FUCHS (LEONHARD)


De historia stirpium commentarii insignes, FIRST EDITION, woodcut device on title and at end, woodcut portrait of Fuchs on verso of title, portraits of the artists Heinrich Füllmaurer, Albrecht Meyer, and Veit Rudolph Speckle on recto of leaf 3f5, upwards of 500 full-page woodcut illustrations of plant in the text, pp.17-20 defective with losses supplied in ?eighteenth century manuscript facsimile, dampstaining to approximately 60 opening leaves and a few others (including portrait of author bound at the end), title with tape repair on verso, a few short marginal tears/repairs but main body clean, French plant names added in ink in an early hand to many of the illustrations, later vellum, rebacked preserving original spine and gilt red morocco lettering label [Hunt 48; Nissen BBI 658; PMM 69; Pritzel 3138; Stafleu TL2 1909], folio (365 x 240mm.), Basel, Michael Insingrin, 1542
|"Perhaps the most celebrated and most beautiful herbal ever published... important in the history of botanical illustration particularly because of the size and beauty of the woodcuts" (PMM). Leonhard Fuchs professor of medicine at Tübingen, gives accurate descriptions of nearly 500 plants, of which forty had never before been depicted, the majority being native German plants. Amongst the foreign plants are some from America including maize (mistakenly thought by Fuchs to have come from Turkey).The illustrations were realised by Heinrich Füllmaurer, Veit Rudolph, and Albert Meyer, who drew the original images from life, mostly using samples from Fuchs' garden. Their portraits, with that of the author, appear in the book and represent "one of the earliest examples of such a tribute paid to artists in a printed book" (PMM).Provenance: Benjamin D. Greene (1793-1862), first President of the Boston Society of Natural History, bookplate (with pencil note "Bought 1822") and "bequest" bookplate to the Society; purchased by the present owner in 1988 from Wheldon & Wesley, with their pencil note inside upper cover.