Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections Martha Glowacki’s Natural History | Page 12

Figure 6. Hans Weiditz (ca. 1495–ca. 1569), Weissz
Seeblum [Nymphea, waterlily], hand-colored woodcut.
In Otto Brunfel (ca. 1488–1534), Contrafayt Kreüterbuch:
Nach rechter vollkommener Art (Strassburg: J. Schott,
1532). The LuEsther T. Mertz Library, The New York
Botantical Garden.
Living Plants”), could be made. 6 The illustrations by
Hans Weiditz (ca. 1495–1536) show successive stages of
horticultural development through the changing seasons
of the year (Figure 6). In order to proliferate his images,
Weiditz had to hand his drawings over to a formschnei-
der (professional woodcutter), who traced the designs
onto the block he would then carve. 7 (Another word for
the prototype from which multiple images are made is
a “matrix,” a term which in Middle English stood for a
female animal kept for breeding, or a parent stem of a
plant. The root of the word “matrix” is mater, i.e. mother.
Gender is thus at the root of this multiple-engendering
technique.) 8 If representations of specimens serve to
convey vegetal life cycles, it is worth remembering that
the felling of trees was part of the process of providing a
substrate for the circulation of pictures of plants. Cut-
ting, then, has always been a part of sharing botanical
knowledge. The scissors on Glowacki’s table remind
us of this. Proliferation, containment, and curtailing.
Wherever the natural world is transformed into a rep-
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Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections
resentation through art, these metaphors are never far
afield. 9 For centuries of Christian iconographical tradi-
tion, the Virgin Mary’s physical state and the emotional
outcome of her fate found expression in the depiction
of plants. The violet of humility, the lily of chastity,
and the rose of charity, are just some of these similes, as
enumerated by Bernard of Clairvaux. 10
Far from being bound in a one-to-one correlation of
symbol to meaning, as the mariological flowers might
suggest, botanical growth structure has provided
numerous analogies for human thought, physiological
development, genealogical succession, social circum-
stance, and transcendent hopes. Even the very process of
making art by studying nature, then developing original
ideas in one’s own mind, has been likened to the gener-
ative process of plants. It was Albrecht Dürer (patient
watercolorist of flora and fauna, as well as wild imaginer
of monstrous fantasies), who wrote: “No man can ever
again make a beautiful image from his own thoughts,