Nature printing
The nature print (Latin Typographia naturalis ), also Physiotypie, is a printing method in which natural objects such as leaves of plants that are used as printing plates. In thin paint application even fine structures are very precisely reproduced. It can also use full -pressed plant, bird feathers, insect wings, flat fossils, etc. are used. The nature print has been further developed in addition to the decorative or artistic application especially in botany, because it allows detailed pictures of flowering plants, ferns and algae.
Botanical Illustration
The plant as a printing
A strung with leather or paper board is coated with a mixture of carbon black and binder or oil paint, take down the plant out and lightly pressed, so that high spots in their surface, such as leaf veins, the color. Then the plant is placed with the print side up on waste paper and covered with a thin but tear-resistant, water-dampened sheet and pressed.
Early examples of this simple technique is the imprint of a sage leaf in a sketch book of Leonardo da Vinci (Codex Atlanticus ). The artist left behind on the same page also notes on the use of carbon black, oil and white lead as printing inks.
A first detailed description provided Girolamo Ruscelli under the pseudonym Alessio Piemontese (or Alexius Pedemontanus ) in his book De ' Secreti, Milano 1557.
From the 16th century, several books on herbs and image collections are preserved with natural self- printing, for example, in 1517 by Johann Jacob Baier, 1557 by Jerome Rosello and in 1583 by Theophilus and John Kent man. However, it is unclear whether the technique has been handed down or repeatedly rediscovered.
The first botanist who used the nature print on a large scale and critical advanced, Johann Hieronymus Kniphof was. In cooperation with the Erfurt printer Johann Michael Funcke he published from 1733 on two editions of the Botanica work in originality, each included several hundred illustrations. A third edition, which he created with the printer Johann Gottfried Trampe from Halle 1757-1767 once contained, 1,200 illustrations.
Kniphof held its preparation and printing technology secret. So is unknown how he reprinted three-dimensional objects, such as succulent shoots, tubers or cabbages. What is certain is that he often just tender and monochrome prints executed in order then to color by hand.
Were particularly precise prints when the plants were macerated before, so that the core network emerged clearly. A pioneer of this technique was Christoph Jacob Trew.
Since most plants were badly damaged after a few passages and details could not be reproduced contrast, the pictures created only in small numbers.
Plant imprints as printing plates
In the 19th century, several famous illustrated works to flowering plants, ferns and seaweed, which were produced with the new method of the natural pressure self- published. Behind this was the desire to produce longer runs and market the books successful. Therefore, attempts were made to transfer the objects on durable printing plates.
The Frenchman Ch d' Aiguebelle used 1828, the fledgling technique of lithography: He pressed inked plants on stone slabs prepared and treated this then by etching. Under the title homography, ou Choix de plantes 20 indigenes et coloniales he gave in 1828 a selection of twenty of these lithographs out.
Since 1830, pressed dried plants from in lead plates and used this as a print forms. By applying different colors on a printing plate is particularly lifelike pictures could create. From an aesthetic and scientific point of view they were superior to early photographs far. The production of metallic printing plates based on real plant imprints has been consistently further developed in the following years and by Alois Auer Ritter von Welsbach (1813-1869), since 1841 director of the Vienna State Printing, perfected. Auer prepared by the lead imprint on electro-deposition a Hochplatte ago. He then produced a printable copper intaglio plate by repeated galvanization. The printing process itself hardly differs from that of an engraving. Auer Andreas printer worring reported the method in 1852 at the Imperial Privileges archive for a patent.
Users of this process were the palaeobotanist Constantin von Ettingshausen and the botanist Alois Pokorny. Between 1855 and 1873, they published a twelve -volume work entitled Figure Physiotypia plantarum Austriacarum. It includes in its first edition 500, in the 2nd edition 1000 plant illustrations from the territory of the Austro -Hungarian Empire. The copper plates, including previously unpublished are preserved in the Institute of Botany at the University of Vienna.
Famous Figure works with natural self- Print
- Constantin von Ettingshausen & Alois Pokorny: Physiotypia plantarum austriacarum. The nature print in its application to the vascular plants of the Austrian Empire, with special emphasis on the innervation in the area of plant organs. Vienna, 1855-1873.
- David Heinrich Hoppe: ectypa plantarum ratisbonensium, or imprints of those plants which grow wild around Regensburg. Regensburg, 1787-1793.
- William Grosart Johnstone & Alexander Croall: The nature printed British Seaweeds. London, 1859.
- Johann Hieronymus Kniphof: Botanica in originali seu herbarium vivum. Halle and Magdeburg, from 1757 to 1767.
- Christian Gottlieb Ludwig: ectypa vegetabilium, usibus medicis praecipue destinatorum ... Halle and Leipzig, 1760-1764.
- Thomas Moore ( botanist ): The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland. London, 1855-1857