Botanical: Observing Beauty

Author: Jean-Marc Mansvelt Marc Jeanson Filipa Ramos, Emanuele Coccia, Alice Thomine-Berrada, Estelle Zhong Mengual

Format: Hardcover | 319 pages

Dimensions: 21.59 × 3.30 × 26.67 cm

Publication date: September 20, 2022

A stunning botanical journey through art and design across the centuries

This elegant book takes readers on a personal walk through hundreds of years of jewelry, botany, drawings, prints, video-game graphics, and scientific illustration, serving as an introduction to the beauty and inventiveness of nature as captured in art. Five contributions mark stages along this visually arranged path, among them a never-before-published leporello by the late artist Etel Adnan that unfolds into a six-page gatefold. The book is itself a work of art as an object, with a cover enriched by fluorescent and silver inks, a screen-printed title, and eight pages of lavish endpapers in rich forest green.

A group of international scholars shapes the broad reach and purpose of Botanical: Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia, author of The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2018); French art historian Estelle Zhong Mengual; and Portuguese curator Filipa Ramos, author of the forthcoming The Artist as Ecologist (2023). In their thoughtful and compelling essays, they explore the hidden mechanisms of the natural world and honor the imaginative art that culture has created in nature's image.

Featured artists and designers include Nobuyoshi Araki, Emile Gallé, Joan Fontcuberta, Christian Dior, Claude Monet, Sarah Bernhardt, Eugène Delacroix, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Anna Atkins, Gustave Courbet, Henri Cartier-Bresson, René Lalique, Georgia O'Keeffe, Otto Dix, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Yves Saint Laurent.