Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections Martha Glowacki’s Natural History | Page 16

covered in graphite, as well as clippings of hair, tiny
tools, jars and jewels, photographs of communion girls
wearing white, or darkly dressed women, alone, their
hips behind a wall of flowering plants. These treasures
may be discovered by opening and closing, peering into
compartments—activities accompanied by the mind’s
free associations or individual remembrances. 19
The other half of Glowacki’s art has to do with the
relationship to a particular stimulus—this is the printed
book. While it is true that the replicative technology of
moveable type and woodblock images codified knowl-
edge, it is also true that innumerable readers understood
the contents of natural history texts not as facts but as
impetuses, written in the imperative tense: “Try this.”
“Make.” 20 Glowacki is operating in a tradition of scien-
tists and artists—and figures who blurred the distinc-
tion between the two—who took what nature offered
them and what they found in books as opportunities to
test, sample, and diverge. Knowledge, for some, like her,
is not what is stored, but what is shared. The impact of
such an attitude towards finding, learning, and creat-
ing cannot be hemmed in with string and scissors, nor
measured by a caliper’s limited expanse.
Shira Brisman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Art History
University of Wisconsin–Madison
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
92 and fig. 5.4 and Sachiko Kusukawa, “The Uses of Pic-
tures in the Formation of Learned Knowledge: The Case
of Leonhard Fuchs and Andreas Vesalius,” in Sachiko
Kusukawa and Ian Maclean, Transmitting Knowledge:
Words, Images, and Instruments in Early Modern Europe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 78-79. A list of
the composite pictures published in Fuchs’s text is found
in Frederick G. Meyer, The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs:
De historia stirpium commentarii insignes 1542, vol. 1 (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 120–122.
3 The unique surviving example of this series is held at
Duke University: https://library.duke.edu/ruben-
stein/history-of-medicine/four-seasons.
4 Charles Bonnet, Recherches sur l’usage des feuilles dans les
plantes (Göttingen and Leiden, E. Luzac, 1754), plates
VI and VII. A reproduction of plate VII is found in
one of the drawers of Glowacki’s cabinet piece, What
Every Woman Ought to Know.
5 Shira Brisman, “Sternkraut: ‘The Word that Unlocks’
Dürer’s Self Portrait of 1493,” in The Early Dürer, ed.
Thomas Eser and Daniel Hess (Thames & Hudson;
Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2012),
194–207.
6 Although in the first Latin edition the authorship of
the pictures is anonymous, Brunfels and his publisher,
Johann Schott, named Hans Weiditz as the illustra-
tor in the German edition, Contrafeyt kreuterhbuch.
For legal disputes over the pirating of Brunfels’ text
and Weiditz’s images, see Joseph Leon Koerner, The
Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 215–217.
7 Weiditz’s drawings eventually reached Felix Platter, a
doctor of medicine and natural scientist in Basel, who
incorporated them into his comprehensive herbarium
by cutting the paper of Weiditz’s around the outlines.
Thus some of Weiditz’s annotations, made in pencil on
the back, have been truncated and lost. Fritz Koreny,
Albrecht Dürer and the Animal and Plant Studies of the
Notes
1 Pliny, Natural History, vol. vii, Book 25, chapter 4,
trans. W.H.S. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2014), 140.
2
12
See for example the “Prunus Sylvestris” depicted in
Leonhard Fuchs, De historia stirpium commentarii insignes
(Basel: In Officina Isengriana, 1542), fol. 404. Sachiko
Kusukawa, “Illustrating Nature,” in Marina Frasca-
Spada and Nick Jardine, eds. Books and the Sciences in
Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections