Medicinal plants, very old herbariums (volumes containing collections of dried herbs) and contemporary works of art. These are some of the 'ingredients' of the exhibition "Wild Medicine: Healing Plants Around the World, Featuring the Italian Renaissance Garden", an extraordinary event recently inaugurated at the New York Botanical Garden which includes "The Renaissance Herbal" exhibition, organized by Lucia Tomasi Tongiorgi, Professor of Art History at the University of Pisa.
"At the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden, more than fifty very rare herbariums, never exhibited before, are on show," says Lucia Tomasi Tongiorgi.
There is, for example, 'Circa Instans' from 1275 which, for the first time in Europe, united Islamic and Western knowledge in the world of plants. There is a printed medical botanical treatise by the German Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179) and also a rare edition, from 1565, of the work of the Italian botanist and physicist Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1500 – 1577) printed in gold and silver ink upon blue paper.
"The Renaissance Herbal" exhibition follows the development of knowledge of plants (and their medicinal properties). It begins with the Greek and Roman epochs and ends with the Renaissance era, a period when herbariums aspired not only to scientific acclaim, but also to aesthetic acclaim.
"It is not by chance," concluded Professor Tongiorgi, " that in Italy, the cradle of the Renaissance, the first botanical gardens as places dedicated to the study of plants and their medicinal properties began to appear. The very first of these were founded at the Universities of Pisa and Padua during the mid-fifteen hundreds; and it is from these two gardens that some of the plants originate which are now on show at the New York Botanical Garden."
