edited by Johannes Grave

Corridor of the Herbier National

When an art historian enters the large storage rooms of a herbarium like the famous “Herbier national” of the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris, he may remember own experiences in cabinets of prints and drawings. Long rows of shelves contain a lot of boxes, in which masses of paper are preserved and ordered. But this combination of sheets, boxes and shelves can be regarded as a common feature of every archival collection.
What establishes a more specific and significant tie between herbaria and collections of graphic works of art, is the way plant specimens or prints respectively are mounted and annotated. Both herbaria and cabinets fix their objects on large, stable sheets and add basic information. Both institutions developed similar forms and methods of preserving fragile objects and relating them to classifications or attributions. Perhaps because of their close relationship to libraries, collections of prints and drawings until the 18th century often were gathered in books – exactly like some early herbaria, which were bound in several volumes (e.g., the Albrecht von Haller herbarium in Paris). Sometimes art collectors decorated the sheets, on which they mounted prints and drawings – exactly like some botanists, who, e.g., drew vases, in order to situate the specimens on the sheet. In collections of prints and drawings, generations of connoisseurs could inscribe a brief history of the reception of specific drawings on the sheet by adding annotations to the first suggested attribution – exactly like the revisions of classifications and identifications on the sheets of herbaria.
So far as I know (i.e., from a narrow art historical perspective), until now, nobody has tried a closer comparison between the histories of herbaria and collections of graphic works of art. As a lot of connoisseurs and art collectors were very interested in other fields of study and especially in botany, there could be some direct historical connections between the developments of the material cultures of both areas of collecting.
In my opinion, some exemplary historical cases, e.g., Goethe, indicate, that the herbaria and the collections of prints and drawings influenced each other mutually. The parallels and potential relations between both fields were probably not only limited to the practical problems, which I sketched out above. The choice of the same methods seems to be based on similar intentions or epistemic premises. The perception of plant specimens in herbaria was presumably for a long time influenced by aesthetic standards; and strategies of classification and temporalization in botany may have been interesting to art collectors. Both types of collections shared (at least in some cases) the concept of grasping an abstract entirety – “nature” or “art” respectively – by gathering and structuring a lot of specific objects that are biologically or historically determined. No matter if one reflects on the relation between the abstract entirety and the single ‘concretum’, or the relation between timeless classification and historicity – herbaria and collections of prints and drawings share not only certain typical practices and material cultures, but also some important basic questions and problems.