Kusukawa - Fuchs On The Importance of Pictures PDF

Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures
Author(s): Sachiko Kusukawa

Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Jul., 1997), pp. 403-427
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3653907
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Leonhart Fuchs on the
Importance of Pictures
Sachiko Kusukawa
If not for the attractive plant with overhanging flute-like flowers that was
named after him, Leonhart Fuchs (1501-66) is best known today as one of the
pioneers of accurate representations of plants in histories of scientific illustra-
tions.' The pictures in Fuchs's Remarkable Commentaries on the History of
Plants (1542) have been appreciated usually for their "naturalistic" features
(i.e., pictures drawn from observing a plant specimen), as well as for their
tendency to discard individual blemishes and portray a universal or ideal "type"
of a plant where several varieties of species could be incorporated into one
bush, or where various stages of the same plant may be depicted in one figure.2
On the other hand no historian of botany who has examined the text these
pictures accompanied has found that such qualities as observation from nature
or a sense of "ideal type" contributed to Fuchs's theoretical understanding of
I would like to thank Andrew Cunningham, Ian Maclean, Jeremy Maule, Dorinda Outram,
Philip Soergel, and the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier versions
of this paper.
"Fuchsia" was discovered and named after Fuchs by Charles Plumier in his Nova
plantarum Americanarum genera (Paris, 1703), 14f. For Fuchs as a pioneer of scientific illus-
tration, see Brian J. Ford, Images of Science: A History of Scientific Illustration (London,
1992), 88, 91-93, and for bibliography, Gavin D. R. Bridson and James J. White, Plant, Ani-
mal and Anatomical Illustration in Art and Science: A Bibliographical Guide from the Six-
teenth Century to the Present Day (Detroit, 1990).
2 For an assessment of Fuchs, see W. Blunt, with W. T. Steam, The Art of Botanical
Illustration (repr. London, 1971), 49-51. (Note that according to the Oxford English Diction-
ary, the term "botanical illustration" first occurs in the title of the work by W. J. Hooker,
Botanical Illustration, in 1822.) For instance, the picture of the prunus (fol. 404) shows all the
stages of the plant depicted in Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium commentarii insignes,
maximis impensis et vigiliis elaborati, adjectis earundem vivis plusquam quingentis imaginibus
(Basle, 1542). The text on the lamium refers to flowers in white, yellow, and purple, and the
flowers of a single bush (fol. 469) are given those three colors in contemporarily colored
copies (such as Cambridge University Library, Sel. 2. 81) of the De historia stirpium.
403
Copyright 1997 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.
404 Sachiko Kusukawa
plants: he lacked any sense of the family genera or Linnean classification, for
he had simply adopted an alphabetical ordering.3
Fuchs himself considered his pictures remarkable-as he was at pains to
point out-and he believed his pictures were absolutely crucial for his com-
mentary on plants. My immediate aim in this paper, therefore, is to offer an
interpretation of Fuchs's Remarkable Commentaries on the History of Plants
which does not split the work into artistically positive and botanically negative
elements. As I shall argue, the uniqueness and so the controversial nature of
Fuchs's enterprise lies in the kind of argument and procedure he believed to be
valid for an academic study of plants. More generally, I hope to use this reas-
sessment of Fuchs's work to show how pictures could be as controversial as
texts and how the uses of texts and pictures together form past acts which
require historical explanation.
In 1542 Fuchs published his Remarkable Commentaries on the History of
Plants Belaboured with Great Expense and Vigilance with More than Five
Hundred Live Images of Plants Attached. It begins with a picture of Fuchs, the
author, at the age of forty-one and ends with that of the artists (fig. 1). Although
the division of labor depicted here seems to have been a standard one for print-
ing illustrated books in this period,4 it is unusual that we know their names.
Albrecht Meyer did the drawings from life, Heinrich Fiillmaurer transferred
the drawings to woodblocks, and Veit Rudolf Speckle cut those woodblocks.5
Fuchs was proud of one of the artists in particular: "the woodcutter [sculptor]
Veit Rudolf Speckle, by far the best in Strasbourg, excellently imitated the
admirable industry of painters: he has so skilfully expressed the outlines of
each picture by carving [sculpendo] that he seems to compete with the painter
for glory and victory."6 A comparison between the painter and the sculptor had
been a favorite topic in the Renaissance genre ofparagone-Leonardo daVinci,
Galileo, Castiglione, and Michaelangelo composed treatises on it-where the
3 "Fuchs's herbal is without importance in the history of plant classification" (Agnes

Arber, Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany 1470-1670
[Cambridge, 19863, originally published 1912], 70). A similar verdict is found in Edward Lee
Greene, Landmarks of Botanical History, ed. Frank N. Egerton (repr., Stanford, 1983, originally
published 1909), I, 289.
4 For an identical distinction of labor in the contract between a patron, Sebald Schreyer,
and a printer, Peter Danhauser, for producing a book entitled Archetypus Triumphantis Romae
(never completed), see Adrian Wilson, The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle (Amsterdam,
1978), 61f.
5 Arber, Herbals, 217.
6 "Pictorum miram industriam praeclare imitatus est Vitus Rodolphus Specklin sculptor
Argentoracensis longe optimus, qui uniuscuiusque picturae sculpendo lineamenta tam affabre
expressit, ut cum pictore de gloria et victoria certasse videatur." Fuchs, De historia stirpium,
a6vf; translation (slightly modified) given in J. S. Ackerman, "The involvement of Artists in
Renaissance Science," Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, eds. J. W. Shirley and F. D.
Hoeniger (Cranbury, N.J., 1985), 113.
Leonhart Fuchs 405
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Figure 1. The Artists. Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium, 1542,

verso of last folio page.
Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
relative merits of various mimetic arts were discussed.7 Fuchs's comment on

