The Botanical Garden and Museum is pleased to announce the exhibition ‘Casabona, Dyckman and the Flora of Crete’, organised as part of the project ‘At the museum and in the garden: dialogues between art and science’ financed by the Pisa Foundation and realised with the collaboration of the Pisan University Library.

The exhibition will be open from 1 October 2024 to 30 November 2024 at the Botanical Museum.

What links the Botanical Garden and Museum of Pisa to the Island of Crete? The plants that grow on this island (over 1700 species, 10% endemic) have always attracted the attention of naturalists due to their variety and peculiarities. The Flemish Giuseppe Casabona (Joseph Goedenhuyze), prefect of the Pisan Institution at the end of the 16th century, explored the island of Crete between 1590 and 1591 on behalf of the Grand Duke of Tuscany Ferdinand I. During his stay, he met a German soldier with artistic skills, Georg Dyckman, and hired him to paint live portraits of the most significant plants collected during his excursions.

The exhibition displays reproductions of all 34 tempera plates that have survived to the present day, taken from manuscript no. 462 ‘Icones variarum plantarum’, today conserved in the Hortus Pisanus fund of the Pisan University Library. The plants portrayed, a perfect synthesis of Art and Science, have all been re-identified and grouped according to growth environments and peculiar adaptations. A visit to the exhibition gives a fairly precise idea of a very particular historical period in the history of the Botanical Garden and Museum (in those same years the institution was moved to its current location) and of the Flora of Crete.

The opening, which will be followed by a small aperitif, will be on Tuesday 1 October 2024 at noon.