Skip to main content

This auction has ended. View lot details

You may also be interested in

Own a similar item?

Submit your item online for a free auction estimate.

Lot 518

FUCHS (LEONHARD)
De historia stirpium commentarii insignes

22 November 2011, 10:30 GMT
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £5,625 inc. premium

Own a similar item?

Submit your item online for a free auction estimate.

How to sell

Looking for a similar item?

Our Books & Manuscripts specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.

Find your local specialist

Ask about this lot

Footnotes

A TALL AND VERY CLEAN COPY OF "Perhaps the most celebrated and most beautiful herbal ever published" (PMM).

Leonhard Fuchs (1501-1566), professor of medicine at Tübingen, is considered is one of the three German fathers of modern botany, alongside Otto Brunfels and Hieronymous Bock. Fuchs gives accurate descriptions of nearly 500 plants, of which forty had never before been depicted. Approximately 400 were native German plants, the others foreign, initiating the history of some American plants including maize (mistakenly thought by Fuchs to have come from Turkey).

The Historia "is important in the history of botanical illustration particularly because of the size and beauty of the woodcuts" which were realised by Heinrich Füllmauer, Veit Rudolph, and Albert Meyer, who drew the original images from life, mostly using samples from Fuchs' garden. Their portraits, with that of the author, appear in the book, being "one of the earliest examples of such a tribute paid to artists in a printed book" (PMM).

Additional information

Bid now on these items

ADVERTISING POSTERfor 'The Suffragette' newspaper, [c.1913-1914]

ARCHITECTURE - STUART (JAMES) AND NICHOLAS REVETT The Antiquities of Athens, 4 vol. bound in 2, 1825-1830

ILLUMINATED ADDRESS – CLARA CODD Illuminated printed address signed by Emmeline Pankhurst, [1909]

ARMENIAN - HISTORY, THEOLOGY AND PRINTING. Group of books/a map in Armenian, c.1825-1901 (12)

MUSIC & RECORDINGS – ETHEL SMYTH Collection of printed music, song sheets and records, [c.1911-1912]

BANK NOTES - MANUFACTURING BRADBURY (HENRY) On the Security and Manufacture of Bank Notes, FIRST EDITION, Bradbury and Evans, 1856