Bry, Johann Theodor de, and Matthaeus Merian

Engraved allegorical title-page depicting Flora and her attendants decorating a herm of Janus guarding the entrance to a garden, woodcut headpiece, type-ornament headpiece, 2 woodcut initials, with blank B4. illustration: 177 engraved plates: full-sheet engraved view of the garden of Johnann Schwinden, the dedicatee, 32 fine engraved plates (numbered 1–32) of parterres, urns of flowers, gardening tools, and flowering plants after G. B. Ferrari by Merian, 144 fine engraved plates (numbered 1–49, 50A, 50–142, [143]; six full-sheet) of flowering plants by de Bry and Merian after de Bry, Merian, Emanuel Sweerts, and Caspar Bauhin.

Folio (12 3/8 x 8 1/8 in.; 315 x 205 mm). binding: Eighteenth-century vellum over pasteboard, slightly overlapping fore-edges, manuscript title on spine, plain endpapers, red edges. Half black morocco folding-case.



Lacking letterpress title (A2), A3 remargined at bottom and with clean tear or cut at inner margin, A4 repaired at lower fore-edge margin obscuring one letter of catchword, small loss or paper flaw to fore-edges of plates 1.3 and 109, one gathering of garden design plates (5–8) bound upside-down, plate 112 short at fore-edge, a very few small scattered marginal stains or rust-spots. Binding very lightly soiled.

Blunt, p. 100; Cleveland Collections 203 (Latin text); De Belder sale 93; Hunt 237 (Latin text); An Oak Spring Flora 16; Nissen 274; Pritzel 1299 note

Lacking letterpress title (A2), A3 remargined at bottom and with clean tear or cut at inner margin, A4 repaired at lower fore-edge margin obscuring one letter of catchword, small loss or paper flaw to fore-edges of plates 1.3 and 109, one gathering of garden design plates (5–8) bound upside-down, plate 112 short at fore-edge, a very few small scattered marginal stains or rust-spots. Binding very lightly soiled.
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A fine copy of the German-text issue of Matthaeus Merian's expanded edition of his father-in-law's 1612 Florilegium novum. "Florilegium renovatum is a much richer work than the earlier Florilegium novum, many illustrations from other sources having been added to de Bry's seventy plates. The allegorical title-page and the first thirty-two plates—illustrating parterres, urns of flowers and gardening tools, as well as plants—were drawn from De florum cultura by the Jesuit Giovanni Battista Ferrari, which was published in Rome in 1633. Merian reproduced Ferrari's plates, reversing them in the printing process, and sometimes adding butterflies or other features or combining figures from more than one illustration" (An Oak Spring Flora).

Among the entirely new plates contributed by Merian are the six full-sheet illustrations of exotic plants: plates 85 (Lilium liliorum), 86 (Lilium wran. multifolium), 113 (Stramonia Ægyptiaca), 116 (Ficus Indica minima), 123 (Narcissus de Alepo & Hyacinthus Comosus ramosus), and 142 (Hyiucca sive Yuca Canadana). The final, unnumbered plate has an integral date of 1647 and depicts a rose that bloomed in Prague.

Although Nissen calls for 177 plates, copies with the full complement of engravings—as in the Allen copy—are very rare, with most copies lacking at least one plate among 50A, 142 (evidently issued in 1644), and the terminal rose of Prague.