A special event, Saturday 15 Junein the second edition of “Tolmezzo streets of Books” Festivalongoing until Sunday: at 10.30, in fact, in the Museum Services Center Hall, the ethnobotanist Eleonora Matarrese will for the first time publicly illustrate the “Voynich Manuscript” defined as “the most mysterious book in the world”, kept in the Beinecke Library of the University from Yale.
The “Gart der Gesundheit” herbarium, exhibited at the Gortani Museum in Tolmezzo, is extremely valuable for studies. Guests include Marco Albino Ferrari (11.30am), Tullio Avoledo (at 5pm) and in the evening, at Cinema David at 9pm, the journalist Concita De Gregorio who presents her latest book “Un’ultima cosa” (Feltrinelli).
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In the collective imagination, a herbarium is a book in which “herbs” are cataloged, sometimes described, sometimes simply illustrated. Herbariums are a real genre, unfortunately not studied and analyzed in depth because botany, the study of plants, with the discovery of new worlds and many species to classify, has become a science and has left, if you will, little space for the past.
Yet, ancient herbaria have an immeasurable charm. Consider that the first herbarium – of which we only know -, created by Crateva, hired by the sovereign Mithridates IV of Pontus, illustrated species that were studied by a real team, to understand which were toxic and which were deadly.
Once the most useful ones had been understood, they were united in the principle which, in honor of the aforementioned sovereign, would be called mithridatium, and which upon reaching Rome would have a name that everyone knows today: panacea, which cures all ills. Then it was the turn of Theophrastus, called not by chance “the father of botany”, who actually wrote books, not real herbariums, dealing with the history of plants.
And the great Dioscorides, who with the numerous volumes of De Materia Medica would reign supreme almost until the botanical classification by the Swede Carl Nilsson Linnaeus. When there were still no massive cultivations and industrial production, the common man and the powerful of the Earth were all united: it was the plant species that provided the cure and remedy, and, as Paracelsus teaches, the poison was in the dose.
Herbs, and herbaria, are culture. So it is no coincidence that the first book with movable type in continental Europe was the Bible, and immediately afterwards a herbarium. And it is also no coincidence that the first incunabulum, Herbarius Moguntinus, is today preserved in the Library of the University of Pavia, and the second, Gart der Gesundheit, literally “the garden of Health”, was always printed in Mainz but was found in a copy in Carnia.
This volume, kept at the M. Gortani Museum in Tolmezzo, is in Middle German dialect, enriched with precious glosses in red ink as was typical of the Bavarian area: this denotes its use, its usefulness.
The characters of the glosses are very similar to the characters of another manuscript, defined by many as “the most mysterious in the world”. This codex, which contains four treatises, tells the origins of peoples beyond the Alps: also with initials in red ink, and with a writing that has defied more than six centuries.
AND the Voynich code, from the name of the antiquarian who found it, in 1912, in a Jesuit college near Rome. Voynich’s first treatise is truly a herbarium: illustrated and live. It seems like the very first time he finally breaks away from the habit and goes back to observing in the field. And so, what have been defined as “invented plants” find new light: the first, for example, is an endemism of the Carnia area. And it is not at all a coincidence that it is close to Mainz and Bavaria.
It is indicated in the penultimate treatise, the agronomic one: it is Kikerebse, a Legume, with its roots depicted with fur and claws, like a wolf (and the lupine belongs to the same family). But the fruit is black, and is found in only two stations right in Tischlbong, a town on the border whose name indicates a spontaneous species: Capsella bursa-pastoris, the shepherd’s bag.
Just as books today have the title and author on the first page, so manuscripts present details on the last: and in fact, in folio 116v it is indicated, in Bavarian dialect, pox leßen umon put ufer, this manuscript was collated on the banks of the river Bût. Between Tischlbong and Tolmezzo, where the Gart was found. Land of crâmars, border land, land of caves and waters.
Like those in the third treatise, where bat er dat is always indicated in dialect, these are the bathrooms. It is not known whether they were the spas of Arta or those further towards Slovenia, but the iconography does not lie: there are the agane, female figures typical of these areas, connected to the descriptions of the benandanti of Ginzburg, and there is the Proteus , unique and rare organism.
And again, folio 75v, the entrance to the cosmology of these peoples on the peaks, who preserved their language and culture: four figures, four giants (and the cardinal points still today bear the name of Germanic dwarves), four seasons. One of them tells it in the caption: es gleit dages, the shining days, the arrival of the beautiful season. Or, for example, the month of September, in the lunar calendar (whose first month has only 29 days, so it is February), which among the women who represent the lunar phases describes: ax eordes erpat am, “even the Earth is caressed” – by the light of the Moon -. Plants, the heritage of our unique habitat, return forcefully in all their parts in the agronomic treatise: leaves, roots, flowers, stems. Like crocon, saffron, which could actually indicate any Allium, but in this case it only has three blue petals: the three stigmas of the precious spice.
Herbaria are a fascinating world, which can still tell us what we don’t know, what seems to have been lost. Renewing our pact with Mother Nature, rediscovering ourselves, relearning to observe, and the wonder of discovery.
