Located at XVIe century, S. Kusukawa’s work analyzes the first development of a regime specific to the scientific image in observational knowledge, in botany and anatomy in particular. It shows how this new image regime proves to be crucial in the genesis of modern sciences.
In Picturing the Book of NatureSachiko Kusukawa continues a series of remarkable articles on scientific representations during the Renaissance. The book, with tight writing, keeps a good distance from two pitfalls, somewhat vain erudition and a taste for beautiful images. The history of scientific images has changed considerably over the past ten years. In 2007, the publication of the much-noticed Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison served as both a symptom and a catalyst in the formation of a new disciplinary subfield somewhere between art and science. The two authors presented the three successive regimes of the scientific image at work from the XVIIIe century: the truth according to nature » (idealized representation of a species, typically through drawing), “ mechanical objectivity » (recording the particularities of an individual, especially through photography) and “ the judgment exercised » (combination of mechanical recording and expert image noise removal).
S. Kusukawa’s book extends this project of a visual history of science by tracing the origins of the first of these regimes – the “ truth according to nature » – in the middle of XVIe century around the figures of Fuchs, Gessner or Vesalius and from two areas of knowledge: medical botany and human anatomy. The author explains that she treated these two areas together because they are both related to the practice of medicine. But in modern times they are also – with “ natural history of animals » – the main areas where images are produced which do not relate to geometry or are not based on a formalized language. To study these scientific representations and their passage in books in the form of engravings, S. Kusukawa succeeds in bringing together what is too often separated, the study of the environments and contexts of publication, the examination of scholarly and philosophical texts. and the observation of the images themselves.
The book is divided into three main parts: the first deals with the printing of images, the second with the botanical image around the From historia stirpium by Fuchs published in 1542 and the third of the anatomical engravings around the From human fabric by Vesalius published in 1543, these two scientific works being the most innovative of the century with regard to the use of engravings. The first part deals a priori paradoxically about book publishing ; paradoxically, because if publishing seems to intervene after writing in the production of the book, it in fact largely conditions the existence and the forms taken by the scientific image. It then seems impossible to dissociate these images from what after Elizabeth Eisenstein it is agreed to call the “ print revolution “. From this very dense book, we will only retain three themes followed by a critical note.
The scientific image: a matter of money
S. Kusukawa talks a lot about expenses, profits and prices: comparison of production costs or sales prices between an engraved book and one that is not, between a book engraved on wood and another on copper, between a book left in “ white » and another colorized, between the salary of a designer and an engraver etc.
The production of books is indeed a matter of money, as historians have amply demonstrated for more than a generation – Robert Darnton in the lead. During the Renaissance, printer-booksellers who published scientific books tried to make a return on their investment, particularly wooden blocks intended for engraving. From these blocks, they often publish picture books or summaries aimed at non-scholarly audiences. Other times, the blocks are reused several times in the same book, or even resold to other printer-booksellers.
Circulation of blocks and copying of images explain that XVIe century more than a third of illustrated works printed in France and Italy contain engravings present in other books. Plagiarism is omnipresent in the science book economy and some people find it the opportunity to get rich quickly, like the indelicate Egenolff. In 1543, a quarrel over the copying of the engravings of From historia stirpium opposes him to Fuchs. Egenolff justifies himself by indicating that the merit of representation must first be given to God, creator of nature, secondarily to the artist but never to the naturalist. Fuchs replies that two plants never have exactly the same shape, so that two painters cannot represent quite the same thing independently of each other. Both arguments are consistent with the positions of the parties to the trial – Egenolff defends his plagiarism as Fuchs defends his investment – but S. Kusukawa observes that Fuchs here is holding a speech in flagrant contradiction with his ambition to create ideal images of plants. The reversibility of the botanist’s arguments clearly shows, here again, that the scientific book is first and foremost a matter of money.
Keep words, things and images aligned
Because of these economic logics, illustrations are very often “ generics », the same engraving can represent several plants – a sort of correspondence from 1 to n – as in the Botanicon by Dorsten in 1540. But, in these same years, certain humanists like Fuchs wanted an engraving to refer to only one – and only one – particular object, in other words that it be “ specific ”, which would make it more “ true “. For Fuchs, who then positions himself in a broader debate around the Aristotelian philosophy of categories, the natural species is defined by the intersection of several of its innate accidental characteristics. The naturalist, fearing that the confusion of names or images will lead to the confusion of things, then justifies the plant – image – name alignment, what Kusukawa calls the “ 1 to 1 match “. The image thus serves as glue to hold the thing and its name together.
