Botanical Illustration and Byzantine Visual Inquiry in the Morgan Dioscorides

Abstract

Standard art historical narratives portray early medieval and Byzantine botanical illustration as a stagnate tradition resulting from the uncritical copying of ancient models. The Morgan Dioscorides, however, testifies to robust critical practices in Byzantine botanical illustration as early as the ninth or tenth century ce. In this article I argue that the makers of the Morgan Dioscorides critically compared variant pictures from the same manuscript tradition. They drew upon nature observation and close readings of text to create illustrations absent from the existing tradition. I further explore the theoretical and empirical underpinnings for these practices.