Speckle is more nuanced, however, than a polite competition between the arts
over their mimetic skills: Fuchs announces that Speckle is worthy of praise in
producing a picture-normally the domain of the painter (pictor)-with the
specialized skill of carving of the cutter (sculptor). This is surely an apprecia-
tion of the particular skill involved in producing replicable pictures for printed
books, just as Erasmus had, a generation earlier, acknowledged in Albrecht
Diirer's prowess at engraving the potential for reproducibility in a print cul-
ture.8 Indeed, of the artists involved in printing, it was the woodcutter who
could expect to be paid most in this period-nearly fifteen times more than the
artist who originally drew the pictures.9
In the preface to the Remarkable Commentaries on the History of Plants
Fuchs explains in detail how and why these pictures by Speckle are different
from any other herbal illustration published before. Fuchs is particularly scathing
of the pictures produced by the Frankfurt printer, Christian Egenolff, in the
Kreuterbuch and its Latin translation by Theodore Dorsten, Botanicon (published
in 1540). One of the major criticisms of Fuchs against Egenolff was that the
latter used the same picture as well as the same name for two or three different
plants.'1 Indeed, Dorsten's edition is replete with such duplicated uses of names
and pictures. For instance, the atriplex and the mercuriales use the same woodcut
(Figs. 2 and 3); the dictamnus and the elleborus albus depict the same flower;
and the name gladiolus is used for three different plants." Fuchs, in contrast,
has ensured that his pictures and plants were in one-to-one correspondence.
Different plants are depicted, for instance, for the atriplex and the mercuriales
(Figs. 4 and 5). Fuchs attributes Egenolff's sloppy use of pictures to his greed
for money, thus failing to serve the scholarly community. For Fuchs the one-to-
one correspondence between picture and textual description is the primary gauge
7 See Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts, ed. and trans. Irma Anne Richter (London,
1949); Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as Critic of the Arts (The Hague, 1954); Peter Burke, Fortunes
of the Courtier: European Receptions of Castiglione's "Cortegiano" (Cambridge, 1995); and
Judith Dundas, "The Paragone and the Art of Michaelangelo," Sixteenth Century Journal, 21
(1990), 87-92.
8 For Erasmus's praise of Diirer in print culture, see Andree Hayum, "Diirer's portrait of
Erasmus and the Ars typographorum," Renaissance Quarterly, 38 (1985), 650-87.
9 E. g., for producing the Archetypus Triumphantis Romae, Sebolt Gallensdorfer, who cut
the blocks, was paid 148 fl. 1 pf. 28 d.; the artists who designed the illustrations on paper 9 fl.
3 pf. 4 d.; and the painters who drew those pictures on blocks, 37 fl. 1 pf. 16 d. Wilson, The
Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle, 243f.
10 Fuchs, De historia stirpium, a5vf.
" See Theodore Dorsten, Botanicon (Frankfurt, 1540), 106r (dittany) and 108v (white
ellebore); 35r (orach) and 189v (dog's mercury); 16r (acorus), 120r (fagasmon), and 140r
(gladiolus).
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410 Sachiko Kusuka wa
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Leonhart Fuchs 411
for judging the herbal works of others, and even his immediate predecessor,
Otto Brunfels (1488-1534), failed on this count.'2
Fuchs's insistence on a different picture for every plant is one of the first
instances of an author articulating his attempt to establish a precise relationship
between pictures and text; for as is well known, it was perfectly possible,
especially in secular literature, to reuse the same pictures in differing contexts
throughout the sixteenth century.'3 This insistence is further underpinned by
Fuchs's belief in the power of pictures. He says that what each description
(historia) describes in plain words is described more certainly and fixed more
strongly in the mind by a picture.14 Fuchs goes as far as to say that everything
in nature can be understood better by pictures than by words:
Who, I ask, in their right mind would condemn a picture which, it is

clear, expresses things much more clearly than they can be described
with any words of the most eloquent men? Indeed nature was fashioned
in such a way that everything may be grasped by us in a picture: in fact,
those which are explained and depicted to the eyes on panels or paper
adhere to the mind more deeply than those described by bare words. It
is certain that there are many plants which cannot be described by any
words so as to be recognised, but which, being placed before the eyes
in a picture, can be recognised immediately at first sight.'5
This is an extremely strong statement about the effectiveness of pictures in the

recognition of plants over and above the power of descriptive words.
Indeed it is because of pictures, Fuchs explains, that he chose to follow an
alphabetical order. It would have been impossible to arrange for pictures
according to the similar kinds of Dioscorides, since it would have meant
travelling widely in order to cover variety, hoping to chance upon plants which
12 Fuchs, De historia stirpium, a5r. See also T. A. Sprague, "The Herbal of Otto Brunfels,"
The Journal of the Linnean Society of London. Botany, 48 (1928), 80.
13 See Ruth Samson Luborsky, "Connections and Disconnections between Images and
Texts: The Case of Secular Tudor Book Illustration," Word and Image, 3 (1987), 74-85.
14 "... singulis stirpium historijs, vivas et ad naturae aemulationem a nullo unquam, pace
omnium dixerim, artificiosius expressas imagines adiecimus: idque nulla alia de causa, quam
ut ea quae nudis verbis exponit historia, certius exprimeret, atque adeo altius animo infigeret
pictura" (Fuchs, De historia stirpium, a6r).
15 "quis quaeso sanae mentis picturam contemneret, quam constat res multo clarius
exprimere, quam verbis ullis, etiam eloquentissimorum, deliniari queant. Et quidem natura sic
comparatum est, ut pictura omnes capiamur: adeoque altius animo insident quae in tabulis aut
charta oculis exposita sunt et depicta, quam quae nudis verbis describuntur. Hinc multas esse
stirpes constat, quae cum nullis verbis ita describi possint ut cognoscantur, pictura tamen sic
ob oculos ponuntur, ut primo statim aspectu deprehendantur" (De historia stirpium, lr).
may only bloom for a short interval.16 Instead, Fuchs explains that he used the
alphabetical ordering, which, more importantly, was the ordering followed by
Galen.
Of the ancient Greek medics Galen was the prime authority whom Fuchs
was trying to emulate. Fuchs argued that the study of medicinal plants had an
ancient and divine origin, that plants were useful for both sustaining and restoring
health; that promoting this study by cultivating gardens had brought lasting
fame and praise to princes and emperors, and that it was therefore worthy of
princely support. Yet, Fuchs laments, one can now hardly find one medic in a
hundred, who has a precise knowledge of even a few plants. Medics consider it
dishonorable and base to deal with the knowledge of plants because they think
dealing with what druggists and others peddle in would detract from their own
dignity and reputation. Thus, the entire knowledge of herbal medicine is today
in the hands of peasants, old wives, and unlearned men who have accumulated
mistake after mistake. But no medic, Fuchs goes on to explain, can remedy an
illness and compose medication or use preventive aids usefully and on appro-
priate cases unless they have an exact knowledge of herbs.17 Here, Fuchs's call
to reclaim the study of plants from the hands of the empirics seems to be a
general exhortation to recover a pristine practice from contemporary neglect,
rather than a specific attack on particular practitioners of medicine such as
Paracelsus.
For Fuchs it was Galen who provided the model for an exact knowledge of
herbs. He explains that for Galen such a knowledge was acquired through
discerning the differences of the plants not just a few times but very frequently.
The ancients considered a first-hand, close examination (autopsia) necessary
for acquiring a knowledge of herbs, which was not to be left to the unlearned
druggists and foolish folk. Rather, they considered it their own duty to travel
widely so that they could examine carefully with their eyes all kinds of herbs as
well as take them in their hands and taste them, and thus learn the powers of
plants in addition to their images.'8 It was this medical knowledge of plants,
currently neglected by medics but nevertheless essential for a proper medic,
that Fuchs wishes to revive after the model of Galen.
Among the ancient medics, Fuchs considers Galen the supreme authority.
Of course, if Dioscorides, Galen, and Pliny the Elder all agreed on a particular
power of a plant, one may well rest assured of that power; but if there were
disagreement amongst the three, Fuchs says, he has followed Galen rather than
Dioscorides and Dioscorides rather than Pliny.'9 For Fuchs, Galen's opinions
are preferable to anybody else's, since the latter explained that powers of plants
16 De historia stirpium, a6v.

