When Leonhart Fuchs printed his woodcuts at Basle in 1542, block-cutter and illuminator worked side by side, colouring every plate from the living specimen. No printed herbal had demanded that image answer to text with such rigour before.
The Colour of Remedy
The greens were mixed from buckthorn sap, pressed from ripe Rhamnus berries and fixed with alum. The blue-greens edging the nightshade leaves came from copper verdigris scraped from vinegar-soaked plates. These were diagnostic choices, not decorative ones.
Nature hath marked every remedy with its own hue — and the engraver who falsifies that hue falsifies the cure.
Two centuries later, Elizabeth Blackwell drew every specimen herself at the Chelsea Physic Garden and hand-tinted each plate of A Curious Herbal to fund her husband’s release from debtor’s prison. The colouring was not ornament; it was pharmacognosy.