Just because good science is meticulous doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. At least that’s what a northern Italian illustrator decided when he went about drawing and coloring nearly 200 botanical specimens on parchment paper back in the 15th century. Initially consisting of 70 plant paintings, as the Public Domain Review notes, the separate folios were consolidated into a single bound manuscript later that century. The herbal is a thick folio of flora, equal parts Voynich manuscript and Monty Python cutscene. Some plants are depicted roughly, as they are in…
