The Role of Images in Early Modern Botany

Fabrizio Baldassarri, To Illustrate or not to Illustrate: Picturing a Science of Plants in the Early Modern Period
Illustrations have never played a secondary role in the history of science and knowledge. In botanical studies, they not only visualize the form of a plant, facilitating its identification, but also show its essence, aiding in processes of description and classification, paving the way to attain scientific knowledge. Yet the function and meaning of illustrations shifted over time. In the Middle Ages, plant images carried a holistic character: they sought to convey not just the specimen’s appearance but also its symbolic resonances, mythologies, and medicinal virtues. By the seventeenth century, however, illustrations assumed a new epistemic status, sometimes contrasting to the rise of illustrations of Renaissance botany. Echoing the Hamlet-like dilemma of whether to include or omit images, in this talk I examine the changing role of botanical illustration through the case of the mandrake—from Brunfels and Fuchs, to Aldrovandi and Cesalpino, and finally to Malpighi and Grew. In tracing these transitions, I show how plant images in pre-modern science evolved from vehicles of symbolic meaning into instruments for transmitting empirical knowledge about the powers of plants, somehow paralleling the opposition between natural and artificial and the challenges of observing nature in itself or reproducing it. More in general, reflections over the role of illustrations reveal a good lens to understand early modern botany.

Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen, Leaves and Spores: Imaging Microscopic Observations of Ferns in Early Modern Europe
European ferns were a familiar plant to early modern naturalists, as they were frequently described and depicted in herbals and botanical treatises. In the seventeenth century, however, naturalists began to turn to their spores, studying ferns with a different vision through the microscope and creating a new line of images that feature plant anatomy more than plant morphology. The presentation delves into images of ferns in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European scientific publications. Focusing on what parts of a fern and how they are pictorially represented, this presentation examines the visual strategies naturalists employed to visualize and communicate their microscopic observations.

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Fabrizio Baldassarri is a researcher at the University of Milan and Principal Investigator of the project #ConEnvHist, focused on environmental history and botany. Baldassarri’s research explores early modern natural philosophy, medicine, and botany, with a particular focus on Descartes’s natural philosophy and seventeenth-century philosophy of plants. His recent books include René Descartes’s Natural Philosophy and Particular Bodies (Springer, 2024) and Filosofia e scienza delle piante nel Seicento (ETS, 2024).

Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen is a historian of art, science, and knowledge currently working as a postdoctoral researcher on the project Visualizing the Unknown (Huygens Institute/Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)). Chen has published several pieces that reflect her interests in image making and the visual and material culture of natural history, including her recent monograph Everlasting Flowers between the Pages (Brill, 2025). Chen is also a maker of images and objects with a background as an illustrator.

Scientific Organization: Sietske Fransen

_{Image: Image makers Heinricus Füllmauer and and Albertus Meyer in Leonhart Fuchs's De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes (Basel, 1542). Wellcome Images.}