Introduction

Despite Albrecht Durer’s enormous artistic output, immediate success in various media, and more than five centuries of scholarship devoted to his work, current research continues to reveal information related to his choice of materials and techniques. Given their wide distribution as prints, Durer’s three meisterstiche impressions – Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) (Figures 4.1 and 4.2) St. Jerome in His Study (1514) (Figure 4.3); and Melencolia I (1514) (Figures 4.4 and 4.5) – have been admired and closely studied, perhaps even more than his paintings and drawings. Of the hundreds of known extant impressions of these works, many were cataloged by Bartsch (1803–1821), Meder (1932), and Hollstein (1954). These and other studies variously describe Durer’s impressions as rich, clean, with burr, excellent, poor, lighter, darker, silvery, brownish, and/or tonal. In light of the inherent subjectivity in judgments of impression quality, this essay outlines the author’s in-depth comparative study across and between impressions carried out using a modified digital camera and modern imaging technology.

As a copperplate such as those produced for the meisterstiche is inked for printing, the hard and sharp fragments of microscopic burr residue left by the burin and inclusions in the carbon-based ink pigment are repeatedly rubbed into its lines for hundreds of impressions, and the condition of the metal matrix gradually declines.

Introduction: The Visual Languages in Illustrated Lecture Notebooks

The curriculum at the Old University of Louvain (founded 1425) remained that of a typically medieval institution in the early modern period. Students started at the Studium Generale of the Faculty of Arts of Louvain before being (possibly) admitted to one of the higher faculties of medicine, law, or theology. The magister artium title required nine months’ training in logic or dialectic, nine months of physics, four months of metaphysics and ethics, and, finally, three months of rehearsal exercises (repetitiones). In the Artes faculty, students took verbatim notes of the text dictated by teachers during class. Taking and saving notes was a widespread habit among humanist scholars, scientific observers, and travelers. In many early modern universities, the professor spoke at dictation speed, which resulted in fairly reliable copies of the course. It also happened that the text was copied or even bought in advance, on the basis of course notes from previous years.

Louvain’s well-preservedwell-preserved volumes of lecture notes or dictata were often embellished by students with drawings and then engravings. This tradition of illustrating lecture notes flourished in the first half of the seventeenth century, continuing until the mid-eighteenth century. Visual material includes logical diagrams, arborial diagrams, tables, “fill-in-the blank” title pages, humoristic doodles, ornamental initials, landscapes and views of cities, portraits of rulers, geometric patterns, scientific instruments, astronomical representations, anatomical plates, attributes and personifications, religious and mythological narratives, satirical or grotesque figures, frames and cartouches surrounding handwritten titles, drawn head pieces and scrolls, object-shaped text, small devotional vignettes, illustrated colophons or chronograms, and symbols of the four pedagogies.

Introduction

What does it mean to forget, learn, or relearn how to see? Reflecting on these questions, this essay emerges from the intersection of digital methodologies and my own art historical interest in the ontological operations of early modern print. These two apparently unrelated fields of inquiry come together as I consider the role of new image technologies and the concomitant processes of replication, circulation, and standardization, today and at the beginnings of globalization around 1600. Here, I briefly sketch some parallels between the infrastructural role of early modern print and twenty-first century attempts to automate and instrumentalize vision, both as efforts to deconstruct and reconstruct ways of seeing.

Indulgent Images, Imperial Infrastructures

Wherever Europeans landed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they brought printed images with them. Stacked and bundled, these woodcuts and engravings were used to introduce foreign rulers, customs, stories and artistic styles. Here is a king, an animal, a city you will never see. The Christian God looks like this; this is his mother (Figure 12.1). Accounting for the diverse roles of prints in the colonization of the Americas, Tom Cummins has described prints as the “indulgent medium par excellence,” as “simultaneously the most democratic and oppressive of all forms of images.” Cummins identifies the ubiquity of prints in the colonial world as symptomatic both of colonial power and its resistance.

