Botanical: Observing Beauty

This handsome volume invites readers on an intimate stroll through centuries of jewelry, botany, drawing, prints, video-game imagery and scientific illustrations, offering a primer on the beauty and ingenuity of nature as reflected in art. Five contributions punctuate the visually structured journey, including a previously unpublished leporello by the late artist Etal Adnan that pulls out into a six-page gatefold. Indeed, this book-as-object is a masterpiece in and of itself, featuring a cover infused with fluorescent and silver inks and titled with a serigraph, in addition to eight pages of sumptuous endpapers printed in deep forest green.A coterie of international thinkers guide Botanical’s ambitious scope and aim: Emanuele Coccia, Italian philosopher and author of The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2018); Estelle Zhong Mengual, French art historian; Filipa Ramos, Portuguese curator and author of the upcoming book The Artist as Ecologist (2023). Through their rigorous and