Anemone coronaria flore simplici et pleno
Aemone coonivia fleve|欧洲银莲花
Anemone coronaria flore simplici et pleno
Ten ways of seeing
- measured cast yellow-green
- upright 1.54 : 1
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 where the orange is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch.
Name and Thing
Only the genus Anemone is given; species-level names came later. The Chinese name 欧洲银莲花 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.
Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 10.5% of the sheet, foliage 3.1%, the cast yellow-green with a second note of amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Bulbous plants store the year underground — bulb, corm or tuber — then send up a few thick leaves and a single scape, with six tepals in cup, funnel or star. Filed under orange — an amber orange, built in washes from a pale ground. A single plant, laid out with nothing hidden.
Composition
The sheet is tall. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 14% of the sheet, centred a little right of centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests.
Line and Colour
The first half of the nineteenth century moved from copper to steel to lithography; stipple could render the softest transition. There is evidence on the back too: the plate mark pressed into the paper, the slight relief of the pigment, lines worn shallow in a later printing. 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
兰陵美酒郁金香，玉碗盛来琥珀光。
—— 唐·李白《客中行》
Fine wine of Lanling, fragrant with turmeric; poured in a jade bowl, it glows like amber.
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the orange the corolla becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
The tulip was an imperial emblem in Istanbul and a speculative bubble in Amsterdam; the hyacinth sprang from a boy's blood in Greek myth. What bulbs share is concealment: next year kept underground. This plate leans orange, which in flower language adds one more degree of feeling. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.
Season and Place
Early spring to early summer, genus by genus: tulips and hyacinths first, gladiolus and amaryllis later. Three homelands: the Mediterranean, Central Asia and South Africa. The tulip came from Ottoman gardens and became a Dutch mania. The year 1818 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
“Flora Italiana” carries only Gaetano Savi's name. A plate is collective work: drawer, engraver and colourist were different hands, and the unnamed ones decided how good it looks.
What to Take Away
Next time you stand before a flowering plant, give it three minutes: leaf arrangement, direction of the flower, the darkest patch. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1818.
About this plate
Anemone coronaria flore simplici et pleno is plate 40, from Flora Italiana, drawn by Gaetano Savi. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: Pisa, Pressa Niccolò Capurro, 1818-1824.
