Plants

In 1568 Aldrovandi founded the Botanical Garden of the University of Bologna. He did so because he understood the vital importance of botanical gardens not only for the study of medicine but also as a status symbol in the sixteenth-century Republic of Letters:

“I am extremely anxious to have it not only equal to any garden in Italy, but to make it a nature theatre and an ornament of this City. It is thus needed to send specialists to collect all things I shall ask them so that before I die a memorable garden, renowned in every part of Europe be available in this City. It has to be the source of officinal plants for medical doctors and herbalists who need them continuously for the health of the City, as well as an attraction for scholars to come to Bologna University, just as, thank God, I see evidence every day of many foreign visitors coming to Bologna to see my ‘Studio’ and of many writers who mention it.”[1]

His linkage of the University of Bologna’s Botanical Garden and his ‘Studio’ in this passage was no accident – he considered them to be parts of the same whole. As Finden relates, within a decade he had created at Bologna ‘one of the richest repositories of medicinal plants in Europe’.[2]

Ulisse Aldrovandi, Dendrologiae naturalis scilicet arborum historiae libri duo : Sylva glandaria, acinosumque pomarium ubi eruditiones omnium generum una cum botanicis doctrinis ingenia quaecunque non parum juvant, et oblectant Ovidius Montalbanus … opus … collegit … Hieronymus Bernia … in lucem editum dicavit (Bologna, 1668), p. 164.

He was able to do so because he was part of a scholarly network which incorporated physicians and apothecaries across Europe.[3] He received specimens and images of plants from a host of European scholars and he was keen to acknowledge these gifts in his publications – an example being this image, sent to him by Bartholomeo Zucchardi. As Baldini points out, Aldrovandi was above all interested in importing plants so that they might be grown in the Botanical Garden, for this would facilitate scholarly observation of their growth and at the same time allow them to be depicted as accurately as possible.[4]

Like any good Renaissance physician, Aldrovandi had a professional interest in botany. He produced a huge herbal, the ‘Iconographia Plantarum’, and some of the images from this work were later incorporated into book two of his Dendrologiae naturalis scilicet arborum historiae libri duo (Bologna, 1668). Book two included citrus fruits which, as Baldassarii points out, had proved to be a popular topic in early modern Europe.[5] The sheer volume of new kinds of fruit becoming known was a challenge which whetted the intellectual appetites of scholars of nature such as Aldrovandi. In his De plantis epitome utilissima (Frankfurt, 1586) one of the most popular botanical authors of the period, Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–77), had classified them within the malus family, dividing citrus into four genres: citrus malus, lemons, oranges and Adam pome, a division replicated by other botanists also.[6] Aldrovandi sought to expand on this classification.

Vegetable monstrosities, such as this lemon in the shape of an eagle’s head, were especially prized. However, as Baldassari points out, this interest in abnormality was intimately connected with Aldrovandi’s desire to classify specimens correctly.[7] Only by considering teratologic cases such as this could a comprehensive classification be attempted. Aldrovandi’s Dendrologiae naturalis scilicet arborum historiae libri duo was the last of the Aldrovandi set to be published, and initially seems an outlier to the earlier publications, but it was a crucial part of his project. Its publication date may well have been deliberate for 1668 marked the centenary of the foundation of the Bologna’s Botanical Garden.

Text: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library, Dublin.

Sources

Baldassarri, Fabrizio, ‘A clockwork Orange: Citrus Fruits in Early Modern Philosophy, Science, and Medicine, 1564–1668’, Nuncius. The Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 37, no 2 (2022), 255–283.

Baldini, Enrico, ‘Fruits and fruit trees in Aldrovandi’s ‘Iconographia Plantarum’, Advances in Horticultural Science, 4, no. 1 (1990), 61–73.

Findlen, Paula, Possessing nature. Museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy (Berkeley, 1996).

Mason, Peter, and José Pardo-Tomas, ‘Bringing it back from Mexico. Eleven paintings of trees in I cinque libri delle plante of Pier’Antonio Michiel (1510–1576)’, Journal of the History of Collections, 32, no. 2 (2020), 225–237.

Vai, Gian Battista, ‘Aldrovandi’s Will: introducing the term ‘Geology’ in 1603’, in Vai, Gian Battista, and William Cavazza (eds), Four centuries of the word Geology. Ulisse Aldrovandi 1603 in Bologna (Bologna, 2003), pp 65–110.

[1] Vai, Gian Battista, ‘Aldrovandi’s Will: introducing the term ‘Geology’ in 1603’, in Vai, Gian Battista, and William Cavazza (eds), Four centuries of the word Geology. Ulisse Aldrovandi 1603 in Bologna (Bologna, 2003), p. 90.

[2] Findlen, Paula, Possessing nature. Museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy (Berkeley, 1996), p. 258.

[3] Aldrovandi also received images of plants from the New World via Portugal: on this see Mason, Peter, and José Pardo-Tomas, ‘Bringing it back from Mexico. Eleven paintings of trees in I cinque libri delle plante of Pier’Antonio Michiel (1510–1576)’, Journal of the History of Collections, 32, no. 2 (2020), 228–9 and 237 fn 34.

[4] Baldini, Enrico, ‘Fruits and fruit trees in Aldrovandi’s ‘Iconographia Plantarum’, Advances in Horticultural Science, 4, no. 1 (1990), 69–71.

[5] Baldassarri, Fabrizio, ‘A clockwork Orange: Citrus Fruits in Early Modern Philosophy, Science, and Medicine, 1564–1668’, Nuncius. The Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 37, no 2 (2022), 255–283

[6] Ibid., 260. As Baldassari notes, in this work Mattioli commented on all mala plants (apples, quinces, peaches, apricots and citrus).

[7] Baldassarri, Fabrizio, ‘A clockwork Orange’, 269–70.