Breaking the silence of the 500-year-old smiling garden of everlasting flowers: The En Tibi book herbarium

Abstract

We reveal the enigmatic origin of one of the earliest surviving botanical collections. The 16 th -century Italian En Tibi herbarium is a large, luxurious book with c . 500 dried plants, made in the Renaissance scholarly circles that developed botany as a distinct discipline. Its Latin inscription, translated as “Here for you a smiling garden of everlasting flowers”, suggests that this herbarium was a gift for a patron of the emerging botanical science. We follow an integrative approach that includes a botanical similarity estimation of the En Tibi with contemporary herbaria (Aldrovandi, Cesalpino, “Cibo”, Merini, Estense) and analysis of the book’s watermark, paper, binding, handwriting, Latin inscription and the morphology and DNA of hairs mounted under specimens. Rejecting the previous origin hypothesis (Ferrara, 1542–1544), we show that the En Tibi was made in Bologna around 1558. We attribute the En Tibi herbarium to Francesco Petrollini, a neglected 16 th -century botanist, to whom also belongs, as clarified herein, the controversial “Erbario Cibo” kept in Rome. The En Tibi was probably a work on commission for Petrollini, who provided the plant material for the book. Other people were apparently involved in the compilation and offering of this precious gift to a yet unknown person, possibly the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I. The En Tibi herbarium is a Renaissance masterpiece of art and science, representing the quest for truth in herbal medicine and botany. Our multidisciplinary approach can serve as a guideline for deciphering other anonymous herbaria, kept safely “hidden” in treasure rooms of universities, libraries and museums.

The early book herbaria of Leonhard Rauwolf (S. France and N. Italy, 1560–1563): new light on a plant collection from the ‘golden age of botany’

“…In the 1558 edition the text is accompanied by the species' rst scienti c illustration (Matthioli 1554(Matthioli , 1558Casas and Barbera 2002;Eggli et al 2018). One specimen identi ed as O. cus-indica appears also in Erbario A, a 16 th -century Italian book herbarium of uncertain origin (Penzig 1905;Stefanaki et al 2019). Unlike the rich record of prickly pear from 16 th -century Italy, no information could be found in literature about France.…”

“…Having nancial di culties, he decided to sell his herbaria, which he achieved for a remarkable price; the four book volumes were bought in 1593 by a commissioner of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) and came to Rudolf's famous art cabinet in Prague (Callmer 1973;Walter et al in press). They were later stolen by Swedish troops and handed to Queen Christina of Sweden, and, together with the Italian En Tibi herbarium which was also part of Rudolf's curiosities collection, they were brought to Stockholm (Callmer 1973;Stefanaki et al 2019 Unlike Rauwolf's travels to the Near East, this early period of Rauwolf's botanical activity is hardly known. According to Dannenfeldt (1968) and Herde and Walter (2010), the best historical source for the travels of Rauwolf in France and Italy is Rauwolf's herbaria themselves, which have remained to date largely unexplored.…”

The Zierikzee Herbarium: An analysis of the contents and origins of an enigmatic herbarium

“…To point out the degree of similarity between the names on the oldest labels of the Zierikzee Herbarium and the most likely sources, in particular the names on the labels of the Clifford Herbarium, the names used in the rst catalogue, the Index Plantarum (Boerhaave, 1710) as well as the second catalogue, the Index Alter Plantarum (Boerhaave, 1719) and the medicinal catalogue from the Amsterdam garden (J.Commelin, 1698), we adopted different levels of similarity. While comparing the texts separately, we counted the words common to both names and divided the outcome by the total number of unique terms used in both names, following Stefanaki & al. (2019).…”

“…Where once they were con ned to the realm of inaccessible treasure rooms, they can now -in their digital form -be studied without the need to handle the fragile specimens too frequently (Van Andel, 2017). For research on the history of botany, the study of historic herbaria is essential (Van Andel et al, 2012;Pulvirenti et al 2015;Stefanaki et al, 2019). Historic herbaria can provide us with valuable information about plant occurrences in time and place, the state-of-the-art of botanical science at a speci c moment and about the scienti c networks of the people who collected the specimens.…”

Editorial: Integrative and Translational Uses of Herbarium Collections Across Time, Space, and Species

“…Their imperfections extend to problems with erroneous identifications and with biased digitization efforts (e.g. Smith and Blagoderov, 2012 ), but careful assessment of data quality significantly improves their value ( Goodwin et al, 2015 ; Maldonado et al, 2015 ), as do efforts to evaluate collection history and association with additional data sources ( Allasi Canales et al, 2020 ; López and Sassone ; Romeiras et al ; Stefanaki et al, 2019 ).…”