Nature portrayed in images in Dutch Brazil: Tracing the sources of the plant woodcuts in the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (1648).

By the mid-seventeenth century, images of natural elements that originated in Dutch Brazil circulated in Europe. These were often included in art collections (the Libri Picturati) and natural history treatises (the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae and the India Utriesque re Naturale et Medica, 1658). The plant woodcut images in these books constituted (icono) type specimens and played a significant role in disseminating scientific botanical knowledge. We present a systematic analysis of their origins by cross-referencing the visual and textual sources related to Dutch Brazil. To do so, we used our previous botanical identifications of the portrayed plants, published sources, and digital archival material. The plant woodcuts accounted for 529 images, which corresponded to 426 taxa. We created a PDF booklet to visualize the (dis-) similarities of the woodcuts with the Libri Picturati and other visual sources. Substantial differences in the visual-making methodology exist between the two treatises (1648, 1658). In the first book, most of the images were available from Dutch Brazil and carved into the woodcuts, while most of these woodcuts were reused in the second one. The Indigenous Tupi-based plant names accompanying the images were crucial when arranging the sources, and portraying as much botanical information as possible was commonly the goal. Freshly picked, living plants, dried branches, fruits, and seeds were used to represent the megadiverse Brazilian flora, even when these belonged to species originating from other regions. Despite not being recognized for their contribution, Indigenous Brazilians and enslaved Africans were essential in the visual knowledge-making processes that later resulted in these natural history collections. As several sources remain lost and many histories yet untold, further archival studies and collaborative projects are pertinent to reveal the missing pieces of this conundrum.

Looking into the flora of Dutch Brazil: botanical identifications of seventeenth century plant illustrations in the Libri Picturati.

The Libri Picturati includes a collection of plant illustrations from seventeenth century Dutch Brazil that is kept in the Jagiellonian library in Krakow since World War II. While many studies focused on the artistic details and history of these images, we identified the flora depicted. We used contemporary textual sources (e.g., Historia Naturalis Brasiliae), monographs and taxonomist' assessments. We checked origin, life form, domestication and conservation status and the plant parts that are represented. We identified 198 taxa, consisting mostly of wild, native rainforest trees and 35 introduced species. Fertile branches are the most represented, although some loose dry fruits and sterile material were also painted, which sheds light into the collection methods by naturalists in Dutch Brazil. Several species are no longer abundant or have become invasive due to anthropogenic influences since colonialism. Through this botanical iconography, we traced the first records of the sunflower and the Ethiopian pepper in Brazil, as well as the dispersion and assimilation of the flora encountered in the colony by Indigenous, African and European peoples. We emphasized the relevance of combining visual and textual sources when studying natural history collections and we highlighted how digitalization makes these artistic and scientific collections more accessible.

Marcgrave and Piso's plants for sale: The presence of plant species and names from the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (1648) in contemporary Brazilian markets.

ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE: Parallelisms between current and historical medicinal practices as described in the seventeenth century treatise Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (HNB) provide us with an overview of traditional plant knowledge transformations. Local markets reflect the actual plant use in urban and rural surroundings, allowing us to trace cross-century similarities of ethnobotanical knowledge. AIMS OF THE STUDY: We aim to verify in how far the HNB, created in seventeenth-century northeastern Brazil, correlates with contemporary plant use in the country by comparing the plant knowledge therein with recent plant market surveys at national level. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted a literature review on ethnobotanical market surveys in Brazil. We used the retrieved data on plant composition and vernacular names, together with our own fieldwork from the Ver-o-Peso market in Belém, to compare each market repertoire with the useful species in the HNB. We analyzed similarities among markets and the HNB with a Detrended Correspondence Analysis and by creating Venn diagrams. We analyzed the methods of the different markets to check whether they influenced our results. RESULTS: Out of the 24 markets reviewed, the greatest similarities with the HNB are seen in northern Brazilian markets, both in plant composition and vernacular names, followed by the northeast. The least overlap is found with markets in the central west and Rio de Janeiro. Most of the shared vernacular names with the HNB belonged to languages of the Tupi linguistic family. CONCLUSION: The similarity patterns in floristic composition among Brazilian markets and the HNB indicate the current wider distribution and trade of the species that Marcgrave and Piso described in 1648 in the northeast. Migration of indigenous groups, environmental changes, globalized and homogenous plant trade, and different market survey methods played a role in these results. The HNB is a reference point in time that captures a moment of colonial cultural transformations.