Sixta fig; Venarum panter acarterum Carebri senem explicat – Ven & arterialis delineatio – Arteria venalis processvs (1545)
Ten ways of seeing
- upright 1.55 : 1
First Look
凡画山水，意在笔先。
—— 唐·王维《山水论》
In painting, the intention precedes the brush.
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
The binomial is Sixta fig: the first word is the genus it belongs among, the second the epithet that sets it apart. Two words carry a whole provenance. No established Chinese name exists, so it is cited by its binomial alone.
Form and Colour
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. A single plant, laid out with nothing hidden.
Composition
Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. Blank paper is not unfinished work: it is where the eye rests.
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
两丛香百合，一架粉长春。
—— 宋·陆游《北窗偶题四首 其一》
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 1545 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. Read the locality and the flowering season both with a discount: one is hearsay, the other a ten-day peak.
The Book and the Hand
“Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio, ære exarata” carries only Thomas Geminus's name. From drawing to plate the sheet passed through several hands — the engraver aimed at accuracy, the colourist at speed, and between them lies each plate's unevenness.
What to Take Away
Carry three rules away: whole before detail; line before colour; picture before book. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1545.
![Prima ossium tabula [Human skeleton leaning on a spade] (1545)](/upload/nat/compendiosa-totius-anatomie-delineatio-aere-exarata/003-thumb.webp)
![Secunda ossium tabula [Human skeleton inspecting a skull and in deep thinking] (1545)](/upload/nat/compendiosa-totius-anatomie-delineatio-aere-exarata/005-thumb.webp)
![Tertia ossium tabula [Skeleton in aiming position] (1545)](/upload/nat/compendiosa-totius-anatomie-delineatio-aere-exarata/006-thumb.webp)
![Prima musculorum tabula. [Shows human muscles] (1545)](/upload/nat/compendiosa-totius-anatomie-delineatio-aere-exarata/007-thumb.webp)
![Secunda musculorum tabula. [Shows muscles in a walking position] (1545)](/upload/nat/compendiosa-totius-anatomie-delineatio-aere-exarata/008-thumb.webp)