The Triumphant Return of Botanical Illustrations

In the age of digital images and virtual realities, one of the lost classical visual arts is experiencing a paradoxical renaissance.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Once dominant in palace interiors, galleries, scientific publications, and elegant magazines, it became one of the first casualties of the technological revolution and sank into deep oblivion throughout the entire 20th century. But like a modern Sleeping Beauty, after a hundred years of sleep, it was awakened by the digital kiss of the 21st century.

Once, many years ago, the Aquarium in the Seaside Gardens of my hometown Varna, was one of the most magical places of my grey socialist childhood. The silence of the half-dark rooms, lit only by the bluish glow of the tanks, the silent swaying of the seaweed, the wide-eyed mute faces of the fish, and the bubbling of the aerators created an otherworldly atmosphere that cast a powerful spell over my child’s imagination and drew me back into its mystic twilight again and again.

But unlike most of my peers, I lingered longest not by the lively, colourful tropical fish or the bristly sharp-nosed cartilaginous species, but in the least-visited museum room, buried in shells, whelks, corals, jars of pale deep-sea creatures, herbaria of dried seaweed…