The visual art of mycology

Boddy, Lynne ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1845-6738 and Herman-Oakley Mills, Maxine E. 2025. The visual art of mycology. Current Biology 35 (11) , R440-R447. 10.1016/j.cub.2025.05.005

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Abstract

Fungi generally receive rather little attention by comparison with more mobile animals or sunlight-harvesting plants, but as subjects for depiction in art they have inspired an enduring fascination that began early in human history. Perhaps the earliest examples are the prehistoric paintings in caves in the Tassili n’Ajjer mountain range in the Algerian Sahara, over 7,000 years old. They contain people with mushroom-shaped heads and dancing figures holding mushrooms that are emitting light. Findings of neolithic stone-carvings of mushroom gods in Guatemala and also in parts of Mexico and El Salvador are other early examples (Figure 1, left), and in these cases there are suggestions of ritual use of hallucinogenic Psilocybe species. Fungi, however, are rarely seen in artwork until the Renaissance (15th and 16th centuries), when they started to become more widespread as incidental features in paintings, such as on the forest floor and as brackets on trees1. This perhaps reflected the increasing awareness of fungi. Giuseppe Arcimoldo’s 1573 painting entitled Autumn featured a man’s head made of fruits, vegetables and leaves, with a gilled mushroom for an ear. In the Baroque period (17th to the late 18th century), fungi sometimes featured in Italian still-life paintings; Bartolomeo Arbotori often included fungi such as Amanita caesarea and Boletus edulis2. Around this time, Ganoderma lucidum or G. sichuanense (lingzhi/reishi) was also often depicted in Asian art3. In this article we will consider how fungi have been represented in natural history artwork, from early printing techniques through to the 19th century, when there was a step change with the advent of beautiful — but also accurate — drawings and watercolour paintings of fruit bodies of macrofungi, and sometimes even microscopic details of spores and their germination. Then we discuss how, in the late 20th and current century, types of artwork and the subjects expanded to cover mycelial networks, mycorrhizas and the so-called ‘wood-wide web’, and decomposition, amongst other topics associated with the role of fungi in the ecosystems of our planet and our lives.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Biosciences
Publisher:	Cell Press
ISSN:	0960-9822
Last Modified:	24 Jun 2025 11:36
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/179287

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