Fuchs, Leonhard

De historia stirpium commentarii insignes. Basel: Michael Isingrin, 1542



Folio (14 9/16 x 9 3/8 in.; 370 x 238 mm). Printer's device on title and on last page, full woodcut portrait of Fuchs on title verso, 3 woodcuts on fff5r depicting the artists Heinrich Füllmaurer and Albert Meyer and the woodcutter Veit Rodolph Speckle, 509 handcolored full-page botanical woodcuts and 2 smaller botanical cuts (gg3r), 6 manuscript leaves bound in at front being an index to Linnaeus's nomenclature and 5 manuscripts leaves at the end classifying the plants according to Linnaeus's sexual system; title-leaf guarded, expert repairs to losses along fore-edges of fff5-6, including restoration of a portion of the figure of Meyer, some dampstaining in first few quires and ccc–fff, marginal tear on p4. Contemporary blind-tooled calf over wooden boards with an alternating bird and floral roll; sympathetically rebacked, endpapers renewed.

Legendre (early fore-edge lettering) — Lambert Michel Winckelmann pharmacist, Lille (ownership inscription on title-page dated 1714) — Jean-Baptiste Lesiboudois (1715–1804), botanist, pharmacist and author (signature on leaf 1 of Linnaeus's nomenclature) — Father Redmond Ambrose Burke

Adams F–1099; Dibner Heralds of Science 19; Garrison-Morton 1808; Grolier/Horblit 33b; Grolier Medicine 17; Hunt 48; Nissen BBI 658; Norman 846; PMM 69; Pritzel 3138 

First edition of one of the finest botanical works of the Renaissance and "perhaps the most celebrated and most beautiful herbal ever published" (PMM), rendered all the more so because of its carefully handcolored woodcuts. Fuchs ranks with Otto Brunfels as one of the founding fathers of modern botany. Along with Brunfels's Herbarum vivae imagines (1530–35), Fuchs's work "[has] rightly been ascribed importance in the history of botany, and for two reasons. In the first place they established the requisites of botanical illustration—versimilitude in form and habit, and accuracy of significant detail ... Secondly they provided a corpus of plant species which were identificable with a considerable degree of certainty by any reasonably careful observer ..." (Morton, p. 124).

Fuchs provides accurate medicinal and botanical descriptions of some 500 plants which comprise about 400 native and 100 foreign, among which are the first depictions of a number of American plants such as pumpkins and maize. The plants largely came from Fuchs's own garden in Tübingen and were drawn from life by Albert Meyer; the highly detailed drawings were then transferred to woodblock by Heinrich Füllmauer and cut by Veit Rudolph Seckler. The illustrations were the exemplar for other botanical writers, and continued to be used well into the eighteenth century.