
Luke Batterham
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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).