"Panicum"

This wonderful and unusual landscape botanical was included in Michael Bernard Valentini’s reissue of Matthaus Merian’s 1646 Der Fruchtbringenden Gesellschaft… It includes a healthy multistalked depiction of the grass in the foreground with fields of the plant in the middleground and a manor house and church in the background.

Valentini was a physician, a medical professor, a natural historian and a bibliophile.  He republished a variety of decorative and important natural history works that had been created during the preceding century, including the one containing this engraving published in 1719.  The prints from this edition of the work are so beautifully engraved that is it presumed that Valentini used the actual plates originally engraved by Merian, a justifiably renowned engraver of topographical views.

Hand colored copperplate engraving.
13 ½ x 8 ¼ inches sheet.
Very good condition with some transference as expected.