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Basilius Besler
Hortus Eystettensis 1613
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Datura Turcarum
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Hand Colored Copper Engraving
Image size: 17
by 21 inches
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Sold
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Basilius Besler¹s magnificent
engravings are the first large-folio natural history botanicals.
His work, Hortus Eystettensis (Garden of Eichstätt), is man¹s
earliest documentation of a specific garden and is the oldest
of all of the great botanicals. Over 1,000 varieties of flowers
are depicted in 367 exquisitely engraved and colored plates. In
the early 1600s, the Prince Bishop of Eichstätt, Johann Konrad von Gemmingen, prince and bishop
of Eichstätt in Bavaria, Germany
created what was probably the first comprehensive botanical garden
devoted to flowering plants. Many of the exotic flowers were imported
from the Americas and the Ottoman Empire.
Besler documented this vast garden, which was the only important European botanical
garden outside Italy, depicting each
plant as it bloomed throughout the four seasons. In fact, the work
is sometimes referred to as the Four Seasons.
Basilius Besler (1561 – 1629) was a respected Nuremberg apothecary
and botanist. The prince bishop commissioned Besler to compile
a codex of the plants growing in his garden, a task which Besler
took sixteen years to complete, the bishop dying shortly before
the work was published. Besler had the assistance of his brother
and a group of skilled German draughtsmen and engravers. The work
was named Hortus Eystettensis (Garden at Eichstätt). The
emphasis in botanicals of previous centuries had been on medicinal
and culinary herbs, and these had usually been depicted in a crude
manner. The images were often inadequate for identification, and
had little claim to being aesthetic. The Hortus Eystettensis changed
botanical art overnight. The plates were of garden flowers, herbs
and vegetables, exotic plants such as castor-oil and arum lilies.
These were depicted near life-size, producing rich detail.
The Hortus Eystettensis has tremendous
signifigance for botany: no garden of the Baroque age was documented
as precisely. Even 140 years after the publication of the first
edition in 1613, Carl von Linne (Carolus Linnaeus) still used
the illustrations from this work: describing them as incomparable
and cited them in his "Species plantarum". The Hortus
Eystettensis is exceptional for many reasons. It was the first
botanical in history to portray flowering plants as objects of
beauty and is considered to be the greatest early botanical picture
book. The Besler florilegium display every flower in its actual
size.