Drawings and Photographs
Drawings
The Museum holds a number of collections of botanical drawings of particular significance, in particular the works of Adriano Fiori and Odoardo Beccari.
By Fiori, one of the most famous Italian botanists, the Museum retains the original drawings that he published in the "Iconography of Flora", the largest botanical iconographic work ever produced in Italy. Beccari also created a large collection of drawings, in part autographs, used to illustrate botanical samples or as study notes.
Also worthy of note are the autographed works created by Ugolino Martelli in support of many samples from his collection of the Pandanaceae family, unique in the world.
Photographs
The Botanical collections contain photographic glass plates made between the end of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The scientific use of photography, as a new investigative tool in the botanical field, is due to Giorgio Roster and the aforementioned Odoardo Beccari and Ugolino Martelli.
The collection of Roster, a physician, is made up of 538 negative glass plates, which have as subjects exotic and local landscapes and plants cultivated in his garden of Ottonella on the Island of Elba.
Odoardo Beccari, equally, used photography as a means of research support: he had a specially built camera for plant samples, so as not to flip them. Ugolino Martelli used photography in the same way as his teacher Beccari, to document his research work on the Pandanaceae family.
In addition to other ‘historical’ collections, there are the thousands of slides, negatives, prints and digital images that are created to support research, loan and dissemination activities.
Head of collections Lorenzo Cecchi
Learn more about the botanical drawing collections (English text at the bottom of the pages)
Cuccuini, P., The collection of botanical drawings, in: Raffaelli, M. (ed), 2009, The Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence: The Botanical Collections, Firenze University Press
Learn more on the collection of photographic plates (English text at the bottom of the pages)
Cuccuini, P., The collection of photographic plates, in the work cited
Last update
07.09.2021