Purple Peony (Paeonia Mas Flore Purpureo)

Besler, a Nuremberg apothecary and horticulturist, produced the Hortus Eystettensis between 1597 and 1613 under the patronage of Prince-Bishop Johann Konrad von Gemmingen of Eichstätt, whose celebrated garden on the Willibaldsburg provided the living specimens. Published in 1613, it remains one of the largest and most ambitious botanical books ever printed: 367 folio plates engraved on copper and then hand-colored by a team of illuminators working under Besler's supervision. The peony plate belongs to the summer section and was among the most admired in contemporary reviews of the work, praised for reconciling the older tradition of the herbarium with the emerging Baroque appetite for grandeur and spectacle. Original copies were produced in colored and uncolored editions; the colored copies, of which fewer than a dozen survive intact, are held by institutions including the Smithsonian Libraries, the Natural History Museum London, and the Bavarian State Library. The work stands as a founding document of botanical illustration as a distinct artistic discipline, predating Linnaeus's classificatory system by more than a century yet anticipating its spirit of comprehensive, ordered observation.