Gardens and Medicinal Virtues
Health and Beauty Between Past and Present
edited by
abstract
This short catalogue was created to leave a trace of the exhibition realised at the end of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie project based at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The aim of the event was to explain what was meant in the past by materia medica – plants, animals and minerals as a source of medicinal substances – but also how many implications knowledge, and therefore respect and love for Nature, has in the present as well. The exhibition, set up in the ancient venue of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, the Sala Sansoviniana, involved public and private subjects, with a variety of items: illustrated herbals, rare handbills for medicinal remedies, apothecary’s tools, works of art (etchings, engravings, mixed techniques) and even two board games, one from the nineteenth century and another from the present day, with naturalistic woodcuts.