Abstract
The Anatomai, a lost work written by Aristotle, must have contained a collection of various drawings and figures of species as well as their organs. In his texts (mainly the Historia animalium), Aristotle is often referring to the drawings after the description of species. Our study applies the method of the comparative view (‘Vergleichendes Sehen’) to provide an access to and reconstruction of Aristotle’s lost illustrations based on his textual descriptions. As an example, we chose the treatment of the European lobster (Homarus gammarus L., 1758) in the Aristotelian corpus as a case study. First, we analyse the etymology of the Greek term astakós referring to the lobster and provide an overview on the putative synonyms. Second, we confront the textual basis of the description with several questions concerning the degree of abstraction, the relation between text and image, and the spatial orientation of the image. Finally, we present a step-by-step reconstruction of Aristotle’s illustrations of the lobster based on the various passages dealing with its anatomy in the text of the Historia animalium. The problems which arise by a confrontation of the textual basis with hypothetical images are discussed at a more general level. We conclude that this kind of a text-based image reconstruction is only possible if the object described by Aristotle is unambiguously identifiable and still visually accessible.
Highlights
IntroductionTexts are limited in their ability to generate visual impressions which match reality
We decided to use the descriptions of the Astakos5 (ὁ ἀστακός) in the chapters of the Historia animalium and De partibus animalium dedicated to crustaceans (HA book IV, chapter 2; PA book IV, chapter 8)
Aristotle mentions a series of crustaceans to which he refers by different names, characterising them on the basis of where they occur, their anatomical structure or their behaviour
Summary
Texts are limited in their ability to generate visual impressions which match reality. In the case of anatomy, the very name of the discipline stems from the title of a collection of images, the Anatomai, which formed part of Aristotle’s treatises on zoology.. The only evidence of the existence of these “section drawings” (aná = based on, tomaí = sections) in humankind’s first atlas of anatomy stems from references to figures in Aristotle’s. The significance of this loss becomes clearest at the points in his works where Aristotle emphasises the parity of text and image:. Does the conveyance of anatomical information depend on text and images in equal part, the very act of thinking itself is for Aristotle a process of visualisation:
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