Flowers pop up everywhere in Renaissance art. Why are there pinks in a pot above a Crivelli Madonna, roses scattered across Botticelli's Primavera and columbines in the borders of many a fifteenth-century manuscript? This is the first book to explore how and why flowers feature so extensively in the[...]

Birds have captured people's imagination since earliest times, with their fascinating plumage, behaviour and power of flight. In this beautifully and unusually illustrated book, Celia Fisher traces the remarkable breadth of ways in which artists, writers and storytellers have depicted the enduring m[...]

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a flowering of botanical illustration and witnessed the production of some of the greatest books of plant illustration ever produced, including such outstanding examples as the Hortus Eystettensis, the work of Maria Sybilla Merian, Thornton's Temple of Fl[...]