New Kreüterbuch is a German translation of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s Commentarii in sex libros Pedacii Dioscoridis. First published in Italian in 1544, the Commentarii was the preeminent botanical reference work during its time period; 32,000 copies of the earlier edition were sold. Mattioli (1501-1577), like all Italian botanists at the time, was a devoted student of the classical Greek text De material medica libri quinque by the ancient physician, botanist and pharmacologist Dioscorides (c. 40-90 AD). Though its title presents him as a “commentator” on Dioscorides’s study, Mattioli made original contributions too and augmented Discorides’s 800 plant compendium by including every plant known to him. Many of these were reported by friends and acquaintances who traveled to distant countries, like the Flemish herbalist and diplomat to the Ottman Empire, Busbecq (1522-1592), who made botanical drawings in Turkey for Mattioli.
The stunning woodcuts (created by Giorgio Liberale and Wolfgang Meyerpeck) appearing in this edition are original to it. Some are hand-colored, a practice of interacting with the book’s prints that might have been undertaken by the book owner or by print shop workers.
A vivid indicator that this book was used arises in the pressed plant leaves that appear throughout this folio sized volume. The pressed plant suggests the reader not only spent time turning the pages of this heavy and large book, but also studied them closely. The reader had carried the information conveyed by Mattioli and those he in turn was informed by inside his mind and found specimens of the same plants within his own immediate environments. By collocating the real plant against the one described and illustrated in Mattioli’s plant book, the reader brought his world into direct contact with the one embodied by print.