Description
A pupil of Luca Ghini (1490-1556), considered by many to be the inventor of herbaria, Andrea Cesalpino (1525?-1603) is considered the scientist who laid the foundations of modern systematic botany; i.e., the first who aimed to described the differences and similarities between species based on their shape and structure, rather than their uses. The collection, inevitably the first in the world to be organised according to systematic criteria, is the only surviving one of the two he seems to have ever created. It was created between 1555 and 1563 as a precious gift for Bishop Alfonso Tornabuoni (1506-1578), twenty years before Cesalpino illustrated his classification system in De plantis libris XVI (1883). Originally bound in a single, large volume of 266 sheets, after its definitive transfer to the Museum collections it was divided into three smaller volumes in 1844 and finally. in 2006, for conservation reasons it was unbound into loose sheets, divided into as many boxes (Nepi. La "slegatura" dell'erbario di Andrea Cesalpino (1525-1603). Museologia scientifica, nuova serie 1: 50-54. 2007). The herbarium includes, in addition to specimens with names in Italian, Latin and/or Greek, a long autograph dedicatory letter.. A complete revision of the collection was published by Caruel (Illustratio in Hortum Siccum Andreae Caesalpini Typis. Le Monnier: Florence. 1858).
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, 265 pages.
