Cesalpino’s (Aristotelian) Philosophy of Plants: A Science of Botany in the Renaissance

Despite the general claim that a theoretical approach to botany only developed in the late seventeenth century, and that Renaissance botany was a mere collection and identification of specimens, the recent studies of plants in the early modern time have shed light on a more complex situation. In his well-known monograph, The Science of Describing, Brian Ogilvie has highlighted four moments in Renaissance science, which perfectly apply to sixteenth-century botanical studies.[2] Accordingly, the first phase is the philological attempts to identify specimens for medical aims; the second reveals a naturalistic attention to plants; the third enhances an exchange of specimens and the fabrication of herbaria as well as the construction of botanical gardens, while the fourth phase emphasizes the production of a theoretical framework to classify plants. However, the interconnection of these features surfaced throughout the sixteenth century. A specific case is found in the work of Andrea Cesalpino, whose botanical text, De plantis libri XVI [DP] (1583), represents a climax in Renaissance botany and reveals a combination of such diverse phases, as Cesalpino incorporated a theoretical approach to botany with the practical attempt to identify and classify plants, uniting the stdy of plant life and functioning with the systematization of plants in an original way.