Renaux, Alain - Louis XIV's botanical engravings / Alain Renaux

Aldershot [England] ; Burlington. VT : Lund Humphries 2008. First Edition. Fine copy in the original cloth-backed. colour-printed boards. Slightest suggestion only of dust-dulling to the panel edges. Remains particularly well-preserved overall; tight. bright. clean and strong.; 8vo 8' - 9' tall; 139 pages; Physical description: 139 p. : colour illus. ; 33 cm. 58 engravings by Nicolas Robert. Abraham Bosse and Louis de Chastillon. out of 319 created for an unfinished project by the then newly founded Académie royale des sciences (1666) to compile a compendium of knowledge about plants to be called Histoire des plantes. Includes bibliographical references (p. [141]). Summary: Louis XIV enjoyed visiting his fruit and vegetable gardens. Enriched with exotic plants by the numerous botanical expeditions that took place during the seventeenth century. the king's gardens were a true agronomical laboratory and the admiration of the courts of Europe. They provided plant specimens for academics. illustrators and engravers.Louis XIV was passionate about the natural sciences. and in 1666. at the suggestion of his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. he founded France's Royal Academy of Sciences.Once of the tasks it undertook was to record and disseminate contemporary plant knowledge through Histoire des Plantes. a botanical history illustrated with engravings. Louis XIV's Botanical Engravings contains a collection of around sixty of the watercolour engravings produced during the reign of Louis XIV. which are now preserved in the Louvre and the French National Museum of Natural History. These exquisite illustrations allow us to familiarise ourselves with some of the plants brought back from distant lands. and to understand the contribution they made to scientific research. as well as their beneficial properties.

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