246
manipulation of arable lands was so extensive as to have engendered a human world
within the world. Greco-Roman philosophers debated the wisdom of this; Aristotle
assessed well over 500 species, and many of the earliest saints, including Basel,
Ambrose, and Augustine, celebrated plant life as the clearest evidence for the goodness of God and His Creation.
19
The associations in every religion were always
implicit.
All of these intellectual debates, insights, and poetic lyricism seizing upon the
obvious importance of plants to human life and death were fixated on those hanging
gardens, granting them the stature of the divine, as the psyche similarly invested the
gardens of the fifteenth-century Aztec Huastepec and Texcotzingo (covered today
by the northern reaches of Mexico City) with an imperial conundrum of potency.
The God Tlaloc was “He Who Makes the Plants Spring Up.” Such juxtapositions of
hallowed space with vast paradise mythologies are most populated by flowers.
Every artist, like that most tangible gene of a gardener in each human being, at some
point engages in her or his own meditation on the flowers of paradise: what they
mean to us personally and perennially. When Sandro Botticelli painted “Primavera”
(Spring, 1482–1485), his forest landscape teemed with 190 discernible flower petals. And when Sir Thomas More published his popular Utopia (1516) European
readers had already assimilated the concept from childhood. The horae, or Christian
devotional Book(s) of Hours, in which every page was typically designed with vertical and horizontal flower gardens of every real and imaginary variety, were to be
found throughout secular life, which segued from the religious oracles of every
church in every quadrant of Europe.
One in particular comes to mind: The Hours of Mary of Burgundy, produced in
Flanders in the 1470s, written by the famed Burgundian scribe Nicolas Spierinc and
illustrated by the greatest of the Flemish miniaturists/illuminators. Flowers and
birds and the garden-as-Otherworld were the most notable backdrop for the religious storylines.
20
Renaissance households were fully conversant with gardens of
Eden, and many of the flower species occupying them, the same flowers that grew
in pots within their homes, in community gardens, and in those arable commons
upon which so much of Medieval and Renaissance village life depended. One witnesses all the same obsessive and iconic motifs in the Dutch love of fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century manuscript illuminations, alive with most of the same wildlife
21
(Fig. 26.3).
19 See Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore – Nature And Culture In Western Thought
From Ancient Times To The End Of The Eighteenth Century, University of California Press,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967, Chapter 3, “Creating a Second Nature,” pp.116–149.
20 See Codex Vindobonensis 1857, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Commentary by
Eric Inglis, Harvey Miller Publishers, London 1995, p. 1.
21 See The Golden Age of Dutch Manuscript Painting, Introduction by James H. Marrow, Catalogue
Essays by Henri L. M. Defoer, Anne S. Korteweg, and Wilhemina C. M. Wüstefeld, George
Braziller Inc., New York 1990.
26 Botanical Equations for Paradox
manipulation of arable lands was so extensive as to have engendered a human world
within the world. Greco-Roman philosophers debated the wisdom of this; Aristotle
assessed well over 500 species, and many of the earliest saints, including Basel,
Ambrose, and Augustine, celebrated plant life as the clearest evidence for the goodness of God and His Creation.
19
The associations in every religion were always
implicit.
All of these intellectual debates, insights, and poetic lyricism seizing upon the
obvious importance of plants to human life and death were fixated on those hanging
gardens, granting them the stature of the divine, as the psyche similarly invested the
gardens of the fifteenth-century Aztec Huastepec and Texcotzingo (covered today
by the northern reaches of Mexico City) with an imperial conundrum of potency.
The God Tlaloc was “He Who Makes the Plants Spring Up.” Such juxtapositions of
hallowed space with vast paradise mythologies are most populated by flowers.
Every artist, like that most tangible gene of a gardener in each human being, at some
point engages in her or his own meditation on the flowers of paradise: what they
mean to us personally and perennially. When Sandro Botticelli painted “Primavera”
(Spring, 1482–1485), his forest landscape teemed with 190 discernible flower petals. And when Sir Thomas More published his popular Utopia (1516) European
readers had already assimilated the concept from childhood. The horae, or Christian
devotional Book(s) of Hours, in which every page was typically designed with vertical and horizontal flower gardens of every real and imaginary variety, were to be
found throughout secular life, which segued from the religious oracles of every
church in every quadrant of Europe.
One in particular comes to mind: The Hours of Mary of Burgundy, produced in
Flanders in the 1470s, written by the famed Burgundian scribe Nicolas Spierinc and
illustrated by the greatest of the Flemish miniaturists/illuminators. Flowers and
birds and the garden-as-Otherworld were the most notable backdrop for the religious storylines.
20
Renaissance households were fully conversant with gardens of
Eden, and many of the flower species occupying them, the same flowers that grew
in pots within their homes, in community gardens, and in those arable commons
upon which so much of Medieval and Renaissance village life depended. One witnesses all the same obsessive and iconic motifs in the Dutch love of fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century manuscript illuminations, alive with most of the same wildlife
21
(Fig. 26.3).
19 See Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore – Nature And Culture In Western Thought
From Ancient Times To The End Of The Eighteenth Century, University of California Press,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967, Chapter 3, “Creating a Second Nature,” pp.116–149.
20 See Codex Vindobonensis 1857, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Commentary by
Eric Inglis, Harvey Miller Publishers, London 1995, p. 1.
21 See The Golden Age of Dutch Manuscript Painting, Introduction by James H. Marrow, Catalogue
Essays by Henri L. M. Defoer, Anne S. Korteweg, and Wilhemina C. M. Wüstefeld, George
Braziller Inc., New York 1990.
26 Botanical Equations for Paradox