The Iris Under the Microscope: Arnold Dodel-Port and the Anatomical Atlas of Botany, 1892

There is a moment in the history of botanical illustration when the ambition of the image changes — when it is no longer enough to show what a plant looks like from the outside, to document the colour of its petals and the form of its leaves, and the illustrator turns instead to what lies within: the cellular architecture of the stem, the microscopic structure of the pollen grain, the developmental sequence from seed to flower. This moment arrives, in the history of European botanical science, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the compound microscope had become a standard tool of botanical research and the chromolithographic press had made it possible to reproduce images of extraordinary complexity and precision at a cost that institutions could afford. The result was a new genre of botanical publication — the anatomical atlas — designed not for the amateur naturalist or the garden enthusiast but for the university student and the professional botanist, and combining the visual beauty of the finest botanical illustration with the scientific rigour of the research laboratory.

Arnold Dodel-Port’s Anatomisch-Physiologischer Atlas der Botanik — the Anatomical-Physiological Atlas of Botany, published in 1892 — is one of the finest examples of this genre. Produced at the University of Zurich, where Dodel-Port held the chair of botany, and created in collaboration with his wife Carolina Dodel-Port, it brought together the precision of Swiss scientific illustration with the pedagogical clarity of a master teacher. Its plates of Iris sibirica — the Siberian iris — are among the most celebrated in the atlas: images that document the plant from the visible beauty of its flower to the invisible precision of its cellular anatomy, in chromolithographs of extraordinary quality.

Arnold Dodel-Port: Botanist, Teacher, Illustrator

Arnold Dodel-Port was born in 1843 in the canton of Zurich, into a Switzerland that was experiencing a significant expansion of its scientific institutions. The University of Zurich — founded in 1833 as the first university in Europe to be established by a democratic state rather than a church or a monarch — had developed, by the middle of the nineteenth century, into one of the leading centres of natural science in Europe. Its botanical department, where Dodel-Port would spend his career, was at the forefront of the new plant physiology that was transforming botanical science in the second half of the century.

Dodel-Port studied botany at Zurich and subsequently at other leading European universities, before returning to Zurich as a professor. He was a committed educator as well as a research scientist — a man who believed that the visual representation of botanical structures was essential to effective teaching, and who devoted a significant part of his career to the development of teaching materials that could make the invisible structures of plant anatomy visible to students. The Anatomisch-Physiologischer Atlas was the culmination of this commitment: a work designed to provide university botany departments across Europe with a comprehensive visual reference for the teaching of plant anatomy and physiology.

The atlas was produced in collaboration with Carolina Dodel-Port, whose contribution to the project — both as a botanical illustrator and as a scientific collaborator — was essential to its success. The plates that resulted from their collaboration combined scientific accuracy with visual clarity in a manner that reflected both the research expertise of the professor and the illustrative skill of his partner.

The Chromolithographic Atlas: Science Made Visible

The chromolithographic technique that Dodel-Port used for his atlas was, by 1892, at the height of its development. Chromolithography — the process of printing in multiple colours from a series of lithographic stones, each carrying one colour of the final image — had been developed in the 1830s and had become, by the second half of the nineteenth century, the dominant technique for the reproduction of colour images in scientific publications. Its advantages over earlier techniques were considerable: it could reproduce a much wider range of colours than hand-colouring, it was more consistent across large print runs, and it could render the fine detail of microscopic structures with a precision that no other printing technique of the period could match.

For botanical illustration, chromolithography was transformative. The earlier tradition of botanical illustration had relied on hand-coloured engravings or aquatints — techniques that were beautiful but expensive, inconsistent, and limited in their ability to render fine detail. Chromolithography made it possible to produce illustrations of comparable beauty at a fraction of the cost, and with a consistency and precision that hand-colouring could not achieve. The result was a democratisation of botanical illustration: images that had previously been available only in expensive luxury publications could now be reproduced in affordable atlases designed for university use.

Dodel-Port’s plates exploit the possibilities of chromolithography to the full. The Iris sibirica plates combine macroscopic and microscopic views in a single image — showing the whole plant alongside enlarged details of its cellular structure, the flower alongside cross-sections of its stem and ovary — in a manner that would have been impossible with earlier illustration techniques. The colours are precise and consistent; the fine detail of the microscopic structures is rendered with a clarity that reflects both the quality of the original drawings and the skill of the chromolithographic printer.

