The Golden Age of the Iris: Weinmann’s Phytanthoza Iconographia and Valentini’s Viridarium Reformatum
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In the summer of 1719, a German physician and naturalist named Michael Bernhard Valentini published a book called Viridarium Reformatum — a reformed garden, in the tradition of the great florilegia that had defined European botanical publishing since the days of Basilius Besler and Theodor de Bry. Among its plates was an engraving of the iris: Iris angustifolia and Iris latifolia, documented with the decorative precision that characterised the Florilegium style, each petal rendered with the care of a man who understood that the iris was not merely a flower but a subject worthy of the finest engraver’s art.
Eighteen years later, in 1737, a Regensburg apothecary named Johann Wilhelm Weinmann began publishing what would become one of the most ambitious botanical projects of the 18th century.
Weinmann and the Phytanthoza Iconographia
Johann Wilhelm Weinmann (1683–1741) was not a botanist by training. He was an apothecary — a man whose professional life was organised around the practical uses of plants, their medicinal properties, their preparation and dispensing. But he had the ambition of a scholar and the resources of a successful businessman, and in 1737 he began commissioning the plates that would become the Phytanthoza Iconographia (1737–1745): eight folio volumes documenting over 1,000 plant species with hand-coloured copperplate engravings of extraordinary precision and beauty.
The project was enormous. Weinmann employed some of the finest botanical illustrators and engravers in Germany, and the result was a publication that combined scientific accuracy with aesthetic ambition in a way that few botanical works before or since have matched. TAB CCV — the plate that appears on the front cover of this journal — documents Iris latifolia, the English Iris: native to the Pyrenees, widely cultivated across 18th-century European gardens, and one of the most architecturally beautiful flowers in the botanical canon. The violet-blue petals, the yellow falls, the intricate veining — all rendered with the precision of a man who had spent his professional life learning to look at plants.
Valentini and the Florilegium Tradition
Michael Bernhard Valentini (1657–1729) worked in an older tradition. His Viridarium Reformatum belongs to the world of the great 17th-century florilegia — the lavishly illustrated flower books that had made botanical publishing one of the most prestigious and expensive enterprises in European print culture. Where Weinmann was encyclopedic, Valentini was selective; where Weinmann was systematic, Valentini was decorative. But both shared the same fundamental conviction: that the plants of the natural world deserved to be documented with the full resources of the engraver’s art.
Valentini’s iris plate predates Weinmann’s by nearly two decades. Together, they offer a portrait of the English Iris across 18 years of botanical illustration history — from the Florilegium tradition of the early 18th century to the encyclopedic precision of the Enlightenment. It is, in miniature, the story of how European botanical publishing changed across the first half of the 18th century: from decoration to documentation, from the garden to the laboratory, from the florilegium to the flora.
The iris, through it all, remained the same: violet-blue, architectural, extraordinary.
