Natural history engravings - December 2019
Tiles panels in majolica of our production with natural history engravings.
Since the Renaissance, the use of illustrations has often been seen in natural history works.
Rhinoceros by Dürer ~ 70 majolica tiles 15x15 cms code 12633
| The scientific revolution that marks the advent of the modern age is accompanied by a different way of perceiving reality: the sense of sight prevails. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, optical perception was privileged in every sector of culture, and at the same time there was a crisis of the written word. Academies, heraldic enterprises and emblems spread, capable of enclosing a moral teaching or a life program in a symbol. The word literary aspires to a symbiosis with images. It is in science that the visual culture produces the most remarkable consequences. In the natural sciences the relative ease with which the drawings and reproductions of animals and plants could be circulated allowed everyone to compare them with each other or with reality and verify their greater or lesser approximation. We only think of the opportunity for doctors to immediately recognize medicinal plants through a simple design. | Perhaps the most famous illustration of natural history is the Rhinoceros of Albrecht Dürer. Dürer\'s Rhinoceros is the name commonly given to a woodcut executed by German painter and printmaker Dürer in 1515. The image is based on a written description and brief sketch by an unknown artist of an Indian rhinoceros that had arrived in Lisbon in 1515. Dürer never saw the actual rhinoceros, which was the first living example seen in Europe since Roman times. In late 1515, the King of Portugal, Manuel I, sent the animal as a gift for Pope Leo X, but it died in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy in early 1516. A live rhinoceros was not seen again in Europe until a second specimen, named Abada, arrived from India at the court of Sebastian of Portugal in 1577, being later inherited by Philip II of Spain around 1580. |
Historiae animalium by Conrad Gessner and Natural History by Ulisse Aldrovandi were the first two examples of illustrated natural history books.
Swamphen by Gessner 24 majolica tiles 15x15 cms code 13259
Historiae animalium is the main work by Conrad Gessner [1516 - 1565], the most widely read in the Renaissance on natural history. Gessner\'s monumental work is a treatise that seeks to build a connection between the ancient knowledge of the animal world and modern science. In the work the author adds his own observations to formulate a global description of the natural history of animals. Gessner\'s approach to natural history was unusual for seventeenth-century readers, containing illustrations and images never before present in treaties of this kind. The first volume is a work illustrated on quadrupeds (1551), the second volume deals with the oviparous (1554), the third the birds (1555), the fourth the fish and the aquatic animals (1558) and the fifth snakes and scorpions ( 1587) published posthumously.
Falcon by Adrovandi 24 majolica tiles15x15 cm code 13299
Owl by Aldrovandi ~ 24 majolica tiles 15x15 cms code 13261
Ulisse Aldrovandi is recognized by many as the father of modern natural history. Born in Bologna in 1522, in 1560 he obtained the title of the first chair of Natural Sciences of the Bologna Study; graduated in philosophy and medicine, creator of one of the first museums of private natural history but open to lovers of natural sciences and amateurs to benefit the community, he established himself as one of the greatest figures of science, as well as guide and reference for Italian naturalists contemporaries. Aware of the usefulness of painting, of its effectiveness and universality, it combined the natural, live and dried repertoire with the figurative one. With the 18 volumes of watercolor tables relating to the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds currently visible at the university library of Bologna, it wanted to promote the identification, classification, completeness, publication and dissemination of knowledge, in dialogue with naturalists, medical and apothecaries from all over Europe.
Flamingo by Audubon 54 majolica tiles 15x15 cms code 12632
http://www.artandpopularculture.com
Wikipedia
https://www.analisidellopera.it/
https://sma.unibo.it/
http://www.alai.it/
www.frizzifrizzi.it
https://sma.unibo.it/it
Ulisse Aldrovandi, Scienza e Natura nel secondo cinquecento di Giuseppe Olmi
Ulisse Aldrovandi, il Museografo di Marinela Haxhiraj
Ulisse Aldrovandi, Libri e immagini di Storia Naturale nella prima Età moderna a cura di Giuseppe Olmi e Fulvio Simoni