17 De historia stirpium, a3vf.
18 De historia stirpium, a4r.
Leonhart Fuchs 413
were understood partly by a certain method and partly by experience.20 Fuchs

was aware of the fact that there were many plants not known to the ancients,
especially those now used extensively by surgeons in wound-treatment; and he
considered it wrong to try and find a corresponding plant from Dioscorides for
every contemporary plant, as Hieronymus Tragus had attempted.21 For plants
unknown to antiquity, Fuchs again proposes to follow the method of Galen
rather than of Dioscorides, by mixing experience and rational reasoning.22
For naming plants Fuchs decided to maintain the awkward Latin names
commonly used rather than assigning false Greek ones or ones in better Latin,
for illegitimate names may result in adulterated uses. Rather than falsely
imposing something from Dioscorides, Fuchs says he has also included German
names. He has equally taken care not to heap up every known name. In his view
a few correct and legitimate names are far better, for confusion of names means
confusion of things. That is, special care was needed in attributing powers to
plants, since a false attribution could endanger life.23 Fuchs thus presents himself
as pursuing responsibly a practice of medicine following Galen but doing so in
a world of plants which was quite different from that of the ancients. It was
within this revival of the important ancient medical knowledge of plants that
Fuchs's pictures were to play a role more expressive than plain words.
Let me give an example of how his pictures functioned. The historia of
petasites (butter-bur) begins with its name: it is called petasithes in Greek and
petasites in Latin, it is totally unknown to contemporary pharmacists, and it is
called Pestilenzwurz in German because its root is an immediate relief for
pestilential fevers. The name petasites comes from the Greek word petasos,
meaning a felt cap, because its large leaf is placed over the pedicle like a cap,
just like a mushroom.24
Next follows the section on the form (forma) of the plant, which usually
starts with the description by Dioscorides: "the footstalk is larger than a cubit,
as thick as a thumb, over which a large leaf, in the shape of a cap, hangs, like a
mushroom." Then the picture (fig. 6) is introduced, and matched up with
Dioscorides' description: "from this description it becomes sufficiently clear
that the herb whose picture we give is apetasites."25 Fuchs then moves smoothly
20 "Cur autem Galeni sententia omnibus aliis sit praeferenda, nulla alia est ratio, quam
quod is stirpium facultates partim certa quadam ratione et methodo, quam literis subinde
mandavit, cognoverit, partim etiam experientia didicerit" (De historia stirpium, a6v).
21 De historia stirpium, a6r, a5v. Hieronymus Tragus (1498-1554) was the author of the
New Kreuter Buch.
24 De historia stirpium, 643.
25 "Pediculus est cubito maior, crassitudine pollicis, in quo petasi figura folium magnum,
ut fungus dependet. Ex qua sane descriptione satis perspicuum fit, herbam cuius picturam
damus esse Petasiten" (De historia stirpium, 643).
I
A?
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BETASITES
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Figure 6. "Petasites." Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium, 1542, fol. 644.

Leonhart Fuchs 415
on to introduce more features (not found in Dioscorides' text) from thepictured

plant: "this [plant] always brings forth at the beginning of March purple flowers
clumped together in the shape of grapes, near the leaves, this Dioscorides
omitted."26 Then features which are not depicted in the picture are brought in:
"its root is thick and long and white inside, smells very strongly and is bitter.
From this it follows that the powers of this herb are no different from the powers
of the petasites."27
So by matching up the features described in the text of Dioscorides with
the features depicted in the picture of a plant, Fuchs first identifies an ancient
plant with a plant of his own time. Then, further additional features not found
in Dioscorides' text are drawn out from the pictured plant and attributed to the
ancient plant. Such additional features often include invisible and undepictable
traits such as taste and smell of the pictured plant. A picture, therefore, shows
not only those features that are depicted of a plant, but also an object with many
more undepicted and undepictable features and virtues. Fuchs, however, never
explains how knowledge of this object, including its smell, taste, and medicinal
virtues, may be acquired-it seems to be assumed that one somehow has a full
knowledge of that object once a plant is "recognized immediately" or intuitively
through a picture. It is perhaps in this potential for signifying more than it
appears to depict that we may understand Fuchs's belief in pictures as more
expressive than words.
Fuchs's explanation of the plant continues: as for its location (locus), he
reports that the petasites is found abundantly in humid meadows or near
streams.28 As for their duration (tempus), he explains that it flowers at the
beginning of March, and near April, the flowers drop off, except for the fruits,
and then the leaves come out with their pedicles.29 The "temperament"
(temperamentum) of thepetasites is, Fuchs reports, of the third order of dryness,
which can easily be shown from its bitterness in taste.30 Then Fuchs lists the
powers attributed to the plant by ancient authorities: the power of petasites
according to Dioscorides is that it is useful for malign phagedaenic ulcers when
ground and smeared31; according to Galen also it is useful for malign and
phagedaenic ulcers, and Paul of Aegina agrees.32 Fuchs then goes on to add
26 "Haec enim statim inter initia Martij, flores suos in albo purpureos, agglomeratos, et
botri figuram referentes profert, citra quidem folia, quod Dioscorides omisit" (ibid., 643, my
emphasis).
27 "Radix illi crassa et longa, intus candida, vehementer ordorata et amara. Quibus accedit
quod vires huius herbae a viribus Petasites,..., non discrepent" (ibid., 643).
28 Ibid., 643
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 645.
31 "Vires ex Dioscoride. Facit ad maligna phagedaenica ulcera tritum et illitum" (ibid.,
645).
32 Ibid., 645.
other uses in an "appendix," and here we see the importance of the root of
petasites introduced earlier in the description of the forma: "by experience,"
Fuchs says, "it was also proven that this root helps pestilential fevers wonderfully,
because it induces perspiration vehemently if it is reduced to powder and taken
with wine."33 It is further helpful for pains in the uterus, getting rid of intestinal
worms, for inducing urine and menstruation, as well as for wet wounds. This
agrees, according to Fuchs, with what Galen taught in a general way in the
Faculties of Simple Medicines (book IV, chapter 17) where it was explained
how certain temperaments could induce perspiration.
Pictures were thus a bridge between Dioscorides' ancient plants and
contemporary ones, which allowed Fuchs to "practice" Galen's medicine of
experience and reason by supplementing and expanding the medicinal properties
of Dioscorides, which he was intent on showing and confirming as Galenic.
Compared to the practical herbal tradition of his predecessors in which plants
were ordered alphabetically largely for their medicinal virtue,34 Fuchs's work
showed different concerns and emphases. Headings such as "tempus" "tempera-
mentum," "vires," and an analysis of names, could be found in the works of
Brunfels or Dorsten; but Dorsten did not bother to distinguish between authorities
when listing the medicinal virtues of plant, nor did he refer to the pictures in his
"descriptio." Meanwhile Brunfels, although he did distinguish between
authorities, his description of the form of plants (cited in the section on the
"opinion" of each ancient) made no reference to the picture accompanying the
text. The section on the forma where pictures were part of the process of
identifying the plant and of discovering its medicinal virtues is unique to Fuchs.
Fuchs's interest in the medical study of plants dates at least from the
beginning of his publishing career. His first work, Errors by Recent Medics,
Sixty in Number, now Editedfor the First lime and the Refutations of the Same
Addedfor the Sake of Students, was printed in 1530. He was then at Ansbach,
as the personal physician to Margrave Georg of Brandenburg (1484-1543) who
had plans to start up a university there. The title was probably meant to evoke
the work of a famous medical Hellenist, Niccolo Leoniceno's On the Errors of
Pliny and Others in Medicine (1509), which included an attack on Pliny the
Elder as an authority in medicinal herbs. In his controversy withAngelo Poliziano
and Pandolfo Collenuccio, Leoniceno (1428-1524) aggressively promoted the
33 "Appendix. Experimento comprobatum est radicem hanc mirifice conferre pesti-

