Plants and animals

The atlases on display in this album were compiled at a time when the first modern taxonomy system was being developed but previous scholarly achievements were still in circulation and subject to criticism. They thus give a well-rounded picture of this watershed moment in natural history.

The first page in each collection of prints from a given atlas or portfolio bears a number (1-42) and the bibliographic data for the whole of the work. The "initiators" and authors named are for the most part scientists, nature researchers, but there are also artists (painters or engravers) among them, as well as autodidacts with a passion for natural history, who devoted their every spare moment to it. In order to satisfy our readers' curiosity, we give the titles of the works not only in the original, but also in free translation into Polish and English. Selected atlases are discussed more broadly in the comments on their authors and the circumstances surrounding their compilation.

The individual prints are catalogued under numbers secondary to the number of the atlas (e.g. 1.1, 1.2). The authors named in the captions are both those who created the original composition of the illustration (usually a first painted version) and/or the engravers who made the print on the basis of that first piece. The highly detailed prints were then hand coloured on the plates or retouched with watercolours or gouaches (and in some cases both).

Many of the plates display species names that are no longer current or are part of classification systems no longer in use. Our striving to use their contemporary equivalents was inspired by our desire to release this material to our readers in its most accessible form. Hence our use of Polish and English species names or entrenched colloquial names (these latter in braces {}) and our use of Latin only where there is no vernacular equivalent. In some cases only the next rank up in a given taxon is used, whether genus, family, or order. In descriptions of plates showing several organisms, their original numbers or positions are given in square brackets. Some of the images of the most fascinating species are accompanied by voices offering botanical or zoological information or a cultural context.

The core material of natural history atlases is supplemented with examples of other prints from the era, e.g. Richard Earlom's Markets and print compositions by Jacob and Joris Hoefnagel.