Home - Visualizing the Unknown. Jessie Chen Color. Wood Blocks. Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen. Before Black There Was Red: the Madder Illustration Woodblock for the Herbals of Rembert Dodoens (1517-1585) - Burgundian Black. In his Stirpium historiae pemptades sex (1583; abbreviated here as the Stirpium), the Mechelen physician and botanist Rembert Dodoens (1517–1585) remarked that the root of the madder plant is used as a red dye (‘tum in tinctoria est usus‘).[1] <p>[1] Dodoens, <em>Stirpium,</em> 349. </p> An important figure in the history of early modern botanical knowledge, Dodoens, along with two other Netherlandish botanists Carolus Clusius (1526–1609) and Matthias Lobelius (1538–1616), and their main publishers Christophe Plantin (c. 1520–1589) and the successors of the Officina Plantiniana (Plantin Press), collectively ushered in the new discipline of botany to the sixteenth-century Low Countries with their many printed botanical treatises.[2] <p>[2] De Nave and Imhof, <em>Botany in the Low Countries,</em> 40–41; Swan, “Illustrated Natural History,” 186.
</p> An interest in plants was already growing strong in the Antwerp region since the late Burgundian period.[3] Printing Type and Images Together. Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen. My dissertation subject is a seventeenth-century book category that most would regard as the florilegium, or sometimes loosely called the flower book. They are collections of botanical illustrations, mostly images of garden flowers. Depending on who you ask, they are often argued to be simply the coffee table book of the past with little to no scientific value. My approach to these images is to look at them from a more holistic perspective. I ask how they played into different types of engagement with plants in the past – such as their relation to gardening and other botanical publications of the time.
In other words, how they participated in the knowledge production of plants, from the perspective of decorative plants rather than, for example, medicinal plants. There are clear, scientific reasons behind studying medicinal and utilitarian plants, but with garden flowers, those reasons might not be as explicit. The interest came from my own artistic practice. Making Colors (6): Space and Resources in Historical Remaking - Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen. *This blog post is part of the series Making Colors. The historical remaking research of my project is supported by the generous grant from the Oak Spring Garden Foundation.
Among all the aspects of historical remaking, the space for conducting experiments may be the most ahistorical one. The recipes to reconstruct are directly from the past. Even though the interpretation of recipes is modern, historians and researchers are trained to carefully contextualize historical text within the period in which a recipe was written or recorded. The materials used for remaking—in spite of the fact that they are often grown, produced, or processed differently nowadays—usually have similar properties as historical ones to offer enough points of comparison.
For example, despite the subtleties in shades, madder root is still a source of red dye; it does not become a yellow dyestuff instead. Fig. 1. Fig. 2. Archives, libraries, and museums supply consultation space and research materials. Jessie Chen Color. Wood Blocks. About - Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen. Herbarium? | Madebyjessiewhchen.
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