In the guise of a preface to this volume, and as an overview and extension of the authors’ reflections contributing to an exploration of prints’ epistemic dimension, I would like to take up the question of the reversibility between knowledge and image through the issue of engraving (and intaglio printmaking more broadly) as a metaphor for thinking knowledge. In his Paradigms for a Metaphorology of 1960, Hans Blumenberg interrogates the place of metaphors in Western thought. He thus underscores how metaphors (e.g. light as a metaphor for truth, or the legibility of the world, to which he dedicated a book), far from simple ornaments of philosophical discourse or efficacious didactic means, allow for a consideration of that which resists conceptualization. Metaphors constitute Grundbestände, which is to say “fundamental elements” “from which and upon which philosophy operates, and do not allow themselves to be overtaken within a conceptuality.” That within this reflection on metaphorology artistic metaphors number among Western thought’s fundamental elements can be confirmed, for example, in the metaphor of sculpture in Aristotle’s theory of causality (doctrine of the four causes). They have enabled a thinking through of the actual plastic processes entailed in the reception and production of knowledge. Among such epistemic-artistic metaphors is that of engraving. This begs the question: how might a new technique such as engraving – a term that refers at once to procedure and product – generate or reactivate and thereby transform rich metaphorical networks, enabling a re-thinking of certain issues at the intersection of knowledge, belief, and vision in early modernity?

Introduction

A plethora of scholarship from recent decades examines the complex processes whereby an early modern book came into existence. While printing obviously speeded up the production of books compared to the manuscript era, a print run of hundreds (let alone thousands) still required many months. During these months, printers could still fiddle with the format of the book, adding accidental and intended changes to text and images at the behest of correctors, authors, and typesetters. Sometimes, as the first sheets of a volume were being printed at full speed, the author was still finishing the text’s concluding section, writing up a fulsome epistle dedicatory, assembling the index, and composing an errata list of typographical errors. Arguably, the complexities of these processes made each exemplar of a printed book unique. They can give the impression that the production of books was a messy and unstable enterprise in the early modern world, and not the orderly business of standardized twentiethcentury production. Our chapter contributes to this historiographical debate by examining the temporal sequence of printing, asking whether exemplars produced at the beginning and end of the process differed from each other.

A well-established distinction between the different states of woodcuts, engravings, and etchings exists in the field of art history. The hundreds of sheets that printmakers pulled from the same copperplate or woodblock can often be grouped into separate and distinct states based either on the matrices’ deterioration, or on the artist’s intervention, as in the case of Rembrandt, who obsessively reworked his etchings throughout his career.

Ink on Paper: Etching as Sensible Experience

This passage was written by Giovanni Battista Agucchi, a Bolognese art theorist and collector, prelate and papal courtier, amateur astronomer and Galilean acolyte.

Introduction: The Plantin-Moretus Museum and Its Woodblock Collection

This chapter reviews the aims, methods, and preliminary results of the recent digitization project for the Officina Plantiniana’s woodblocks in the typographical collections of the Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp. An extraordinarily rich but long overlooked primary resource, the blocks stand to benefit from recent research investigating the role of material culture and visual representation in early modern science by examining the emergence, production, and role of printed images as tools in scientific texts. Making an online clearinghouse of digital images of the blocks linked to basic descriptions in an online catalog, the project facilitates open access to this exceptional and unique collection to enable emerging object-based research that investigates not merely the printed image, but also the matrices used to print them, shedding new light on the Press’s history specifically and early modern printing and knowledge production more broadly.

Christoffel Plantin was born in France c. 1520 and was taught printing and book-binding before moving to Antwerp in 1548 for religious reasons, where he opened his printing office the Officina Plantiniana in 1555. Appointed Prototypographe or chief printer of the city in 1570 by the king of Spain, he was regarded as the period’s foremost printer. By 1575, his operations were based in buildings that now constitute the Plantin-Moretus Museum and boasted sixteen presses, 32 printers, twenty compositors, three proof-readers, and one unskilled laborer, in addition to numerous skilled artisans to whom he contracted out work.

Introduction

The sixteenth-century press codified disciplines of knowledge by distilling available information into visual tools. By presenting data in useful and easily legible formats, printmakers rewired the emphasis of older genres such as the Book of Secrets and repackaged those secrets in printed editions of the more marketable genres of complexion literature, physiognomy, and cosmography. While scholars of early modern prints are usually eager to search for prints’ agency in the technologizing of the image, or in the prompting of the collective viewing practices that underwrote emerging scientific consensus, a look at prints’ intersection with manuscript culture proves a fruitful route to uncovering a path to early modern data development. The trajectory by which ancient knowledge domains became how-to skills can perhaps best be tracked in a manuscript likely assembled in Passau, c. 1524. The so-called Liber Quodlibetarius, which seamlessly imported images from a variety of printed genres, forms the focus of this chapter. The manuscript’s compiler merged information from books in the humanistic tradition, such as cosmography and chiromancy, with pamphlets advertising designs for bridle bits of horses, tools for field surgery, and artists’ manuals, on the strength of their visual kinship and the degree to which images were critical messengers of the books’ program. In transposing the images from these printed books, the manuscript aimed to make that data more useful to the reader by deputizing images to stand in for text-based knowledge.

Introduction

Historical accounts conventionally highlight two central aspects of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: on the one hand, that this is a period of, arguably, never before imagined dynamics in the “sciences,” embodied in such iconic figures as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, and giving rise to countless myths about progress. On the other hand, that it signifies an essential step in the development of present-day scientific disciplines and a milestone in European history, marking the beginning of the scientization of modern societies. A fundamental trait of the Scientific Revolution was the growing epistemic value of practical knowledge in general and of scientific instruments in particular, allowing for a significant extension of the realm of experience. Whereas astrolabes, armillary spheres, air pumps, microscopes, telescopes, and many other devices became increasingly important for the study of nature, they had not yet become standardized and impersonal tools.

That these usually unique items could, by means of function and design, mediate between scholars and social elites means that imagery incised in or imprinted on the surface of such instruments played a crucial role. In fact, a great number of early modern instruments are adorned with such images that per se have no relevance to the object’s practical use: for instance, the depiction of Atlas and Hercules on an astrolabe by Johannes Praetorius (1568, Dresden) or that of tradition in astronomy and geometry from the patriarchs to Copernicus on Jost Burgi’s astronomical equation clock (1591, Kassel).

This chapter provides an abbreviated survey of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century printed images of the interior of the eye, tracing the impact of illustrations of the eye in Vesalius’s 1543 De humani corporis fabrica libri septem through Johannes Kepler’s 1604 Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, quibus astronomiae pars optica traditur and Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente’s 1600 De visione. This is read against a persuasive narrative in recent historiography that posits clear differences between the impact of epistemic images in, on the one hand, the domains of medicine, anatomy, and natural history generally, and in the mathematical sciences, particularly astronomy, on the other. Vesalius looms large in accounts of the former, Copernicus and his wake (Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, etc.) in the latter. These studies in part responded to earlier, rather sweeping accounts of the importance of new kinds of graphic techniques, technology (print, foremost), and ways of seeing to the so-called Scientific Revolution. Such works, by, among others, William Ivins, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Bruno Latour, made no clear distinctions between the visual traditions of medicine and mathematics.

Depictions of the interior of the eye, however, challenge aspects of both accounts. This chapter considers how entanglements of visual depiction, textual content, and experimental activities through developments in anatomy, medicine, and mathematical optics might revise broader narratives about the role of visualization in the development of modern science.

Metrication of Eye Illustrations in Vesalius

Though less famous than other now-canonical woodcuts in the Fabrica, within their domain Vesalius’s images of the eye exercised enormous influence.

Enabled by the prosperity of printing technology and motivated by a “newly invigorated info-lust,” early modern artists, scientists, and theologians produced numerous images that used diagrammatic and pictorial strategies to condense theories or practices into easily digestible graphic forms. The resulting visual works were tools of transforming information into knowledge. They spatialized relationships, creating worlds in which physical and conceptual proximity were one and the same. They were instruments of pedagogy, championed by scholars such as Petrus Ramus and Johann Amos Comenius, who argued that comprehension could be better achieved and retained when the studied information was manifested spatially. Print designers, both renowned and unknown, found many ways of organizing these spatialized relationships, modeling them after trees or wheels, and applying them to diverse genres from politics to theology. Bold lines, textheavy chains or trodden footpaths – the map-like skeletons of schematic prints – guide beholders through these complex images, inviting them to traverse imaginatively the pictorial space as if it were real, perhaps by tracing their chosen routes with their fingers, feeling the subtle topographic ridge of ink on the printed page.

Despite their diversity and abundance, early modern single-page schemata, which exist somewhere between text and image, have long skirted the attentions of art historians. That they largely remain footnotes of visual culture can be attributed in part to their dry and convoluted nature, which has made them objects of study better suited to the histories of mathematics or science, who, however, focus primarily on the information represented rather than the manner of its representation.