lentialibus febribus, quod sudorem vehementer moveat, si in pulverem redacta cum vino
sumatur" (ibid., 645).
34 Jerry Stannard, "Natural History," in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg
(Chicago, 1978), 443-49. For the alphabetical ordering of medieval medical compendia and
concordances, see L. C. Mackinney, "Medieval Medical Dictionaries and Glossaries," in
Medieval and Historiographical Essays in Honor of James Westfall Thompson, eds. J. L. Cate
and E. N. Anderson (Chicago, 1938), 240-68.
Leonhart Fuchs 417
pristine medical knowledge of the Greeks over and above anything else.35 In
doing so, Leoniceno was extending the skills and values of humanist scholars
(whose subject matters were originally confined to the liberal arts) to the area
of medicine. It was a move initially decried by the humanist medics at
universities,36 but Fuchs, who was then hoping to secure a university appointment
and thus writing for students of medicine, took Leoniceno's message seriously.
In his Errors of Recent Medics Fuchs thus similarly promoted Greek medicine
by exposing the misunderstandings and distortions about Greek medicine
perpetrated by Arab and contemporary medics. Alluding to Galen and Quintilian,
Fuchs explains that there are two steps of learning: to forget inept and impure
opinions and to learn better and purer things. On the other hand, things which
one learns at an early stage tend to persist and are difficult to get rid of. Medical
teaching of Fuchs's day, however, had inverted the proper order of learning
medicine: the worst things from the Arabs are learned first and the best things
of the Greeks learned later and, not surprisingly, rather badly. Thus it is important
first to learn from the pure source of Greek medicine before reading the Arabs
and recent medical writers.37 What Fuchs intended to do in his textbook was to
show how and where the Arabs and recent medics had erred, and to restore a
proper understanding of Greek medicine in the areas of medicinal simples, the
method of healing (methodus medendi) and anatomical knowledge.
It is in the first book of his Errors of Recent Medics that Fuchs points out
contemporary mistakes in the identification of plants. For instance, almost all
young men make a mistake when they take the contemporary buglossum for its
ancient namesake and accordingly apply it for medical use, when in fact the
contemporary borrago corresponds to the ancient buglossum (and the con-
temporary buglossum to the ancient cirsion). Fuchs quotes the description of
buglossum from Dioscorides as a plant with deciduous leaves which are rough
and black, similar in shape to the tongue of an ox, and when dropped in wine,
it would bring pleasure and lightness to the mind. According to Fuchs, Galen,
Paul of Aegina, and Pliny the Elder all essentially agree with this description.
Fuchs believes that a close examination would reveal that the ancient buglossum
35 For Leoniceno's attack on Pliny, see Roger K. French, "Pliny and Renaissance Medicine,"
in Science in the Early Roman Empire: Pliny the Elder, his Sources and Influence, eds. Roger
K. French and Frank Greenaway (London, 1986), 263-68; and Vivian Nutton, "The Rise of
Medical Humanism: Ferrara, 1464-1555," Renaissance Studies, 11 (1997), 2-19. For Leoncieno,
see Daniela Mugnai Carrara, "Profilo di Nicolo Leoniceno" Interpres, 2 (1979), 169-212. I
thank Dr Silvia de Renzi for drawing my attention to G. Ferrari, "Gli errori di Plinio-Fonti
classiche e medicina nel conflitto tra Alessandro Benedetti e Nicolo Leoniceno," in Sapere e
potere, ed. A. Custiani (Bologna, 1990), II, 173-204, which I have not yet seen.
36 See the case of Collenuccio, in French, "Pliny and Renaissance Medicine," 268-71.
37 Errata recentiorum medicorum. LX numero, adjectis eorundem confutationibus in
studiosorum gratiam, iam primum aedita (Hagenau, 1530), Vrf.
is the contemporary borrago because Dioscorides' description matches the

