Narcissus & Hepatica Journal — Gherardo Cibo 1564

Every botanical illustrator of the Renaissance painted plants against a blank background — isolated, precise, removed from the world they grew in. Gherardo Cibo did something no one else did: he put them back. His watercolour and gouache miniatures of the 1560s show narcissus and hepatica rooted in the actual landscape of the Roman States, with rolling hills, distant towns, birds in flight, and small human figures behind them — an ecological insight expressed in paint nearly five centuries before ecology became a science.

The front cover reproduces Cibo's c.1564 narcissus miniature from the Paintings of Flora of the Roman States — Narcissus tazetta and Narcissus poeticus depicted with meticulous watercolour and gouache precision, roots, bulbs, stems, and flowers all rendered with the scientific rigour of the Mattioli pharmacobotanical tradition, set against a living landscape of rolling hills, a distant town beside water, and birds in flight over the Roman States countryside. The back cover presents Cibo's Hepatica nobilis from the same series — its characteristic blue-purple flowers and three-lobed leaves rendered with the same luminous technique, a small human figure moving through the landscape behind it, the doctrine of signatures made visible in paint.

Product Details

• Format: 5.75 × 8 in (14.6 × 20.3 cm)
• Pages: 150 lined pages (75 sheets)
• Perforated pages — tear out cleanly without damaging the binding
• Paper weight: 90 gsm, suitable for fountain pens and pencils
• Hardcover with matte finish, casewrap sewn binding
• Weight: 400 g (14.1 oz)

Perfect For

• Renaissance art and botanical illustration collectors
• Lovers of narcissus, hepatica, and early modern natural history
• Admirers of Italian Renaissance science and pharmacobotany
• Those drawn to the intersection of art, landscape, and botanical precision
• Students and researchers of sixteenth-century Italian natural philosophy
• Thoughtful gifts for historians, botanists, and lovers of rare illustrated manuscripts

Read more: Gherardo Cibo and the Botanical Landscape: Plants in Their Place