Pietro Andrea Mattioli, 1500-1577.
Petri Andreae Matthioli senensis medici : commentarij in sex libros Pedacij Dioscoridis Anazarbei De medica materia. Venetiis : Ex Officina Valgrisiana, 1565.

Mattioli, an Italian physician and botanist, is known today for his translations and commentary on the works of the Greek botanist Pedanios Dioscorides. Of the many editions of De medica materia that Mattioli produced, the most important is this 1565 edition which contains large woodcuts done by Giorgio Liberale and Wolfgang Meyerpeck. Because the engravers had to work within the confines of a small wood block, the images of the plants connform to a rectangular shape, even when that does not reflect the actual growth pattern. The artists did try to make the images attractive, however, filling the space with foliage and using shading to add depth.

Pierre Bulliard,1752-1793.
Herbier de la France, ou, Collection complette des plantes... A Paris : Chez Garnery ... Bleuet jeune ..., 1780-1791.

Herbier de la France is considered an herbal because it illustrates and orders plants according to the traditional divisions--medicinal, poisonous, edible. All of the six hundred plates were drawn, engraved and color printed by Bulliard. His use of three tint plates over an engraved outline was far ahead of his time. The delicacy of his color and line and the way that the images fill the page make this one of the loveliest of the eighteenth century botanical works.

Crispijn van de Passe, d. 1670.
Hortus floridus in quo rariorum & minus vulgarium florum icones ad vivam varamq<ue> formam accuratissime delineatae. Extant Arnheimij, apud Ioannem Ianssonium, bibliopolam ibid [1614-1616].

Perhaps the greatest of the early horticultural works using copperplate engraving, Hortus Floridus shows the great control and detail possible with this technique. Van de Passe was a member of a famous family of Dutch engravers and went on to become a Professor of Drawing at a school for the education of the royal pages in Paris. Unlike the stiff and artificial look of most seventeenth century botanical works, Hortus Floridus shows the plants planted in the earth, sometimes accompanied by insects or animals. Most of the flowers shown in the book are tulips, crocuses, and other flowering bulbs. The Dutch enthusiasm for collecting and planting these flowers led to the "tulipomania" of 1636 and 1637, when speculation in the investment of tulip bulbs caused a natonwide financial crisis.

Pierre Vallet, fl. 1600
Le Jardin du Roy Très Chrestien, Loys XIII, Roy de France et de Navare ... A Paris: Et se vandent au Logis de l'auteur, Rue du Four,1623.

Vallet presents a selection of plants from the French Royal Gardens. Although the illustrations are botanically correct, the work is not a gardening book, but a pattern book for painters, embroiderers, and tapestry weavers. Vallet was, himself, not only a royal gardener but also a royal embroiderer. As a further aid to the artist and designer, the text describes the colors of the flowers represented in the uncolored plates.

John Parkinson, 1567-1650.
Paradisi In Sole Paradisus Terrestris, or A Garden of all sorts of pleasant, flowers which our English ayre will permit to the noursed vp... London: Printed by Hvmfrey Lownes and Robert Yovng at the signe of the Starre on Bread-street hill, 1629.

Parkinson was the apothecary to James I and botanist to Charles I. Paradisi is the earliest important treatise on horticulture published in England and marked the transition between the herbal which focused solely on the medicinal use of plants and the modern gardening book which viewed plants as ornament and objects of beauty. The original woodcuts for the book were made by A. Switzer, a German artist working in England.

Giovanni Battista Ferrari, 1584-1655.
Flora: ouero, Cvltvra di fiori del Roma. Facciotti: 1638.

Giovanni Battista Ferrari, a Jesuit priest, intended this work to be both a serious work of botany and an object of beauty. Flora is a manual on ornamental flowers and their cultivation. The illustrations, done in copperplate engraving, are a mix of new designs by well known artists of the period and others copied from florilegia being published at that time in Northern Europe. One of the artists was Anna Maria Variana (active in Rome circa 1630), possibly the first woman professional botanical illustrator.

Nicolas Robert, 1614-1684.
Variae ac multiformes florum species appressae ad viuum et aeneis tabulis incisae = diverses fleurs dessinees et gravees d'apres le naturel. London: Scolar Press, 1975. Facsimile of the Paris ed., ca. 1660, from a copy in the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society.

Robert started out as a painter of ornamental flower pictures but his work became more botanically oriented after he was hired by the Duke of Orleans to draw the rare and exotic plants and animals brought to the Duke's gardens. Scholars believe that the Scottish botanist Robert Morison, director of the gardens, encouraged Robert to take a more scientific approach to his subject.

Caspar Commelin, 1667?-1731.
Caspari Commelin ... Praeludia botanica ad publicas plantarum exoticarum demonstrationes ... Lugduni Batavorum: Apud Fredericum Haringh, 1703.

Commelin was a Dutch physician and botanist and held the chair of botany at the university at Amsterdam. He was instrumental in making the Amsterdam botanical garden one of the finest of its time. Because Holland was a trading center for its colonies around the world, new plant specimens were constantly being brought back to the gardens. The plate "Geranium aftricanum" was the first depiction and description of the geranium and fixes the date of its introduction into European gardens. The plate was engraved by Pieter Sluyter.