Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Botany and Anatomy

Abstract

Rather than use “the book of nature” in a metaphorical sense, Sachiko Kusukawa makes a compelling case that illustrated books of anatomy and botany similarly directed attention to material structures of nature in sixteenth-century Europe. Showing that illustrated books stand in a complex relation to the practices they record, she argues in this beautifully produced volume that authors adopted engraved images to define “nature” as a material form of evidence in distinctly modern ways. Kusukawa shows how the assembly of books restored the premium ancient writers placed on “seeing for oneself [autopsia]” in ways “integral to the Renaissance enterprise of reviving classical knowledge” (125). She argues that images in botany and anatomy texts after 1530 delineated natural structures both to resolve debates of translation and to synthesize observations by which natural structures “became visible” (257) in ways independent from stylistic shifts of art. Kusukawa demonstrates that naturalists defended their right to illustrate their work with the fixed outlines, volumetric shading, and delineation of wood and copper engravings, thus mediating their first-hand observations through printed form. Her argument extends the classic thesis of William Ivins that “exactly reproducible pictorial statement[s]” rationalized nature (Prints and Visual Communication, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969, 23–24, 46). Her attention to how authors integrated images to create arguments rooted in observations unpacks Ivins's claim and extends his argument in at least three ways: by demonstrating the investment of a northern European milieu in securing privileges for prints to make knowledge claims in their illustrated books; by showing the value of the precision with which engraved images could embody synthetic observations; by highlighting the common attention to preserving lifelike design both in commentary devoted to botanical images and anatomists' attention to deploying lifelike images of natural bodily structures.