Mattioli's Commentarii

Often intertwining written word with visuals, herbals are records of the medical knowledge of plants. They were written to disseminate the knowledge and usefulness of plants, while contextualizing this knowledge with visual aids that emphasize plant morphology. They helped shape the ways in which we created, sourced, and applied medicines, while providing a way for people to systematize and engage with nature.

This herbal, Commentarii, represents the work of Pietro Andrea Mattioli, a botanist and physician hailing from Siena, Italy. This edition, published in Venice in 1565, is one of two printed on blue-grey paper. It contains 900 woodblock prints, designed and engraved by Giorgio Liberale and Wolfgang Meyerpeck.

The advent of the printing press in the 15th Century began a revolution that made books accessible to the general masses. Still, books like herbals that contained illustrations were expensive to produce, and were desirable as objects beyond the information that they contained.

This print of Tilia foemina, or lime tree, exemplifies Liberale and Meyerpeck’s use of silver and gold to highlight the illustrations, an innovative technique Mattioli described as “the most rare thing of this kind that has ever been seen.”

Produced from large planks of pear wood, Mattioli’s woodblocks have been praised for their extreme detail and shading. These place among the finest and latest existing examples of botanical woodblock prints. In the 1580s, technologies in metal engraving went on to replace wood as a medium.

This woodblock represents “Limonium,” or sea lavender, a coastal plant with thin flowering stems and purple blooms. This woodblock exemplifies the tendency of the artists to fill the full perimeter of the rectangle, stunting the lavender blooms at the very top of the block.

The first edition of Mattioli’s work, published in 1554, instantly gained universal praise for its texts and illustrations. Commentarii established him as an international authority on specimens that would revolutionize European medicine, culture, and trade.

As Mattioli’s fame rose in Prague in the 1560s, he gained notoriety for his vicious retaliation against colleagues who questioned his classifications, as well as his questionable practices in pursuit of knowledge.