specimens remain both eternally alert and look as though they have hastened to a kind of rigor mortis
Figure 4. Charles Bonnet( French 1720 – 1793), Recherches sur l’ usage des feuilles dans les plantes, 1754, pl. VII. word stilleven, also known in French as“ nature morte”) encapsulates( Figure 5).
In an attempt to find the right word for what it is that an energetic eye and hand are doing whenever an artist copies nature, the verb“ to capture”( a process literalized by Glowacki’ s oblong cage) seems right. Even if a sampling was not severed from its nurturing source, not harmed, nor even touched, confinement to a pictorial field operates like a kind of trap. This is because static, two-dimensional arts cannot mimic growth.
It is also the case, however, that in the early history of the spreading of knowledge about the physiological characteristics and medicinal properties of plants, the circulation of images and descriptions in an easily reproducible medium led to the perpetuation of bits of false information. Early printed illustrated texts, such as the Gart der Gesundheit of 1485, set a standard for decades of reissuings of crude woodcuts, some of which were attached to the wrong names. 5 It was with Otto Brunfels’ Herbarum vivae eicones, published in three parts between 1530 and 1536, that the claim to have produced original images from the study of samples( boasted by the title, which translates to“ Images of
Figure 5. Albrecht Dürer( German, 1471 – 1528), Great Piece of Turf( Das große Rasenstück), 1503, watercolor, pen and ink, 40.3 x 31.1 cm, Albertina, Vienna.
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