Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art

Giovanni Aloi

This groundbreaking volume unearths the representation of plants and their vital impact on art, thereby advocating for the botanical world’s legitimate place in art history.

Desired for their aesthetic beauty, sought after for their medicinal properties, harvested for their scents and flavors, or grown as essential material resources, plants are indissolubly entwined with our existence. In art it is no different: plants have played a critical role. Yet despite their significant material and conceptual contributions, plants have been sidelined in the commentary of art historians and critics.

Botanical Revolutions presents a global history of plants in art, focusing on the crucial moments that signaled the formation of new movements and styles, as well as the creation of media that could not have occurred without the involvement of and interaction with the vegetal world. In this fascinating and beautifully illustrated book, author Giovanni Aloi delves deeply into the history and representation of plants in art, advocates for a change in our relationship with the botanical world, and presents an alternative history of art that foregrounds the truly indispensable contributions of plants.

Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in environmental subjects and the representation of nature in art. His previous publications include Lucian Freud Herbarium (2019), Botanical Speculations (2018), and Why Look at Plants? (2018).

“In Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art, Giovanni Aloi offers a rich bouquet of vegetal art.”
—Luke Lyman, The Wall Street Journal

“In Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art, the author and curator Giovanni Aloi urges us to take botanical representations in art altogether more seriously. Such a topic demands a suitably lush and illustrated book, and this one, spread over seven chapters, is undeniably beautiful to look at, but it is also much more than that. It is a book that is good to think with, highly philosophical in its musings, and boundary-pushing in its theories.”
—Caroline Eden, Engelsberg Ideas

224 pages 
8 x 10 1/2 inches
172 color and 13 b/w illustrations
ISBN 978-1-60606-947-9
hardcover

Getty Publications
Imprint: Getty Publications

2025