contemporary borrago better than the contemporary buglossum, which has leaves
which become white.38 Fuchs's method for the "diligent investigator of truth"
for identifying an ancient plant with a contemporary one is thus essentially one
of comparing and matching up features of both plants.39
The question of the identity of buglossum had already been raised by
Leoniceno.40 Leoniceno too believed that the ancient buglossum was the
contemporary borrago and the ancient cirsion the contemporary buglossum.
He cited and examined the confused opinions of Simon Genuensis, Marco
Antonio Montagnana, Avicenna, and Pliny the Elder, and pinpointed the source
of this confusion as a confusion over the fact that the ancient Greeks considered
two kinds of plants (the buglossum and the cirsion) as having the shape of an
ox's tongue. According to Dioscorides, the cirsion has leaves larger than the
buglossum; and indeed, by the evidence of the senses, it is the case that the
contemporary buglossum has leaves larger than the contemporary borrago,
Leoniceno explained.41 The confusion of the ancient buglossum with the
contemporary buglossum, and the cirsion with the contemporary borrago, was
attributed by Leoniceno to Pliny the Elder, who wrote that the cirsion did not
have leaves larger than the buglossum. Leoniceno explains that this confusion
was due to the confusion of similar Greek terms and a defective manuscript
Pliny was using.42 Thus, although appeal to the senses and matching up of
descriptions were required,43 Leoniceno was concerned to show philologically
how Latin medics had come to confuse names. The careful philological
examination of Leoniceno is absent in Fuchs, and instead the matching up of
features fares as sufficient grounds for his identification.
Fuchs's Errata caused fury even among those medics who had been busy
promoting Greek medicine, such as Sympphorien Champier.44 Another medic
in Champier's circle, Sebastianus Montuus (b. 1480?), published in 1533 a
critique of Fuchs's Errata in the Little Annotations ... on the Errors of Recent
Medics Collected by Leonhart Fuchs, the German. One of the objections he
raised was about Fuchs's way of identifying ancient and contemporary plants.
Significantly, this section was entitled "that pictures of simple medicines are
38 Ibid., Xvf.
39 The phrase "veritatis diligens indagator" occurs in a further example of this method
when identifying the ancient eupatorium with the contemporary agrimonia (see ibid., XIvf).
40 Niccolo Leoniceno, De Plinii et aliorum medicorum erroribus liber (Basle, 1529), 239-
42.
41 "Liquido autem sensui subijcitur, folia herbae illius, quae vulgo buglossa dicitur, esse
folijs boraginis longiora" (ibid., 241).
42 Ibid., 240f.
43 Ibid., 240.
44 B. P. Copenhaver, Symphorien Champier and the Reception of the Occultist Tradition
in Renaissance France (The Hague, 1978), 77f.
Leonhart Fuchs 419
fallacious and that arguments derived from them are also fallacious." Montuus
argues that descriptions or definitions of simple medicines are based on accidents,
which are features that do not define the essence of a plant: these features may
remain even when the plant dies, or they could be found in other kinds of
plants. Therefore, any argument about the substance of the plant derived from
these descriptions of accidents is ineffective. Montuus reckons that this is why
Galen did not paint pictures of simple medicines.45 According to Pliny the
Elder, pictures of such plants are fallacious since they capture accidents which
are variable by the change of seasons,46 while the natural power of those plants
may not be susceptible to similar change. Montuus was thus objecting to Fuchs's
way of claiming something about the essential attributes of plants, such as their
medical properties, by way of matching up their accidental attributes.
Fuchs answered back in his Three Books of Medical Paradoxes in which
Many Things which Have so far Been Produced by Nobody are Produced. The
errors of the Arabs and medics of our time are not only pointed out, but also
refuted with writings of most approved authors, and with thefirmest and rational
arguments. Here Fuchs argued that it was the human way of knowing to gather
some image of the substance from many accidents, just as Homer describes
what Thersites was through descriptions such as squint-eyed, pointy-headed,
hump-backed, garrulous, and scurrilous (Iliad, II, 211-77). Why should an
argument derived from definition through accidents be inefficacious, when
almost everywhere we describe the difference of things through accidental
attributes?47 Fuchs argues that Montuus had misread Galen: where Galen says
45 "Annotatio 7. Errati 6, 7, 12 & 27. Quod picturae simplicium medicamentorum sint

fallaces, et inde ducta argumenta sint fallacia.... Iam simplicium medicamentorum descriptiones
seu finitiones apud Dioscoridem, Apuleium, Plinium, et reliquos medicinae doctores non ex
genere et differentia essentiali, aut proprio, sed ex genere et accidentibus, quae adesse absesseque
possunt praeter subiecti corruptionem constant. Quocirca ab his ducta argumenta (veluti ea
quibus persuadere nititur Fuchsius antiquorum buglossum nostram esse boraginem, et
Argemonem esse eupatorium, et turbit non esse tripolum) inefficacia omnia sunt: eoque
simplicium medicamentorum figuras non depinxisse Galenum reor." Sebastianus Montuus,
Annotatiunculae Sebastiani Montui artium, ac Medicinae doctoris in errata recentiorum
medicorum per Leonardum Fuchsium Germanum Collecta (Lyons, 1533), Vr. Montuus is
alluding a passage in Galen, Faculties of Medicinal Simples, book six chapter one.
46 Pliny, Natural History, trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), VII, 141: "... not
only is a picture misleading when the colours are so many, particularly as the aim is to copy
Nature, but besides this, much imperfection arises from the manifold hazards in the accuracy
of copyists. In addition, it is not enough for each plant to be painted at one period only of its
life, since it alters its appearance with the fourfold changes of the year." In general see C. G.
Nauert Jr., "Caius Plinius Secundus," Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, 4 (1980),
297-422.
47 "Modus namque humanae cognitionis ferme ex multis accidentibus unam quandam

