Featured on PDR in the collection Erbario: a 15th-century Herbal from Northern Italy
This wonderful 15th-century herbal hails from northern Italy (mostly likely the Veneto) and contains a few different kinds of illustration styles, evidence of a series of augmentations to the manuscript made across several generations. It started life out in the early fifteenth century as a set of around seventy highly stylised paintings of plants, whose patterns, human faces, and other fantastical elements broadly follow medieval conventions (in particular the Pseudo-Apuleius herbal tradition). Sometime later in the century, as Karen M. Reeds writes “the bound manuscript of 100 folios was, in effect, interleaved”: