Description
Herbarium by an Tuscan anonymous (formerly ‘Merini’; 1543-1545). Already attributed by Chiovenda (1927, 1929) to Michele Merini, a priest from Lucca and pupil of Luca Ghini (in turn, founder in 1543 of the Botanical Garden of Pisa, then of that of Florence, universally recognised as the inventor of the method of preserving plants in the form of pressed and dried specimens); recent studies (Cristofolini & Nepi 2021) have confirmed its age but cast doubt on its authorship. It is a very small collection of just over 200 specimens ‘agglutinated’ on 48 sheets of rough paper, loose but packed in a red marzipan box; a jewel of the Botany collections, it is by far one of the oldest herbaria in the world, if not the oldest: a precious testimony to the birth of the herbarium as a scientific tool for the study of plants. Fully imaged, but not databased. Contents: 201 specimens, of which 192 angiosperms, 2 gymnosperm, 1 pteridophyte and 2 lichens. References Chiovenda 1927. Un antichissimo Erbario anonimo del Museo Botanico di Firenze. Annali di Botanica 17(4): 119-139. Chiovenda 1929. Un antichissimo Erbario anonimo del Museo Botanico di Firenze. Annali di Botanica 19(1): 122-144. Cristofolini & Nepi 2021. La paternità del cosiddetto “Erbario Merini” conservato presso il Museo di Storia Naturale dell’Università di Firenze: una questione aperta. Notiziario della Società Botanica Italiana 5(1): 55-58.
Purposes
This is a sub-collection of https://registry.gbif.org/collection/19961847-31f6-4abb-9b92-18a391ba9b0d. Information originally retrieved from internal University of Florence Museal System (UNIFI-SMA) digitization dashboard, compiled in October 2021. 1 volume, 48 pages.