Similarly, the anatomist Vesalius argues by aligning text, engraving and body. The Vesalian demonstration connects things to words through images. The link between the image and the text is made by referencing, hence signs of references involving incessant back and forth. As for the link between images and things, in other words the reliability of the former, it is based on the trust placed in the anatomist, which is why Vesalius constantly shows his scientific authority by relying on the Emperor, on a list of great characters and on the statement of his practice. During the Renaissance, and this may seem strange to us, scientific credit rested largely on the network of powerful foreigners to the Republic of Letters. By observing the circulation of credit between the author, the anatomical practice, the reliability of his images and the quality of his texts, we could say that the truth of the image is then first of all a question of authority.
The absolute image
In the middle of XVIe century, Fuchs, Gessner and Vesalius use the qualifier “ absolute » to designate an ideal of representation. For Fuchs, engraving must be absolutissimathat is to say as complete as possible by integrating the roots, leaves, stems, flowers, seeds and fruits of the plants. A quarter of a century later, Gessner in turn speaks ofabsolute icon to designate the complete image of plants in a sense very close to its predecessor. Vesalius describes thehomo absolutus like the perfect body, that is to say “ natural » in the Aristotelian conception and therefore devoid of monstrous parts. The notions of completeness and perfection lead the two naturalists and the anatomist to strip their representations of individual variations to construct ideal models.
Regarding the images of Fuchs, who represents species diachronically or by juxtaposing several varieties on the same branch, we could speak ofIdealbild in a sense close to our current iconotypes. Likewise, Gessner wants to rid his drawings of possible idiosyncrasies – insect holes, broken branches – in other words of what reveals singular individuals, even if it means multiplying referent specimens. Likewise again, following Galen, Vesalius proposes what S. Kusukawa calls the “ canon of Polykleitos » for public dissections: the corpse must be that of a man or woman of middle age with an average complexion, an exemplary body to which all others can be compared and whose model is given by ancient statuary.
In Fuchs or Vesalius, we can say that the image is thought of as a “ standard-form », a sort of iconic ideal type. But, as S. Kusukawa points out, there existed, during the Renaissance, no consensus on the role of representations in the sciences of observation among humanists who sometimes despised them like Cornarius as among anatomists more concerned with the variation of the anatomical structures that of the ideal vesalian body like Eustace. In this set of convergent practices, there is therefore nothing that could resemble a visual regime common to all botanists and anatomists of the Renaissance. Obviously, these uncertainties clearly distinguish this period of the visual regime of the “ truth according to nature » when, in the Age of Enlightenment, the usefulness of images became obvious and their relationship to things became more consensual.
Critical remarks
S. Kusukawa’s book is particularly remarkable in the constant play of scales of analysis, from the most detailed case study – about tobacco, butterbur or the bone structure of the hand – to the religious contexts of the times from reforms to the economic organization of the book world. Everything goes there: multiple themes – printers-booksellers, cartography, the Reformed, the Belvédère collection etc. –, numerous historical sub-disciplines – history of books and reading, religious history, history of philosophy, history of science and medicine etc. –, and a large number of characters – Fuchs and Vesalius of course but also Peter of Ramée, Leonardo, Jamnitzer, Aristotle, Copernicus, Plato, Melanchton etc. The entire Renaissance then seems precipitated into this small object of the history of science.
We will indeed find some faults in the work: some length, notably on the controversy of “ side pain » which opposes humanists and doctors around the side where the bleeding must be operated, questions left pending such as that relating to reading practices around the case of Lorkyn, a professor of physics from Cambridge, an administration of proof sometimes a little weak as in the audacious reformulation of the notion ofad vivum (which would not necessarily imply that the image is created according to the living but according to the external forms of the visible thing), and a certain abuse of partial conclusions. The main regret, however, is not linked to the book project but to what remains a sort of black hole in the visual history of science. We now know the situation well XVIe century and that of XVIIIe century but what about the missing link, the XVIIe century, which we usually link to the Scientific Revolution – without really knowing what we mean by that – and which saw the replacement of wood engraving by copper engraving ? We have, perhaps wrongly, the feeling that the XVIIe century is marked by a scarcity of scientific engravings, particularly in the field of natural history which, as Brian W. Ogilvie had shown, then has less of a project of knowing how to describe nature than of naming it and order by gradually becoming taxonomic.