A Woodblock’s Career: Transferring Visual Botanical Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries

Abstract

The Antwerp publishing house Officina Plantiniana was the birthplace of many important early modern botanical treatises. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the masters of the press commissioned approximately 4,000 botanical woodblocks to print illustrations for the publications of the three Renaissance botanists – Rembert Dodoens, Carolus Clusius, and Matthias Lobelius. The woodcuts became one of the bases of early modern botanical visual culture, generating and transmitting the understanding of plants throughout the Low Countries and the rest of Europe. The physical blocks, which are preserved at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, thus offer a material perspective into the development of early modern botany. By examining the 108 woodblocks made for Dodoens’ small herbal, the Florum (1568), and the printing history of a selected few, this article shows the ways in which the use of these woodblocks impacted visual botanical knowledge transfer in the early modern period.