Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 “Innocent Witch-craft of Lights”: Developing Visual Judgment through Printed Books
- 2 “A New Visible World”: Developing a Visual Vocabulary for the Microscopic
- 3 “Nearly Resembling the Live Birds”: Collecting and Collating for the Reformation of Natural History
- 4 “These Rude Collections”: Accumulating Observations and Experiments
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - “Innocent Witch-craft of Lights”: Developing Visual Judgment through Printed Books
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 “Innocent Witch-craft of Lights”: Developing Visual Judgment through Printed Books
- 2 “A New Visible World”: Developing a Visual Vocabulary for the Microscopic
- 3 “Nearly Resembling the Live Birds”: Collecting and Collating for the Reformation of Natural History
- 4 “These Rude Collections”: Accumulating Observations and Experiments
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter examines the precursors to the production of scientific illustrations by studying books that purported to teach the arts of drawing and engraving to examine how the eye and the hand of the naturalist were trained to consume and produce images that were useful to the production of natural knowledge. My explorations are focused on three texts: A Book of Drawing (1647); John Evelyn's Sculptura (1662); and William Faithorne's The Art of Graveing and Etching (1662). These books are used to gain an understanding of how a natural philosopher could accept a two-dimensional representation, often made by someone else, as a useful surrogate for an individual's lived experience of the three-dimensional world.
Keywords: Drawing, Engraving, John Evelyn, William Faithorne
Fellows of the Royal Society were concerned with how to ensure the accuracy of their images. This chapter investigates the ways in which the effects of accuracy derived from training in how to produce and consume visual materials, particularly drawings and engravings. By making explicit the ways in which artist's manuals and practices informed the construction of early modern visual knowledge of nature, I also aim to show the new ways that authors exerted control over the production of the images associated with their research, which was viewed as an ideal toward which scholars in the seventeenth century strove. The modes of accuracy the Fellows developed as a result of a prolonged engagement with artistic practices and habits of mind grew from several forms of control, including the training and skill required to exert physical control over image production, the intellectual control involved in deploying and refining an emergent visual vocabulary for the circulation of natural knowledge, and the shared controls involved in judging other scholars’ visual work as further contributions to a common body of knowledge.
In his book on the history of engraving, Sculptura: or the History, and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper, John Evelyn held up Johannes Hevelius (1611–1687) as the model of a scholar who created his own images.
The learned Hevelius has shewed his admirable dexterity in this Art [engraving], by the several Phases and other Ichonisms which adorn his Selenographi, and is therefore one of the noblest instances of the extraordinary use of this Talent, for men of Letters, and that would be accurate in the Diagramms which they publish in their works.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Engraving Accuracy in Early Modern EnglandVisual Communication and the Royal Society, pp. 49 - 96Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022