substantiae imaginem colligit quemadmodum Homerus fecit, ubi si strabis oculis, acuminato
capite, gibbosis humeris, garrulitate scurruli Thersiten fuisse scribit. Denique argumenta ducta
a definitione, ex genere et accidentibus, inefficacia essent, cum fere ubique differentias rerum
per accidentia circumloquamur?" Paradoxorum medicinae libri tres, in quibus sane multa a
"it is not necessary to express the species or form of this herb after so many
men" (Faculties of Medicinal Simples, book VI, chapter 1), Fuchs reads that
Galen was in fact referring to the authors of the materia medica and to
Dioscorides, whom Galen was discussing in the preceding section (book VI,
proem).48 According to Fuchs, Galen meant that there was no need to depict
herbs again after Dioscorides because the latter had so excelled in describing
herbs that nobody could find fault with him.49 In short, as dubbed in the margins
of the textbook, Dioscorides was the best painter of herbs.50 As for Pliny the
Elder, Fuchs argues that the former did not say that pictures of herbs were
fallacious, but that pictures with abundant colors did not emulate nature well.5"
In terms of transmission of knowledge, however, Fuchs at this point concedes
that forms of herbs are better expressed by words rather than by pictures.52
Montuus replied again in 1537 in his Two Books of Medical Arguments,
where he uses a form, the dialexis, of collating arguments for or against an
issue which is to be weighed up and on which truth beyond doubt was to be
attained.53 Each section reproduces Fuchs's argument in the Errata, followed
by Montuus's objection in the LittleAnnotations, then Fuchs's counter-objection
in the Medical Paradoxes, and ending with Montuus's new response to Fuchs.
On the issue of pictures, Montuus essentially repeats his earlier objections, but
with much clearer and reinforcing arguments: he first states that knowledge of
medicinal simples is twofold, one of their powers and another of their names,
but that the former is more necessary for a medic. Fuchs has tried to derive the
latter knowledge of names from pictures and descriptions, which are composed
of accidents rather than of essential differences. Although there are accidents
which are inseparable from the substance, it does not mean that they inhere in
the substance or are identical to the substance. Just as the iberis (Pepperwort)
has the leaf of nasturtium (cress), so there are plants of different kinds which
have similar features; there are plants which change their appearance over time
but not their medical efficacy, such as the apium (celery/parsley); and there are
diverse forms within the same kind. No writer may therefore describe or
comprehend a universal form of plants. This, for Montuus, is tantamount to
nemine hactenus prodita, Arabum aetatisque nostrae medicorum errata non tantum indicantur,
sed & probatissimorum autorum scriptis, firmissimisque rationibus ac argumentis confutantur
(Basel, 1535), 9vf.
48 Ibid., lOr.
49 Ibid.
50 "Diosc. optimus herbarum pictor" (ibid.).
51 Ibid., 10r.
52 "Proinde longe melius est ut verbis herbarum formas, quam pictura exprimamus, certius
enim sermone quam pictura quod conamur assequemur: multum enim, ut Plinij verbis utar,
degenerat transcribentium sors varia" (ibid., lOr).
53 Dialexeon Medicinalium libri duo (Lyons, 1537), a2r.
Leonhart Fuchs 421
realizing that descriptions of herbs are fallacious.54 In short, Montuus was arguing
that there was no fixed relationship between external features and the essence
of a plant which would guarantee a valid inference from the one to the other.
Most of Fuchs's critique of contemporary and Arabic understanding of
medicinal herbs as published in his Errors by Recent Medics was reproduced in
1536 in the second volume of Otto Brunfels's herbal.55 The title of the first
volume of that herbal (Herbarum Vivae Eicones) was perhaps echoed in 1538,
when Fuchs introduced his own ideal for studying medicine in the medical
faculty of his university, the University of Tiibingen: he stipulated that a course
of study be first based exclusively on Greek authors (Hippocrates and Galen)
and Arabic authors introduced later, when necessary; whenever a medicinal
herb was mentioned, it was to be explained from Dioscorides; and the professor
was to take the students to the country and hills, in order to show the "live
images" (vivas imagines) of plants, lest knowledge of them would be left to the
unlearned druggists and foolish old wives.56
So Fuchs, from the beginning of his career, like other medical Hellenists,
was concerned with restoring the ancient medicine of the Greeks. He believed
that he could rectify mistakes and restore the true identities of plants mentioned
by the Greeks by comparing the features of plants. His method of collating
features was criticized and identified as argument from pictures by a rival,
Montuus. Fuchs retorted that accidental attributes were necessary for humans
to perceive and express substances. Montuus argued back, that there was no
established connection between external, accidental features and essential
properties of plants. Fuchs then attached his project of correctly identifying
herbs to Brunfels's pictorial enterprise of "live images" of plants and further
made it compulsory for medical students to learn Greek medicine and to go out
into the woods to find those "live images" for themselves. Unfortunately for
Fuchs, as already mentioned, there was one major shortcoming in Brunfels's
work: it did not always offer a unique one-to-one correspondence between picture
and textual descriptions of a plant. This would have meant playing straight into
54 Ibid., 42-46.
55 "Leonardi Fuchsii annotationes aliquot herbarum et simplicium, a medicis hactenus
non recte intellectorum" (Otto Brunfels, Novi Herbarii tomus II [Strasburg, 1536], 245-71).
Except for sections eleven and fourteen, all arguments from the Errata are reproduced.
56 "... cum simplicium medicamentorum effigies ac formas nemo Graecorum, cuius hodie
extent opera, extra unum Dioscoridem descripserit, curabit fidus interpres, ut si qua de iis
inter praelegendum mentio incidat, illorum ex Dioscoride historias afferat et pro virili explanet.
Aetatis denique tempore cum medicinae studiosis rura montesque saepius petat ac plantarum
vultum diligentia observet illisque vivas eorundem imagines demonstret, neque ut hactenus
consuevere multi, simplicium notitiam seplasiariis illis hominis rudibus et stultis mulierculis
committat." Leges et constitutiones collegii medici universitatis scholae Tubingensis, Urkunden
zur Geschichte der Universitdt Tibingen aus den Jahren 1476-1550, ed. Rudolph von Roth
(repr., Tiibingen, 1973), 312.
Montuus's hands since the latter's objection was based on the argument that
external features could be shared by several plants.
The Remarkable Commentary on the History of Plants was thus in many
ways a culmination of Fuchs's earlier effort to revive the classical medicine of
plants by matching up external features of plants. But it was also a visible,
defiant stance against an opponent, by taking on board a criticism that his
arguments were pictorial and turning the table around on his opponent by
producing precisely such pictorial arguments. Through his prolonged battle
with Montuus, we may also appreciate why Fuchs had to create his own pictorial
program with a very precise and explicit stipulation of the function of pictures
in 1542.
Montuus complained that Fuchs was using rhetorical arguments rather than
dialectical ones.57 Fuchs complained that Montuus was ignorant of dialectics.58
Both had their reasons for complaining, which arose from different attitudes
towards the kinds of argumentation they considered valid. Montuus on the one
hand was following a traditional topical classification of descriptions of plants
as the definitio ex genere et accidentibus, where the accidents predicating the
genus are not properties (propria) or differences (differentiae) and thus do not
yield essential definitions.59 As a definition it was considered more suitable for
rhetorical rather than for logical, necessary arguments.6 Fuchs on the other
hand was following a different tradition of humanist dialectics as promoted
vigorously by his friend, Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560).61 In his enormously
influential textbooks on dialectics, Melanchthon classified the description of
plants as definitio ex accidentibus, but he gave it a positive meaning: it is useful
for describing a person, such as Thersites, who is squint-eyed, hump-backed,
57 "Aliquot recentiorum medicorum placita ex variis decerpta authoribus Leonardus

Fuchsius vir (quantum opinor) utraque peritus lingua, et medicinalium rerum scientia non
indoctus, confutare nititur argumentis rhetoricis, potiusquam dialecticis, salter talia sunt, ut
mihi persuadere, quod moliuntur haud possint quae itaque si libeat ingenioso cuilibet Medicinae
candidato esse, in re non necessaria evertere facile queat, horum aliqua ... obiter et laconismo
in brevi syngrapha annotavimus" (Montuus to Symphorien Champier, 1533, in Montuus,
Dialexeon medicinae, iiir).
58 "Pudet profecto medicorum quorundam, qui adhuc hodie in clarissima luce caligantibus
oculis veritatem intuentur, huicque praefracto animo contradicunt: in quorum certe numero
Montuus est, qui suam temeritatem et in dialecticis inscitiam, nunquam apertius quam in
annotatione septima prodidit" (Fuchs, Paradoxorum medicinae, 10).
59 See, e.g., Commentaria in Isagogen Porphyrii et in omnes libros de dialectica Aristotelis
(Louvain, 1535), 192.
60 For the topical tradition, see Niels J. Green-Pedersen, The Tradition of the Topics in the
Middle Ages: The Commentaries on Aristotle's and Boethius' "Topics" (Munich 1984).
61 Johannes Agricola, for instance, also understood that the shortage of differentia in
essential definitions forced one to resort to descriptive definitions using non-essential accidents;
see Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and
Dialectic (New York, 1993), 150-56.
Leonhart Fuchs 423
and scurrilous.62 According to Melanchthon, this form of definition is effective

in showing substances unknown to us. In fact Melanchthon eventually takes
the position that as a condition of Fallen Man, humans could understand
substances only through accidents. For Melanchthon, moreover, a clear definition
of a thing, as opposed to a definition of a name (which meant supplying
vernacular names) was to show the thing itself in front of one's eyes, as one did
with herbs.63 Melanchthon certainly considered Montuus's objections inane
and looked forward to the publication of the De Historia Stirpium.64 Fuchs's
pictorial arguments may be construed as following the positive sense of non-
essential definitions in the kind of dialectics promoted by his friend Melanchthon.
Such a visualization of Melanchthonian dialectics into a pictorial enterprise,
it seems, was unique to Fuchs: one of the harshest critiques of Fuchs's work
came from another Lutheran medic, Janus Cornarius (1500-1558). The silent
rivalry between Fuchs and Cornarius may be traced back to the early 1530s, but
it was after the publication of the De Historia Stirpium that they clashed openly
in an exchange of vitriolic insults.65 Cornarius reiterated in his own exposition
of Dioscorides' materia medica of 1557 that he was convinced that pictures
could not be useful for gaining knowledge of plants when people had not seen
the plant live in nature before seeing its picture: from live plants one can often
recognize their pictures, but from pictured plants one can never acquire
knowledge of live plants.66 Corarius pointed out that Dioscorides himself had
62 "definito ex genere et accidentibus collecta, ut sunt herbarum definitiones apud

