing and scientific demand for accuracy. The large-scale print of Laelia purpurata williamsii has a delicate cascading froth of white petals, suggested by the barest touch of line, and in contrast to the dramatic purple and pale yellow of the center. Monumental in size (each page is a breathtaking 24 x 30 inches), superb in rendering, and astonishing in its range of color on a single print, Aroideae Maximilianae by Heinrich Wilhelm Schott (Vienna: C. Gerold's Sohn, 1879) is a further example, and the exquisite high point of this exhibition. This magnificent work catalogued the findings of Ferdinand-Joseph Maximilian, second son of the Archduke of Austria, on a botanical expedition to Brazil in 1859. The illustrated plant is portrayed in its entirety on the page, surrounded by closeups of the specimen's flower, leaves, roots and seeds. The chromolithography itself displays a masterful command of the process, its range of color, hue and saturation ranging from the palest pink-white flush on the seeds and bulbs, to the contrasting mint-green and forest-green of the leaves, to the deep and dramatic purple-black and crimson of the illustrated flower. These handsome images required up to twenty stones for a single plate -- meaning that unlike a single pass of black ink printing, each printed page was run through the press twenty times, once per selectively-inked stone, and at times adding only the slighted blush or degree of shading to a detail. The book itself includes forty-two such plates. One can see the expense involved; but the reward is a level of subtle hue that is difficult to equal. With delicate colors and ranges of colors, clean lines, and artistic, yet impeccably detailed presentation, books such as the Aroideae Maximilianae represent printed botanic illustration at its height.
It is a height we have since lost. The twentieth century saw the advent of widespread photography which, though cruder in presentation, quickly became the accepted medium. Printing technology itself changed, sacrificing superb quality to more utilitarian concerns of mass-production and merely-adequate illustration. We tend to regard photography as state of the art, but the paradox is that fine printing can capture what photography, even, cannot. Good draughtsmanship can render an illustration more artfully on a page; multiple layers of inks can reproduce the fugitive bloom of must on a plant's leaf, or the iridescence of a butterfly's wing, visual effects far beyond the range of a photo. Only a few fine-art presses maintain such printing facilities today, and the rarity of the technique makes any contemporary production of such magnificent volumes prohibitively expensive. In this, we have lost ground to our nineteenth-century ancestors, whose skilled manipulation of engraving, lithography and color brought scientific printing to a fine art. The heights of printing seen in examples such as the Aroideae and Warner's The Orchid Book would be difficult if not impossible to duplicate today. It is all the more reason to see these magnificent examples of printing at its height. There is one criticism to be made of the curation of Plants in Print which is that, other than incidentally, neither the print medium nor the dimensions are included in the annotations accompanying the displayed books or in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. This is a dramatic oversight in this otherwise well-presented exhibition, and a particular irritation where the means of print illustration is integral to the exhibition topic itself. Located in an adjacent gallery, a companion exhibition, Treasures: Selections from the Rare Book Collection of the Chicago Botanic Garden features an additional display of twenty-four rare botanical works, also from the Botanic Garden's own library, including herbals, sketchbooks, floral illustrations by noted French illustrator Pierre-Joseph Redouté, and books devoted to landscape design, fruits, and fungi. Noteworthy items include a copy of Basilius Besler's monumental Hortus Eystettensis (Nurnberg, 1613), "the most famous botanical book of all time," open to an engraved sunflower of raw power; a lively, delicate squirrel from Victor Jacquemont's Voyage dans l'Inde (Paris: Firmin Didot fréres, 1844); and a print with unexpected appeal, Mrs. Thomas John Hussey's hand-colored lithograph of the mushroom Polyporus gigantius from Illustrations of British Mycology (London: Reeve, Brothers, 1847) -- impeccably realistic, exquisitely composed, and worthy of being an artistic piece in its own right. Treasures itself closes with a pair of hand-done botanic sketchbooks. Their charmingly idiosyncratic aspect, one open to a watercolor of purple amaranth, the other to a spray of crimson maple leaves, carries echoes back to the woodcuts of the early herbals, to an artistic process close to the artist. If it tempts the viewer to make another round, starting with the woodcuts of Plants in Print once again, so much the better. Rare, beautiful, informative and accessible, Plants in Print: The Age of Botanical Discovery and Treasures: Selections from the Rare Book Collection of the Chicago Botanic Garden will be at the Chicago Botanic Gardens through November 7, 2004. The evolution of print illustration, the growth of botany as an ordered science, and the taking of botanic prints to heights of connoisseurship are all entwined in this modest, yet satisfying exhibition of rare works. Thirty-three rare books in one gallery; a further twenty-four in another. For an additional pleasure, stroll the gardens themselves after visiting the exhibition; you may well find your senses sharpened. Both exhibitions are free of charge, as are the 300 acres of botanic gardens themselves. There is, however, a slight fee for parking. Plants in Print: The Age of Botanical Discovery was previously hosted at the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. from April 1 - July 15, 2004. As of January 2005 this portable exhibition will be available to tour to other locations upon request; see the web site, www.plantsinprint.org, for more information. A 40-page exhibition catalogue for Plants in Print: The Age of Botanical Discovery is available in the gift shop of the Chicago Botanic Gardens. Priced at $4.95, it offers a complete overview of the exhibition and includes a list of the exhibited books, brief biographies of their authors and artists, and a short glossary of printmaking techniques. --Katherine Rook Lieber Katherine Rook Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net. Editorial Note: All quotations are from the exhibition catalogue unless otherwise identified. |
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