The Death of a Naturalist: Knowledge and Community in Late Renaissance Italy

Findlen, Paula

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-56514-9_9

Cited by 38 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…After Galen, scholars of the Mediterranean zone, whether Greek, Arabic or Latin, did not associate the name arum with taro and it took centuries before the edible Cyrenaic arum was finally identified with colocasia . During the Italian Renaissance, taro regained popularity among members of the botanical school led by the Professor of Medicinal Simples Luca Ghini at the Universities of Bologna (1534–1544) and Pisa (1544–1555) [ 102 ]. Ghini’s botanical school attracted scholars from across Europe after the Classical botanical treatises became more widely available in print.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Literary evidence for taro in the ancient Mediterranean: A chronology of names and uses in a multilingual world

et al. 2018

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Taro, Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, is a vegetable and starchy root crop cultivated in Asia, Oceania, the Americas, Africa, and the Mediterranean. Very little is known about its early history in the Mediterranean, which previous authors have sought to trace through Classical (Greek and Latin) texts that record the name colocasia (including cognates) from the 3rd century BC onwards. In ancient literature, however, this name also refers to the sacred lotus, Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn. and its edible rhizome. Like taro, lotus is an alien introduction to the Mediterranean, and there has been considerable confusion regarding the true identity of plants referred to as colocasia in ancient literature. Another early name used to indicate taro was arum, a name already attested from the 4th century BC. Today, this name refers to Arum, an aroid genus native to West Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Our aim is to explore historical references to taro in order to clarify when and through which routes this plant reached the Mediterranean. To investigate Greek and Latin texts, we performed a search using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL), plus commentaries and English and French translations of original texts. Results show that while in the early Greek and Latin literature the name kolokasia (Greek κολοκάσια) and its Latin equivalent colocasia refer to Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn., after the 4th century AD a poorly understood linguistic shift occurs, and colocasia becomes the name for taro. We also found that aron (Greek ἄρον) and its Latin equivalent arum are names used to indicate taro from the 3rd century BC and possibly earlier.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Literary evidence for taro in the ancient Mediterranean: A chronology of names and uses in a multilingual world

et al. 2018

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“…Ghini taught medical botany in Pisa from 1544 to 1555, where he founded the rst university botanical garden supported by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I de' Medici (De Toni, 1907). Cosimo attempted to import and acclimatize various American plants (Gentilcore, 2010), and Ghini enriched the garden with exotic species and taught his many pupils to press and dry botanical specimens between paper (Findlen, 2017). According to McCue (1952: 292), the Pisa garden catalogue manuscript from 1548 'does not include any plant identi able as the tomato'.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Anguillara had followed Ghini's classes and worked in his teacher's private garden in Bologna, and in 1546 became the rst prefect of the Padua garden (Minelli, 2010). In 1543, Anguillara assisted Ghini in amassing materials for the Pisa garden (Findlen, 2017), so it is more likely that Anguillara (and not Michiel) provided Ghini with tomato seeds, also because the Padua garden was founded in 1545 (Palmer, 1985), a year after Matthioli described the rst European tomato. Michiel apparently started to expand his Venice garden upon his return from Padua in 1555 (De Toni, 1940).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We performed a literature review, starting with studies on the introduction of the tomato in Europe (e.g., Jenkins, 1948. McCue, 1952, Daunay, Laterrot & Janick, 2007Gentilcore, 2010) and on early modern naturalists in Italy, France, Central Europe and the Low Countries (e.g., De Toni, 1907, 1910, 1940Findlen, 1994Findlen, , 2017Egmond, 2016, Rotelli, 2018. We also reviewed modern taxonomic and molecular studies on the origin of the tomato (e.g., Peralta, Spooner & Knapp, 2008;Lin et al, 2014).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unfortunately, his Historia Plantarum, a beautiful collection with hundreds of colored plant illustrations, was never published. Gesner had travelled to Italy in 1544, where he met Ghini to admire his collections (Findlen, 2017), which provides us with a clue to where he may have obtained his tomato seeds. Later, Gesner (1561) wrote that the tomato was grown by Pieter van Coudenberghe in Antwerp (a possible source of Dodoens' tomato), by Vuoysselus in Breslau (now Poland) and in German gardens by Joachimus Kreichius in Torgau and in Nuremberg by George Oellinger.…”

Section: The Rst Tomato Specimen (1551)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sixteenth-century tomatoes in Europe: who saw them, what did they look like, and where did they come from?

Andel

Vos

Michels

et al. 2021

Preprint

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BackgroundSoon after the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the first tomatoes were presented as curiosities to the European royals and drew the attention of sixteenth-century Italian naturalists. Despite of their scientific interest in this New World crop, most Renaissance botanists did not specify where these ‘golden apples’ or ‘pomi d’oro’ came from. The debate on the first European tomatoes and their origin is often hindered by erroneous dating, botanical misidentifications and inaccessible historical sources. The discovery of a tomato specimen in the sixteenth-century ‘En Tibi herbarium’ kept at Leiden, the Netherlands led to claims that its DNA would reveal the ‘original’ taste and pest resistance of early tomatoes.MethodsRecent digitization efforts greatly facilitate research on historic botanical sources. Here we provide an overview of the ten remaining sixteenth-century tomato specimens, early descriptions and 13 illustrations. Several were never published before, revealing what these tomatoes looked like, who saw them, and where they came from.ResultsOur survey shows that the earliest tomatoes in Europe came in a much wider variety of colors, shapes and sizes than previously thought, with both simple and fasciated flowers, round and segmented fruits. Pietro Andrea Matthioli gave the first description of a tomato in 1544, and the oldest specimens were collected by Ulisse Aldrovandi and Francesco Petrollini in c. 1551 from plants grown in the Pisa botanical garden by their teacher Luca Ghini. The oldest illustrations were made in Germany in the early 1550s, but the Flemish Rembert Dodoens published the first image in 1553. The names of early tomatoes in contemporary manuscripts suggest both a Mexican and a Peruvian origin. The ‘En Tibi’ specimen was collected by Petrollini around Bologna in 1558 and thus is not the oldest extant tomato. Although only 1.2% of its DNA was readable, recent molecular research shows that the En Tibi tomato was a fully domesticated, but quite heterozygous individual and genetically close to three Mexican and two Peruvian tomato landraces. Molecular research on the other sixteenth-century tomato specimens may reveal other patterns of genetic similarity and geographic origin. Clues on the ‘historic’ taste and pest resistance of the sixteenth-century tomatoes should not be searched in their degraded DNA, but rather in those landraces in Central and South America that are genetically close to them. The indigenous farmers growing these traditional varieties should be supported to conserve these heirloom varieties in-situ.

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The road to herbaria: Teaching and learning about biology, aesthetics, and the history of botany

Flannery

2023

J Biosci

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The Death of a Naturalist: Knowledge and Community in Late Renaissance Italy

Cited by 38 publications

References 18 publications

Literary evidence for taro in the ancient Mediterranean: A chronology of names and uses in a multilingual world

Literary evidence for taro in the ancient Mediterranean: A chronology of names and uses in a multilingual world

Sixteenth-century tomatoes in Europe: who saw them, what did they look like, and where did they come from?

The road to herbaria: Teaching and learning about biology, aesthetics, and the history of botany

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