I recently saw some 1975 (?) works by Gennady Pavlishin, an illustrator from Eastern Russia. I find his You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. interesting, I guess they are derived from older models. In particular, I find the symmetrical roots of You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. somehow similar to the (simpler and more symmetric) decorative plants You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view..
Does anybody have links to actual ancient illustrations of plants from Russia? I guess that manuscript herbals must have existed in Russia as well.
Other parallels for the roots of f2r?
I checked the Wikipedia article about Mr. Pavlishin. Notwithstanding that he graduated as an artist, he worked as ethnographer in the USSR Academy of Sciences for several years and travelled a lot across the Far East studying life and culture of the local peoples; it was that experience (as Wikipedia suggests) that became the basis of many of his works.
So I doubt that these ornaments, most probably Far Eastern in origin, can have anything in common with the VMS drawings.
As for ancient Russian herbals, I'm not sure that such do exist at all, but I'll check.
(19-05-2016, 12:53 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So I doubt that these ornaments, most probably Far Eastern in origin, can have anything in common with the VMS drawings.
Are you sure about this? Leaving all details aside, there have been contacts between Europe and the far East, be it directly or indirectly, ever since the existence of the Eastern trade routes. Nothing we know about MS Beinecke 408 excludes the possibility of Far Eastern influence in the source material.
I'm no expert on Eastern styles myself, but I know Diane considers the style of the plants to be influenced by Eastern habit. In my own research, I have identified plants that originated as far as Borneo, which was connected to the trade routes since Antiquity.
Without knowing wheter or not there is any link between the styles of the VM plants and these drawings, I still find it interesting that Marco noticed a similarity
What I mean here by "Far East" is actually "Russian Far East", not Manchuria to the south of Amur, let alone the rest of modern mainland China.
(19-05-2016, 12:53 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As for ancient Russian herbals, I'm not sure that such do exist at all, but I'll check.
According to the caption, You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. is a Russian manuscript herbal (I have no idea of the dating).
The illustration looks like an ant heap to me.
You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. mentions the Russian translation of an early printed German herbal.
I believe 16th century is not that "ancient"
I have no illustrations to offer, but here is a You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. to a book chapter about "Alchemy and the Virtues of Stones in Muscovy".
Although it is primarily concerned with stones, there is a short section which discusses herbals on p. 152.
It explains the lack of "hortus" literature in Russia before the game-changing translation of Gart der Gesundheit by Nicolaus Bulow in 1534 as the
Blagoprokhladnyi Vertograd.
From then, hortus literature (
vertogrady?) flourished, often mixing the herbals with Russian translations of the Secretum Secretorum.
This does not completely rule out that there were Russian herbals before then, but the tradition seems to have really taken off after this 16th C translation.
There is a thesis written about this Bulow herbal translation by a J. Muskala, Uppsala University, but all I've been able to find online is an abstract.
