Picturing the Book of Nature
Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany
Sachiko Kusukawa
The University of Chicago Press
352 pages
|
121 color plates, 16 halftones, 2 tables
|
7 x 10
|
© 2012
Because of their spectacular, naturalistic pictures of plants and the human body, Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium and Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica are landmark publications in the history of the printed book. But as Picturing the Book of Nature
makes clear, they do more than bear witness to the development of book
publishing during the Renaissance and to the prominence attained by the
fields of medical botany and anatomy in European medicine. Sachiko
Kusukawa examines these texts, as well as Conrad Gessner’s unpublished Historia plantarum, and demonstrates how their illustrations were integral to the emergence of a new type of argument during this period—a visual argument for the scientific study of nature.
To
set the stage, Kusukawa begins with a survey of the technical,
financial, artistic, and political conditions that governed the
production of printed books during the Renaissance. It was during the
first half of the sixteenth century that learned authors began using
images in their research and writing, but because the technology was so new, there was a
great deal of variety of thought—and often disagreement—about exactly
what images could do: how they should be used, what degree of authority
should be attributed to them, which graphic elements were bearers of
that authority, and what sorts of truths images could and did encode.
Kusukawa investigates the works of Fuchs, Gessner, and Vesalius in light
of these debates, scrutinizing the scientists’ treatment of
illustrations and tracing their motivation for including them in their
works. What results is a fascinating and original study of the visual
dimension of scientific knowledge in the sixteenth century.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire