CLAUDIA SWAN
There are clear indications that Klout, who came to the Leidon university after Clusius was there, brought with him an extensive collection, and that that collection contained, not only the kinds of dried specimens of minerals and spices and plants that would have been crucial for his practice as a pharmacist, but also for the teaching function that he occupied when he was at Leidon, but he also brought with him a vast collection of botanical water colours.


NARRATOR
A simple answer was emerging. But to find it, Claudia had to start thinking in a different way. She had to cross the boundary between art and science and explore the time when the wisdom of classical antiquity was thrown open to question.



MARTIN KEMP
We see in the Renaissance something very remarkable happening, and that is the great bodies of theoretical learning from Greek antiquity which had passed in various ways into the middle ages in the universities, bookish learning, being allied with the knowledge of the doers, the people who had hands on experience.

NARRATOR
Clusius was a prime example of the bookish set, learned in Greek and Latin. But Dierk Klout was different. In Leiden’s archive there is the one known book that Klout published. The university academics of the day wouldn’t have considered it worthy of attention. After all it was only printed locally and written in Dutch. But in terms of science, Van de Beyen is a vision of the future.


CARLA TUENE
He was the man who wrote the first scientific book on bees, and it's called On the Bees (Van de Beyen) and it is written in a dialogue between Clusius and Klout. Clusius comes in on a very nice summer day spring day like today, beautiful weather, he comes into the garden, and he asks Mr Klout about the bees how they are doing.

CLAUDIA SWAN
It is written in a an, accessible dialogue form - a conversation between two interlocutors, one of whom is Carolus Clusius, and the dialogue takes the form of a series of questions about, the generation of insects.



NARRATOR
It was thought that insects were created spontaneously from rotting meat. But Klout thought otherwise and his ideas were based on observation of the natural world rather than reading.

His carefully argued book shows Klout to be far more than a simple gardener or pharmacist. He was a gifted scientist who remained unrecognised. And what of the watercolours? Who painted them? No-one will ever know for sure, but Claudia’s studies suggest that Dierk Klout was more than a gardener, pharmacist and scientist. He was also a gifted painter. It could be that at least some of the watercolours were actually painted by this lost man of the renaissance.

After his death, students of the medical school petitioned to employ Klout’s son - on the sole basis that he was now the owner of their winter garden. The pictures have now been reconnected with Leiden. But the greatest secret of the Winter Garden is what they have revealed of the man who owned and perhaps painted them.

NARRATOR
The really interesting thing about this tiny Renaissance garden is that it gives us a great view onto what is a fundamentally outmoded idea of how renaissance science worked. On the one hand, centrally located in the garden that bears his name, we have a monumental bust, statue, portrait of Carolus Clusius.

On the other hand, here in the corner of the garden, we have a monument to Dirk Klout. It’s a set of six beehives that record his work here, his practice, his observation and investigation of the natural world.



MARTIN KEMP
What we have in the Renaissance is the very interesting phenomenon where the learning about nature is not so much an abstract book learning but it intersects with these people who are doers, they have the hands on experience. So the particular empiricism, the particular kind of experience in the Renaissance is this very potent mix, of very high level abstract theory, and absolutely concrete doing.

CLAUDIA SWAN
The really major message here for me at least was that it is, figures who are easy to under estimate like the figure of the local pharmacist, who are really pushing the scientific enterprise in this time.

The contributions that were made to what we think of as scientific progress were not made exclusively by any means by the big guys.

 

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