Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean

In Botanical Icons, Griebeler challenges the argument that for much of the premodern era, botanical illustration was a moribund practice of uncritical copying. In selecting examples from Greek, Roman, and Arabic sources, especially illustrated versions of Dioscorides’s De materia medica dating from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, Griebeler argues for the presence of critical practices across the Mediterranean basin in the premodern era, which he defines as “exercises of reasoned and informed judgement” (p. 2). Griebeler argues that knowledge can be “conveyed and transmitted primarily through visual, depictive means, in ways that are complementary and sometimes even contradictory to other, primarily verbal, means of creating botanical knowledge” (pp. 2–3). Choosing to describe the premodern images as icons rather than as illustrations allows Griebeler to hypothesize how the images were used and affected by their makers’ cultural philosophies and philology, possibly working as visual primers and mnemonics, as distinct from today’s botanical illustration practice, which focuses solely on depicting the accurate appearance of a plant. Covering such a lengthy period with a paucity of material to consult, Griebeler explains that the book is not intended as a survey, but as a narrative arc based on case studies that build his argument.The text is organized into eight chapters: the first four set out the background, and the following four form the argument. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the Hellenistic and Roman origins of botanical knowledge and the production of illustrated herbals in the first century. Chapter 3 describes pictorial development between the second and sixth centuries, including the introduction of mnemonics and habitat indications. Chapter 4 traces the transformation of Dioscorides’s original, unillustrated, pharmacopeial manuscript into shortened, alphabetized, illustrated herbaria. Griebeler states that extant illustrations, possibly from popular traditions, may have been reused and matched to textual descriptions. Matching images to text without knowing exactly which plant was referred to resulted in some misinformation, with the image seeming to indicate a different plant from the one referred to in the text. These errors became apparent to medieval Greek, Arabic, and Latin readers and users of the texts, leading to the critical correction of the imagery. Examining examples of their corrections forms the basis Griebeler’s argument through the following four chapters.Chapter 5 explains how cultural and institutional changes transformed the Mediterranean between the fifth and ninth centuries. However, the pursuit of botanical knowledge in illustrated volumes persisted, although dissemination of the shared botanical heritage varied across the Mediterranean basin. In monasteries in the Latin West, scribes and illustrators worked closely together while copyists were independently contracted in Byzantium. Their counterparts in the Islamic tradition were professionals. These differences are examined in chapters 6 and 7 as medieval scholars across all three regions worked to both correct and create knowledge.Chapter 6, entitled “The Critical Copy,” is pivotal to Griebeler’s argument that copying did not always result in the loss of visual information, and that critical practices improved and elaborated the visual content. Griebeler illustrates his point with pictorial examples of Spanish Broom (Spartium junceum L.) from two fifteenth- and sixteenth-century De materia medica manuscripts made in Constantinople. These are compared with a fourteenth-century annotation to the sixth-century Vienna Dioscorides (figure 6.9, pp. 152–53), which Griebeler describes as a “sketch” (p. 150). This is troubling as the annotation is the only version that shows varying views of the flowers and includes the pedicels, a morphological character that today aids identification. The term “observational line drawing” would be more accurate. Labelling it a “sketch” overlooks the fact that the illustrations of this plant in both the Chigi and Padua Dioscorides are examples of Pliny the Elder’s “hazards of copying,” resulting in the degeneration of the image (p. 9). There is ongoing additive, critical practice; however, it is not chronologically linear here.Chapter 7 discusses the additive process of restoring information from Dioscorides’ first-century text for De materia medica during the Middle Ages to the abridged earlier versions. This, plus medical developments, required the production of new illustrations. Tractatus de herbis, an illustrated early fourteenth-century Italian manuscript, is usually referenced as the first evidence for illustrations observed directly from nature since antiquity. However, Griebeler describes ex novo practice in the early tenth-century Greek Morgan Dioscorides and an early thirteenth-century Arabic Dioscorides in the Topkapi library in Istanbul, which also contains nature printing, possibly the earliest adoption of this technique within scientific enquiry. Textual evidence that an Arabic scholar commissioned painters to observe nature directly in the thirteenth century is presented, although, unfortunately, the resultant work is not extant. Chapter 8 discusses how these critical practices affected the development of botanical illustration in medieval and early modern Western Europe.Pre-publication input from a botanist or a botanical illustrator could have helped catch some terminology errors, such as the illustration of Geranium tuberosum L. (figure 6.8, from the Morgan Dioscorides) showing an infructescence (not inflorescence, p. 148). That is a minor point, and Griebeler’s research is thought-provoking and makes a valuable, insightful contribution by engaging with the imagery to interpret it as it was used, and uncovering evidence for ex novo illustration practices, such as observation from life, predating those credited to Western European botanical illustration practice. There are surprises, such as the pictorial device of a figure, possibly a sea goddess, to indicate the watery habitat of the coral (regarded as a plant at the time) illustrated in the sixth-century Vienna Dioscorides, a practice usually considered medieval. Excepting the example in chapter 6 discussed above, the argument is presented eloquently alongside convincing, pictorial evidence for critical practice and contact between Arabic, Greek, and Latin scholars in the field of botanical enquiry from late antiquity to the early medieval period in the Mediterranean basin. The text is laid out clearly, and the reproduced images are an absolute pleasure to pore over.