![Gefülte Feüer Lilia. [Lily] (1692) - Blumenbuch](/upload/nat/blumenbuch/097-original.webp)
Gefülte Feüer Lilia. [Lily] (1692)
Gefülte Feüer Lilia. [Lily] (1692)
About this plate
Gefülte Feüer Lilia. [Lily] (1692) is plate 97, from Blumenbuch, drawn by Magdelena Rosina Funck. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: Altdorf, Germany, 1692.
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast amber
- upright 1.52 : 1
- published 1692
- Plate 97
First Look
江馆清秋，晨起看竹，烟光日影露气，皆浮动于疏枝密叶之间。
—— 清·郑板桥《题画竹》
On an autumn morning at the river lodge I looked at the bamboo: mist, sunlight, dew, all drifting among the sparse and dense leaves.
The sheet is vertical: the eye climbs and settles in the upper half. Let the plant stand before you look for detail. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find the darkest small patch: the whole tonal order is measured from there.
Name and Thing
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. Neither name nor binomial survives: the printed title must do.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 9.2% of the sheet, foliage 3.5%, the cast amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. A bulb of overlapping fleshy scales gives the lily its Chinese name, 'hundred-fold'; six tepals reflex as the flower opens, around six stamens with long, T-shaped anthers.No colour group is recorded. Three things fix the habit: leaf arrangement, tepal count, and how the flower is borne.
Composition
Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.52 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 13% of the sheet, centred above centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests. Old plates set the plant slightly off centre, with unequal margins — that small imbalance is what keeps it alive.
Line and Colour
Before 1700 most botanical figures came from woodcut: thick, hard lines in relief, colour brushed on afterwards. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions. If you mean to copy it: take its skeleton, its margins and the order of its colours; the burin's hatching is the language of copper — suggest it with pencil density, do not imitate it stroke for stroke.
Poetic Resonance
木末芙蓉花，山中发红萼。涧户寂无人，纷纷开且落。
—— 唐·王维《辛夷坞》
Lotus blossoms at the branch tips put forth red calyces in the hills. By the silent ravine, they open and fall, open and fall.
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the corolla becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
In the West the white lily is Marian purity, held by the angel of the Annunciation; in China the name sounds like 'a hundred years in harmony', a wedding wish. Meanings change their tune: the same flower can say opposite things within a century.
Season and Place
the flowers last only days, so artists drew them just as they opened. Temperate north — China, Japan, Europe. Long used in Chinese medicine, lilies were hunted in East Asia by nineteenth-century collectors and transformed European gardens. The year 1692 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The volume was made in 1692, when most of this knowledge came from living plants under glass.
The Book and the Hand
“Blumenbuch” was drawn by Magdelena Rosina Funck and published 1692. This plate is Plate 97. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
What to Take Away
If you keep one line, keep Guo Xi's: from afar its momentum, up close its texture. A flora exists to be consulted; look long enough and you forget to consult — someone in 1692 gave a whole day to a single flower.
![Feüer Lilia. [Lily] (1692)](/upload/nat/blumenbuch/096-thumb.webp)
![Stern Lilia. [Lily] (1692)](/upload/nat/blumenbuch/098-thumb.webp)