Dioscoridem et Plinium, ut Narcissus est flos similis croco.... Hoc genere definitionum utimur
in describendis personis, ut apud Homerum Thersites describitur, strabis oculis, gibbosus,
garrulitate scurrili. Est autem nobis ideo saepius hac forma definiendi utendum, quia accidentia
ostendunt nobis substantias alioqui ignotas, per haec Malvam a Marubio, Cygnum a Corvo,...
denique res inter se omnes discernimus." Philip Melanchthon, De Dialectica Libri IV
(Wittenberg, 1531), E2v; "Sed de creatis traditur definitio illustrior, quia mens humana per
accidentia agnoscit substantiam.... Et accidentia, quantitates, qualitates, effectiones, passiones
consideremus, quantum conceditur, et Deo gratias agamus, quod aliquo modo et sese et naturam
rerum nobis ostendit, et aliquas noticias certas tradidit, et appetamus consuetudinem coelestem,
in qua noticia Dei e aliarum rerum erit illustrior." Philip Melanchthon, Erotemata dialectices
(1547) in Corpus Reformatorum Philippi Melanthonis Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. C. B.
Bretschneider and H. E. Bindseil (28 vols.; Halle, 1834-52; Brunswick, 1853-60), XIII, cols.
528f.
63 Melanchthon, De Dialectica Libri IV, D4r; Erotemata dialectices, in Corpus Reforma-
torum, XIII, col. 564.
64 "Montui invectivam legi, et video esse ineptum et strenue arrogantem." Melanchthon
to Fuchs, 1537, Corpus Reformatorum, III, col. 411; "Tuam lucubrationem de herbis ac fructibus
expecto" (Melanchthon to Fuchs, 12 November 1538, ibid. col. 607).
65 For Fuchs's squabble with Cornarius, see Eberhard Stiibler, Leonhart Fuchs: Leben und
Werk, Miinchener Beitriige zur Geschichte und Literatur der Naturwissenschaften und Medizin
Heft 13/14 (Munich, 1928), 102-10 (bottom pagination used).
66 "quas [=picturas] multi negant sibi unquam profuisse ad ullius plantae agnitionem
consequendam, quam non ipsi prius vivam et naturalem cognovissent, quam pictam vidissent:
et proinde affirmant se ex vivis quidem ad pictarum agnitionem saepe, nunquam vero ex
depictis ad vivarum cognitionem pervenisse." Cornarius, Pedacii Dioscoridae Anazarbensis
de materia medica libri V (Basel, 1557), a3r.
said that it was necessary to pay attention to the vicissitudes of the size, color,
and form of plants which change according to region and season. Pictures of
plants do not depict the characteristics of region or season, unless they are
added in writing.67 Even then the picture would represent a plant at a certain
time at a certain place, which one may not necessarily come across in that exact
form.68 Cornarius thus explained why he had omitted pictures altogether: he
had wished to nourish the minds, rather than please the eyes.69
Cornarius had a near-conversion experience when encountering the texts of
Greek medics in Froben's library, after having lived through the turbulent events
of the Wittenberg Movement (1520-21) and then embarking on a soul-searching
journey all over Europe.70 He saw his vocation as editing and translating the
texts of ancient Greek medics, and so with Dioscorides, he wanted to read and
hear him first in Greek and then to enable medical students to hear and read
him in Latin. He then added some emblemata, he said, inserted into chapters
like inlaid ornament.71 Like Andreas Alciato, the most famous promoter of the
term, emblema, Cornarius understands such ornamentation to be verbal, though
unlike Alciato, Cornarius's emblema are not intended to signify something else
which are simply pleasing and moralizing.72 Cornarius explained that he decided
to add the emblems in order to flesh out the true images of great minds, by
which he meant opinions of other ancients which were to be gauged against the
opinion of Dioscorides.73 Cornarius's images are thus verbal statements of other
67 Ibid., a3r.
68 Although Cornarius's objection to Fuchs's use of pictures is strictly based on the
testimony of Dioscorides, it is also important to note that printed pictures (counterfeit) were
generally accepted as conveying the truth of particulars. See the important article by Peter
Parshall, "Imago contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance," Art History, 16
(1993), 554-79. I thank Prof. L. Daston for drawing this article to my attention.
69 "Nos non oculos pascere, sed animos alere, et iudicia excitare, et excavere voluimus,
eorum qui haec nostra amore capti, non livore acti legent" (Comarius, Dioscoridae ... de
materia medica, a3v).
70 Otto Clemen, "Janus Cornarius," Neues Archiv fur Sdchsische Geschichte, 33 (1912),
40-45.
71 "Hoc vero tandem post maximos hue impensos labores, mihi primum ut et legerem
illum [Dioscorides] et audirem contigit: nunc per me etiam aliis rei medicae studiosis continget,
si qui forte nostra lingua latine loquentem illum audire, aut legere volent. Nec vero hoc solum
his continget, sed etiam ut nostra simul in ipsum emblemata, et legant, et audiant: quae sive ut
immissuras exemptiles, ad singula capita interiectas accipere volent, sive velut oramenta, et
singulorum illius capitum velut mitrarum redimicula quaedam addita per me sane utrumque
licebit" (Corarius, Dioscoridae ... de materia medica, a2 v, my insertion).
72 The pictures of Alciati's Emblematum liber were insertions made by the printers. For a
convincing case of Alciati's use of the term as epigrammatic, see Hessel Miedema, "The term
emblema in Alciati," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 31 (1968), 234-50.
Note that Corarius's edition of Greek epigrams (1529) served as a substantial source for
Alciati's Emblematum liber (1531), see Alison Saunders, "Alciati and Greek Anthology," The
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 12 (1982), 1-18.
73 Cornarius, Dioscoridae ... de materia medica, a2 v.
Leonhart Fuchs 425
ancients, and it is quite telling that in his index he uses the wordpictura to refer
to the verbal description of the forms of plants.74
Thus, Comarius dealt with plants in quite a different way from Fuchs. For
the petasites, for instance, Cornarius began by reproducing Dioscorides'
description in Latin, which differs slightly from Fuchs's quotation: its pedicle
is larger than a cubit, with a thickness of a thumb, over which a large leaf hangs
in the way of a cap or a bonnet, like a mushroom. Applied rubbing, it is good
for malign and phagedaenic ulcers.75 Then follows an emblema (in smaller
print) in which Cornarius reports and examines opinions of other ancients:
Pliny the Elder did not mention the plant; according to Galen, it is of the third
order of dryness; whence it may be used for malign and spreading ulcers.76 In
the emblema sections, Comarius is usually content with examining the opinions
of other ancient medics such as Galen, Paul ofAegina, and Pliny the Elder. For
emblema of the petasites, however, he has a further oblique reference to make:
almost all experts of herbs "of our time," he writes, want it to be what they call
Pestilenzwurz or Rosspappeln. But it is astonishing, Comarius continues, that
Dioscorides did not consider the use of its root, or indeed that he did not mention
the root at all. Since Dioscorides attributes the same use to its leaf as that of the
arcion, Comarius concludes that the petasites is a kind ofpersonata unknown
to anybody today. Comarius ends with explaining the etymology of the name
of the plant: it is taken from petasos, a kind of broad cap, which the leaf
resembles.77
Both Fuchs and Comarius covered essentially the same classical sources
on thepetasites-Galen, Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder, and classical etymology-
but what they did with them was starkly different: Fuchs was happy to
supplement where Dioscorides had failed and then to show how his own
identification of the plant and of further medicinal virtues (via a picture) fitted
in with a Galenic practice of knowing medicinal plants through reason and
experience.78 In contrast Comarius refused to accept Fuchs's identification of
the petasites with the Pestilenzwurz on the grounds that Dioscorides himself
74 E.g., "anthenidis pictura & vires," "buglossi pictura et vis" (ibid., Index, a2r and a3v).
75 "Petasites. pediculus est maior cubito, digiti magni crassitudine, in quo folium petasi
sive galeri modo magnum, incumbens velut fungus. Facit hoc ad maligna et phagedaenica
ulcera, tritum impositum." Ibid., 353. The parts which differ from Fuchs's Latin quotation of
the same passage of Dioscorides (cf. note 25 above) are italicized.
76 Ibid., 354.
77 "Herbarum periti nostrae aetate fere omnes petasiten esse volunt, quam nostri
Pestilenzwurz et rosspappeln vocant. Sed mirum quod radicis usum non recensuit Diosc. imo
radicis in totum non meminit. Quum autem folij usum eundem quem arcij Dios. habeat, mihi
sane etiam ipse ex personatae genere esse videtur, sed eo hodie omnibus ignoto. Nomen ex
petaso lati pilei genere habet, cuius similitudinem folium praefert" (ibid., 354).
78 See also the assessment that Fuchs is a less skilled philologist compared to Cornarius
in Richard J. Durling, "Leonhart Fuchs and his Commentaries on Galen," Medizinhistorisches
Journal, 24 (1989), 42-47.
did not mention the root of the plant. Furthermore, because of a use similar to
another plant, Cornarius was inclined to believe that thepetasites may be another
kind of plant mentioned by Dioscorides. Here, Cornarius rigorously sticks to
the words of Dioscorides: they are the only basis from which Comarius is
prepared to accept inferences and arguments-there is no attempt to expand or
supplement the medicinal use of a plant for contemporary use. For Cornarius it
was Dioscorides' words that were most important. Thus Fuchs and Cornarius
were pursuing different kinds of commitment to the classical world: Fuchs to
the revival of Galenicpractice of understanding medicinal plants and Cornarius
to the revival of Dioscorides' knowledge of plants through his voice and his
words. They were arguing at cross purposes.
The controversial nature of Fuchs's work highlights the strangeness of his
claims, even to his contemporaries, but it also shows up the absence of common
ground for the study of plants in this period and this is precisely why the study
of plants was a quarrelsome affair.79 Those promoting the study of plants in this
period, at least in Northern Europe, pursued what was largely an emulation of
classical models in many different ways, without agreed methods of investi-
gation, without agreed aims, and without a sense of a common discipline or a
community. This is a situation quite different from that of Italy, where Pier
Andrea Matthioli (1500-1577) had been using a different strategy in his prefaces,
forming an Italian "republic" of botany through his many editions of Dios-
corides.80 Individual and local contexts shape qualitatively different kinds of
botanizing, and a comparative analysis of these contexts may be one way in
which historians may fruitfully avoid the anachronism of searching the early
modem period for early forms of moder botany.
I hope that my reassessment of Fuchs's works offers an account of the
context in which both the text and the pictures formed integral parts of Fuchs's
unique enterprise of reviving the practice of Galenic medicine. Fuchs's decision
to use pictures arose from a lengthy dispute with a rival medic, Montuus, over
the proper way to identify classical plants. Their difference boiled down to the
different values they attached to dialectical definitions. Fuchs's use of pictures
was as controversial as his project of reviving Galenic medicine which was
spelt out in the text, precisely because his pictures of plants were an integral
part of his scholarly argument about the medicinal virtue of plants. Thus,
objections against Fuchs's use of pictures were raised by Cornarius who
understood the entire enterprise of reviving the ancients in a different light. The
79 As it was in Italy; see R. Palmer, "Medical Botany in Northern Italy in the Renaissance,"
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 78 (1985), 149-57.
80 Paula Findlen, "The Formation of a scientific community: natural history in sixteenth-
century Italy," in Natural Philosophy and the Disciplines in Early Modern Europe, eds. A.
Grafton and N. Siraisi (forthcoming). I am grateful to Prof. Findlen for allowing me to see an
earlier version of this paper.
Leonhart Fuchs 427
case of Fuchs shows ho

