Pistaccia

Article description

Original antique hand colored copper engraving. Published in one of the most beautiful illustrated works of baroque masterpieces. This plate shows at the bottom the city of Fürth, near Nürnberg in Franconia. Above is a branch of a pistachio tree with a pink banderole. Most of these beautiful hand-colored engravings in Johann Christoph Volkamers Hesperides show carefully engraved depictions of citrus and bitter orange fruits in combination with baroque gardens. The focus of the illustrations is on the representations of the unbelievably large number of varieties of lemons and bitter oranges, and various exotic plants and fruits such as pineapples, a blooming cactus or even coconut fruits are shown. Most of these engravings show fruits and plants in combination with beautiful engraved scenes of royal and private gardens, castles, small villages, courtyards and houses of merchants or smaller royal houses in and around southern Germany (many of them in the vicinity of Nuremberg) and in northern Italy. Furthermore, Volkamer describes very extensively these gardens and places in northern Italy around Lake Garda, Lago di Nervi, Verona, Padua, Bergamo, Genoa etc. Many of these decorative fruits were, mostly below, combined with a view of the place, where this particular one fruit or plant was grown and very often the owner of this place is named. All these beautiful, extremely carefully hand-colored engravings lead the viewer through a remarkable collection of locations with gardens and greenhouses in northern Italy and to locations north of the Alps in southern Bavaria around Nuremberg, Bayreuth and Passau.

Pistaccia