Breaking the silence of the 500-year-old smiling garden of everlasting flowers: The En Tibi book herbarium

RESEARCH ARTICLE Breaking the silence of the 500-year-old smiling garden of everlasting flowers: The En Tibi book herbarium Anastasia Stefanaki ID1*, Henk Porck2, Ilaria Maria Grimaldi ID1,3, Nikolaus Thurn4, Valentina Pugliano5, Adriaan Kardinaal6, Jochem Salemink7, Gerard Thijsse1, Claudine Chavannes-Mazel8, Erik Kwakkel9, Tinde van Andel ID1,10 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 1 Naturalis Biodiversity Center, National Herbarium, Leiden, Netherlands, 2 National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague, Netherlands, 3 Research Laboratory for Archaeology and The History of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, 4 Institute of Greek and Latin Languages and Literatures, Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 5 Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 6 Onderzoeksbureau De Facto, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 7 Bureau Voorlichting, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 8 Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 9 Book and Digital Media Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands, 10 Clusius chair in History of Botany and Gardens, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands * OPEN ACCESS Citation: Stefanaki A, Porck H, Grimaldi IM, Thurn N, Pugliano V, Kardinaal A, et al. (2019) Breaking the silence of the 500-year-old smiling garden of everlasting flowers: The En Tibi book herbarium. PLoS ONE 14(6): e0217779. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0217779 Editor: Narel Y. Paniagua-Zambrana, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, PLURINATIONAL STATE OF BOLIVIA Received: February 11, 2019 Accepted: May 19, 2019 Published: June 26, 2019 Copyright: © 2019 Stefanaki et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files. Funding: AS and TvA received funds from Naturalis Biodiversity Center, https://www.naturalis.nl/. AS received funds from the Alberta Mennega Stichting, http://www.alberta-mennega-stichting.nl/Index-UK. html. TvA received funds from the Clusius Stichting, http://www.clusiusstichting.nl/ The Institute of Biology of Leiden University contributed Abstract We reveal the enigmatic origin of one of the earliest surviving botanical collections. The 16th-century Italian En Tibi herbarium is a large, luxurious book with c. 500 dried plants, made in the Renaissance scholarly circles that developed botany as a distinct discipline. Its Latin inscription, translated as “Here for you a smiling garden of everlasting flowers”, suggests that this herbarium was a gift for a patron of the emerging botanical science. We follow an integrative approach that includes a botanical similarity estimation of the En Tibi with contemporary herbaria (Aldrovandi, Cesalpino, “Cibo”, Merini, Estense) and analysis of the book’s watermark, paper, binding, handwriting, Latin inscription and the morphology and DNA of hairs mounted under specimens. Rejecting the previous origin hypothesis (Ferrara, 1542–1544), we show that the En Tibi was made in Bologna around 1558. We attribute the En Tibi herbarium to Francesco Petrollini, a neglected 16th-century botanist, to whom also belongs, as clarified herein, the controversial “Erbario Cibo” kept in Rome. The En Tibi was probably a work on commission for Petrollini, who provided the plant material for the book. Other people were apparently involved in the compilation and offering of this precious gift to a yet unknown person, possibly the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I. The En Tibi herbarium is a Renaissance masterpiece of art and science, representing the quest for truth in herbal medicine and botany. Our multidisciplinary approach can serve as a guideline for deciphering other anonymous herbaria, kept safely “hidden” in treasure rooms of universities, libraries and museums. PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217779 June 26, 2019 1 / 21 Breaking the silence of the 500-year-old smiling garden of everlasting flowers funds for laboratory work, https://www. universiteitleiden.nl/en/science/biology. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction Botany emerged as a practice of medicine. For centuries long, apothecaries and physicians applied the remedies prescribed in the herbals of classical authors such as Dioscorides and Pliny, copied and translated in many languages, illustrated, edited and extended with additional plants and treatments [1]. These repeated reproductions resulted in copies that scarcely resembled the lost originals; rather, they were filled with vague plant descriptions which, sometimes accompanied by rough and fantastical illustrations, were erroneous and even dangerous for human health [2]. Renaissance Italian scholars radically changed this state of affairs, giving birth to the discipline of botany as we know it today [3, 4]: the plants mentioned by the ancient authors were no longer illustrated through obscure descriptions but by reference to actual plant specimens. More than that, the idea that the ancients had described all existing species was abandoned, and an increasing interest in plant taxonomy triggered the first botanical expeditions and the discovery of new species [2, 5]. The collected plants were no longer air-dried but pressed-dried among paper sheets, mounted and bound into books–the first herbaria. Luca Ghini (c. 1490–1556), professor of medical botany at the University of Bologna, was a crucial figure in this transition [4, 6]. Although acknowledged as the “inventor” of the herbarium, Ghini did not leave an herbarium of his own, but several of his disciples did. Remarkable examples are the herbaria of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) kept in Bologna [7–10], of Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603) [11] and Michele Merini [12] kept in Florence, and the “Erbario Cibo” kept in Rome (hereafter “Rome herbarium”), attributed to either Gherardo Cibo (1512–1600) [13] or Francesco Petrollini [14]. These collections comprise the earliest surviving Italian herbaria along with two anonymous 16th-century collections, namely the Ducale Erbario Estense (hereafter “Estense herbarium”) kept in Modena [15], and the En Tibi herbarium [16] (Fig 1). Historic herbaria can reveal interesting stories beyond the plants themselves [17, 18], and the story of the En Tibi is a fascinating one. Reflecting the history of political turbulences characteristic of the European Renaissance, the En Tibi travelled from Italy to Prague, and then, together with the four herbaria of Leonhard Rauwolf, to Stockholm and London, changing hands between emperors, kings and scholars. A cur (...truncated)