Tulip (Tulipa)

The Tulipa plate was engraved for the Hortus Eystettensis, published in Nuremberg in 1613 under the direction of Basilius Besler, an apothecary and botanist commissioned by Prince-Bishop Johann Konrad von Gemmingen to document the extraordinary garden at Willibaldsburg Castle in Eichstätt, Bavaria. The garden, one of the largest and most ambitious in northern Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century, contained plants gathered from four continents, and Besler spent sixteen years producing the 367 folio plates that would constitute the finished work. The tulip plates are among the most sought after in the volume, because they document the height of tulipomania, that extraordinary speculative fever that gripped Europe in the early seventeenth century, when individual bulbs of broken or feathered tulips commanded prices equivalent to fine houses. Besler's renderings capture precisely the flamed and parrot forms that drove collectors to financial ruin, preserving a visual record of varieties since lost to time and disease. The Hortus Eystettensis was produced in two editions, a hand-colored version for the prince-bishop's court and an uncolored edition for wider scholarly distribution; the hand-colored plates, of which this is an example, are considered among the finest examples of scientific illustration produced during the Northern European Renaissance and have been held in the collections of the British Library, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.