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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Botanical illustration | 6/11 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botanical_illustration | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:43:35.237685+00:00 | kb-cron |
It was John Ray who brought them to light by applying them to his own botanical classification work, and, through Ray, Carl von Linné eventually incorporated them into his own system. Jacob Marrel's stepdaughter Maria Sibylla Merian, who published her first book in 1675, included insects in her floral pictures. Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705) showed caterpillars and the plants to which they are attached. Her daughters Rachel Ruysch and Dorothea Maria Graff were also flower painters. The most important work on plant systematics in the 17th century was the Historia generalis plantarum ('The General History of Plants', 1686) by John Ray (1627–1705), on which Linnaeus based his work and whom he proclaimed the 'founder' of systematics. The botanist and draughtsman Charles Plumier, who made four botanical expeditions (the first one in 1689), brought back a (now lost) herbarium and many drawings: Description des plantes de l'Amérique was published after the second voyage (1693), and Nova plantarum americanarum genera (1703) after the third. These works include plates showing flowers and fruits at different stages of development. A few decades earlier, Flora Sinensis (Vienna, 1656) had been published by a Jesuit missionary, Michał Boym. At the end of the 17th century, the first manuals for amateur painters appeared: in 1679, Claude Boutet published École de la mignature : Dans laquelle on peut facilement apprendre à peindre sans maître (Miniature art school: where you can easily learn to paint without a master'.). Chapters 88 and following are dedicated to the painting of flowers. The idea for the manual was taken up by a former pupil of Nicolas Robert, Catherine Perrot, received at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (1682): The Royal Lessons, or the Method of Painting Miniatures of Flowers and Birds, based on an Explanation of the Books on Flowers and Birds by the late Nicolas Robert, Flower painter (1686), recommends (Preface and Chapter I) imitating Robert's works rather than those of one "Baptiste de la Fleur", presumably a nickname for rising star Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer whose Le Livre de toutes sortes de fleurs d'après nature shows flowers with botanical accuracy and served decorative designers for decades. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort published his first work, Éléments de botanique ou méthode pour connaître les plantes, in 1694. In the preliminary notice, he noted that "the method followed is based on the structure of flowers and fruits. One cannot depart from it without getting into strange difficulties...". The book, illustrated with 451 excellent plates by Claude Aubriet, was an immediate success. Tournefort himself translated it into Latin as Institutiones rei herbariae as the use of Latin was still necessary to ensure a wide readership throughout Europe. He introduced a sophisticated hierarchy of classes, sections, genera and species, and was the first to systematically use a polynomial nomenclature. Towards the end of the 17th century, the first microscopic observations of plants were made and the study of plant anatomy developed rapidly, which was to have a major influence on later classifications. Robert Hooke's Micrographia, (1667), contains a large number of observations made with the microscope. Modern plant pathology started with Robert Hooke illustrating a fungal disease, rose rust (1665). Marcello Malpighi used the microscope to study the anatomy of all kinds of organisms; his work, Anatomia Plantarum (1675), contains studies of plant anatomy and systematic descriptions of the different parts of plants. Nehemiah Grew's The Anatomy of Plants (1682) displays detailed anatomical diagrams and cross sections of flowers and other plant structures, including the first known microscopic description of pollen. This makes it all the more curious to see that Abraham Munting's best known work, Naauwkeurige Beschryving Der Aardgewassen (Description of Terrestrial Plants, 1696), shows plants against a background of classic or pastoral landscapes. His Phytographia curiosa, 1702, also has inhabited landscapes in the background, reminiscent of the work of Gherardo Cibo at the end of the 16th century.