NATURALISTIC DRAWING

At the beginning of the XVI century, botany undergoes a major transformation that enables it to become a modern discipline. In the medieval period, the study of plant species focused mainly on food, medicinal and pharmaceutical uses. In the 1500’s a fervent attention to the problems of classification and morphology of plants arose, also thanks to the importation of new flowers and plants from Asia and the Americas.

The merit for having initiated for the very first time a rigorous survey of the plant world is credited in particular to the Germans Otto Brunfels (theologist) and Leonhart Fuchs (doctor) and to the Italian doctor Pietro Andrea Mattioli. In order to dominate the conspicuous number of plants that were being added to those that were already known, reference was made to a number of treaties that were enriched with precise descriptions, and above all, with the most detailed and realistic depictions possible. The improvement in the quality of printing and of engraving techniques contributes to the fortune of the images that accompany the printed works or that are brought together in albums, and to the dissemination of the single engraved sheets.  

Among the printing techniques of chalcography on a metal matrix the most utilised was, especially towards the end of the seventeenth century, the so-called etching technique. These etched prints were however commonly retouched and hand coloured. At the end of the eighteenth century, the lithographic print is invented, thanks to Alois Senefelder of Bavarian origin, and the date of the invention is set at 1796.

The XIX century is dominated by the figure of Pierre Joseph Redouté (1759 – 1840).  Pierre Joseph Redouté was a French painter and botanist, celebrated for his water-colour paintings of flowers, and mainly those depicting roses. He was nicknamed “the Raphael of flowers”.

The English Botanical Magazine, founded in 1787 by William Curtis, is accompanied by numerous superior-quality illustrations of plants “always painted from live specimens” and printed using different techniques, in particular the lithographic print, a technique that not only contributed to broaden new horizons of botanical knowledge, but also to spread the passion for illustration. Even in Italy, different works from the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, demonstrate the importance attributed by scientists to the depiction of natural phenomena.

Count Giorgio Gallesio is the first to present plates depicting Italian vine varieties, in his Pomona italiana a treaty on fruit trees, edited in Pisa between 1817 and 1839. The volumes bring together 160 plates that constitute an exceptional and isolated example in the Italian panorama of botanical illustration. The beautiful colour plates are engraved in copper on a dotted base, a technique similar to that of etching. The Pomona constitutes an ambitious project that apart from a competence in botany, required great graphical skill and editorial stability due to the high printing costs. Gallesio coordinated not less than thirty people among etchers and artists, among whom was one of the best Italian chalcographers and engravers of the mid-nineteenth century, Antonio Serantoni, who had also etched the plates of Gaetano Savi.