Florike Egmond

What a strange book. I thought it was going to show me a lot of old natural history paintings made with high levels of detail and talk about the techniques used to derive the detail. And yes, there is some of this but the text is seriously tedious and probably only someone like the author, who is a cultural historian specialising in natural history and residing in Rome, would actually enjoy reading this stuff. She is only dealing with the period from 1500 to 1630 and the microscope was invented in the late 1500's and greatly improved by Galileo in 1609. So much of the work is pre-microscope.
Florike is apparently Dutch and presumably writing in a second language. Hard to fault her grammar but the subject matter and the style is heavy going. She is examining these old drawings and paintings to draw some conclusions about cultural change. For example, collectors of animal drawings tended to be interested in unusual examples (monsters) ...those with two heads or six legs etc. (interestingly enough that's still happening...I saw a news article two days ago featuring a puppy born with six legs). However with botanical drawing there was more interest in getting a likeness that would help in recognition. And Florike devotes a huge number of words to investigating whether they were painting exactly what they saw (generally no) or some sort of idealised plant (generally flawless).....and it seemed to be mainly the latter. Painters were also faced with decisions about scale.....hard to fit a tree onto a page and still get details about the leaves and flowers. So various compromises were made. Notably the "zoom" feature which allowed painters to add magnified features on the same page.
Some of the early collectors simply cut-out earlier paintings and re-mounted them .....sometimes in settings of their own. And sometimes re-painting details that had been lost in the cutting-out process.
Of all the artists featured I must say that I liked the work of Conrad Gessner the most. ...He has a nice combination of realism (and accuracy) together with "zoomed" features for various parts of the plants.
Something that I hadn't truly appreciated was that there was often a considerable gap between a drawing/painting being produced and having a print made of the work. (Of course, it's only relatively recently that Joseph Bank's huge collection of drawings have actually been printed). But, also, in the printing process, frequently, the zoomed details were omitted. Pity.
Florike also makes a considerable "meal" of the fact that early observers did pretty well just using their own eyes or maybe a hand lens and, whilst the details improved after they had access to microscopes) the style of presentation tended to remain the same. (Using zoomed details , for example).
I guess it's written as an academic text ....with lots of references to work that was not actually on display ...though the range of displayed items seems fairly narrow anyway. But bottom line, it's rather tedious and, I think, would have been much better with 25% of the text and more pictures.
I give it two stars.… (más)