Basil Besler- Hortus Eystettensis

The Hortus Eystettensis, published by Basil Besler at Nuremberg in 1613, is one of the landmarks of European botanical publishing and one of the most spectacular illustrated books ever produced. Commissioned by Johann Konrad von Gemmingen, Prince-Bishop of Eichstatt, to document the garden he had created at his palace on the Willibaldsburg, it comprises 374 folio plates depicting more than a thousand plant species arranged according to the season in which they flower. The original publication appeared in two editions — one hand-coloured, one uncoloured — and the sheer scale of the enterprise, involving multiple engravers working over many years, is extraordinary by any standard.

The botanical accuracy of the Hortus Eystettensis was considerable for its time. Besler worked with artists who had direct access to the living plants in the Eichstatt garden, and the resulting images combine scientific precision with a decorative quality that places them at the summit of early seventeenth-century botanical illustration. Unlike many earlier herbals, which reproduced woodcuts derived ultimately from ancient prototypes with little reference to actual plants, the Hortus Eystettensis plates are based on direct observation, giving them an authority and a freshness that later generations of botanists as well as collectors have recognised.

The format of the plates is unusually large — the original folio sheets measure approximately 46 by 56 centimetres — which allowed the engravers to depict plants at or near natural size. This scale, combined with the quality of the engraving and the richness of the hand-applied colour in the best examples, gives the plates a physical presence that smaller botanical illustrations cannot match. They were designed to impress as much as to inform, and they succeed on both counts.

The plant subjects range from the familiar — tulips, roses, lilies, irises — to species that were, in 1613, still novelties in European gardens, recently arrived from the Americas, the Ottoman Empire and the far reaches of the known world. The tulip plates are particularly celebrated: produced at a moment when tulip mania was beginning to grip the Dutch market, they record varieties that were then among the most fashionable and valuable plants in Europe. The Hortus Eystettensis thus captures a moment of significant horticultural change, when the European garden was being transformed by the influx of exotic species from every part of the globe.

Original plates from the Hortus Eystettensis have been among the most consistently valued items in the antique botanical print market for more than a century. The combination of their historical importance, their visual splendour, their large format and their genuine rarity — the original edition was produced in a limited number of copies, and attrition over four centuries has reduced the number of intact copies further — places them in a category apart from most other botanical illustration.

Individual plates extracted from defective or incomplete copies have been available on the market since the nineteenth century, and they remain the primary means by which collectors can acquire original Besler material. The condition of individual plates varies considerably; the finest hand-coloured examples, with strong impression and fresh colour, command substantial premiums over uncoloured or later-coloured examples. Each plate represents a direct connection to one of the great moments in the history of botanical publishing.