"Written in vernacular Italian for the , the Carrara Herbal is a translation of the work of a 9th-century Arab physician called , and it is celebrated for the beauty and realism of its paintings. The unnamed artist did not copy the works of others but instead looked at nature. ... we see the artist expressing his own knowledge of plants through what he sees with his own eyes and this was revolutionary. Like the painter of the Carrara Herbal, the Italian fine artist (c. 1395–1455). working in the very early years of the Renaissance, was ahead of his contemporaries in so far as he also drew directly from nature."