primary sources for an
assumptions frequently
picture "shows" the sam
a theoretical commitmen
to use pictures require
Christ's College, Cam

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Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures

Author(s): Sachiko Kusukawa

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and

Copyright 1997 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.

3 "Fuchs's herbal is without importance in the history of plant classification" (Agnes

Figure 1. The Artists. Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium, 1542,

relative merits of various mimetic arts were discussed.7 Fuchs's comment on

HOR STEN SI; :&

Figure 4. Atriplex. Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium, 1542, fol. 118.

Figure 5. Mercuiralis. Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium, 154

Who, I ask, in their right mind would condemn a picture which, it is

This is an extremely strong statement about the effectiveness of pictures in the

16 De historia stirpium, a6v.

were understood partly by a certain method and partly by experience.20 Fuchs

Figure 6. "Petasites." Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium, 1542, fol. 644.

on to introduce more features (not found in Dioscorides' text) from thepictured

33 "Appendix. Experimento comprobatum est radicem hanc mirifice conferre pesti-

is the contemporary borrago because Dioscorides' description matches the

45 "Annotatio 7. Errati 6, 7, 12 & 27. Quod picturae simplicium medicamentorum sint

47 "Modus namque humanae cognitionis ferme ex multis accidentibus unam quandam

57 "Aliquot recentiorum medicorum placita ex variis decerpta authoribus Leonardus

and scurrilous.62 According to Melanchthon, this form of definition is effective

62 "definito ex genere et accidentibus collecta, ut sunt herbarum definitiones apud

case of Fuchs shows ho

Christ's College, Cam

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