Iris sibirica: The Siberian Iris in European Botany

Iris sibirica — the Siberian iris — is a species native to a broad band of temperate Eurasia, from central Europe through Russia to the Far East. It is a plant of considerable beauty: the flowers, which appear in early summer, are typically violet-blue with white and yellow markings on the falls, and are borne on tall, slender stems above clumps of narrow, grass-like leaves. It had been known to European botanists since the sixteenth century — it was described and illustrated by Carolus Clusius in the 1580s — and had been grown in European gardens since the Renaissance.

By the time Dodel-Port chose it as the subject for his atlas plates, Iris sibirica was well established in European botanical science. It was a familiar garden plant, widely grown in the botanical gardens that served as the research institutions of nineteenth-century plant science; it was a species whose anatomy had been studied by several generations of botanists; and it was a plant of sufficient visual beauty to make it an attractive subject for illustration. But Dodel-Port’s treatment of it was unlike anything that had been done before: where earlier illustrators had shown the flower and the plant, he showed the plant and its inner architecture — the cellular structures that underlay the visible beauty of the flower, the developmental sequences that produced it.

The first plate — reproduced on the front cover of our journal — presents the plant in its full botanical complexity: flower, stem, leaf, and root system documented with the meticulous labelling and structural clarity that defined Dodel-Port’s pedagogical method. The second plate — on the back cover — extends the documentation into the microscopic: cross-sections of the stem and ovary, cellular structures, stages of pollen development, the inner architecture of the iris revealed with the authority of a University of Zurich laboratory.

Swiss Botanical Science and the University of Zurich

The University of Zurich in which Dodel-Port worked was, by the 1880s and 1890s, one of the leading centres of botanical research in Europe. Swiss science in the nineteenth century had developed a distinctive character: rigorous, methodical, and committed to the integration of research and teaching in a manner that reflected the democratic values of the Swiss Confederation. The botanical department at Zurich was at the forefront of the new plant physiology — the science of how plants function, as distinct from the older taxonomy that had classified and named them — and Dodel-Port’s atlas was a product of this research environment.

The atlas was designed for use in university teaching across Europe, and it was adopted by botany departments in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and beyond. Its success reflected both the quality of its illustrations and the pedagogical clarity of its organisation: each plate was designed to be used as a teaching aid, with structures labelled and developmental sequences clearly shown, in a manner that made the invisible architecture of plant anatomy accessible to students who had never looked through a microscope.

In this sense, Dodel-Port’s atlas was not merely a work of scientific illustration but a work of educational design — an attempt to make the findings of botanical research available to a new generation of students, to democratise the knowledge that had previously been accessible only to those with access to a research laboratory. It is a tradition that connects him, across the centuries, to the great botanical illustrators of the Enlightenment — to the makers of the Hortus Cliffortianus and the Flora Graeca — who had sought to make the natural world visible and knowable through the power of the image.

A Journal for Those Who Look Closely

Our Arnold Dodel-Port Iris Sibirica Journal carries these 1892 chromolithographic plates across its full wraparound cover — the macroscopic beauty of the Siberian iris on the front, the microscopic precision of its cellular anatomy on the back, rendered with the Swiss scientific rigour and pedagogical clarity that made Dodel-Port’s atlas a standard reference for a generation of European botanists.

Inside, 150 perforated lined pages await your botanical observations, field notes, research reflections, or whatever form your engagement with the natural world takes. The casewrap sewn binding opens completely flat — ideal for sketching alongside your notes. The matte laminated cover preserves every detail of Dodel-Port’s chromolithographs in a finish that rewards close examination.

In 1892, Arnold Dodel-Port looked at an iris so carefully that he could see its cells. Perhaps the pages inside will help you look a little more carefully too.

References & Further Reading

• Blunt, Wilfrid & Stearn, William T. The Art of Botanical Illustration. Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994.
• Dodel-Port, Arnold & Carolina. Anatomisch-Physiologischer Atlas der Botanik. Esslingen, 1878–1883. [The original atlas; the 1892 edition expanded and revised the original publication.]
• Lack, H. Walter. Garden Eden: Masterpieces of Botanical Illustration. Taschen, 2008.
• Nissen, Claus. Die botanische Buchillustration. Hiersemann, 1951. [The standard bibliography of botanical book illustration, which documents Dodel-Port’s atlas in detail.]
• Ogilvie, Marilyn Bailey. Women in Science: Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century. MIT Press, 1986. [On Carolina Dodel-Port’s contribution to the atlas.]
• Pavord, Anna. The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants. Bloomsbury, 2005.
• Stearn, William T. Botanical Latin. David & Charles, 1983.