Morgan E. Aronson has recently departed the Smithsonian Libraries but was previously the library technician at the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology. The role of the more »
Tag: incunabula
The most interesting thing about the text, at least to me, is its variety of bizarre illustrative woodcuts. The first half of the text, “De Herbis,” contains many woodcuts of various plants. Three more sections follow, including the next section, “Tractatus de Animalibus,” which focuses on animals both real and imagined. Prüss immediately catches the reader’s attention with a detailed, labeled woodcut of a human skeleton, then continues with hundreds of odd woodcuts, some of which depict animals that the artist had clearly never seen.
The National Museum of American History blog, O Say can You See? recently featured a wonderful post about the reopening of the Libraries' Dibner Library of the History of Science more »