Johannes Kepler was a very prolific author but there is an aspect to his major books that usually doesn’t receive enough attention. As well as the torrent of words that poured from his pen, his books were always richly embellished with masterfully executed and deeply expressive illustrations. This visual communication between Kepler and his readers reached a high point in the fascinating, immensely complex frontispiece of the Tabulae Rudolphinae (Rudolphine Tables) published in Ulm in 1627. The frontispiece of this monumental collection of tables, that probably did more to further the acceptance of a heliocentric model of the cosmos than any other publication, is a complex sketch of the history of astronomy from Aratus (c. 312–240 BCE) down to Kepler himself, in the following I will narrate the story of this wonderful depiction of that history.
It depicts the Temple of Urania, the muse of astronomy, which is here an open sided pavilion with a decagon base and a domed roof supported on ten columns. The columns are in pairs and starting from the back develop in style and materials to depict the passage of time. The first pair are simple tree trunks with the branches loped off, the second pair consists of simple stone blocks piled on top of each other. Moving towards the front there are two pairs of brick column and at the front are a pair of smooth Corinthian columns, the one on the right having an achanthus-leaf capital. The floor of the pavilion depicts the stary heavens which form the fundament on which the observations, the columns, to which we will return later, are built.
The Emperor (Rudolf) sits on his throne in the middle of the roof and above him hovers the imperial eagle, who is dropping gold coin from his beak down on the astronomers below. This element of the illustration contains more than a little irony. Throughout his time as imperial mathematicus, Kepler had extreme difficulties getting the imperial treasury to pay his wages. By the time he finally came to print the Tabulae Rudolphinae he was owed a large sum of money in back wages, some of which he tried in vain to obtain to cover the printing costs. In the end he paid the printing costs out of his own pocket and then instead of handing the finished product over to the current emperor, who property the book was, he took the whole first edition to the Frankfurt Bookfair, where he sold it to recuperate his outlay.
Around the rim of the roof are six goddesses each one representing significant aspects of Kepler’s astronomy. From left to right they are optics (the shining head of the goddess is creating a shadow of a globe), the telescope, logarithms (holding in her hands rods of the ratio of one to two, and the number around her head showing the Keplerian natural logarithm of 1/2: 0.6931472), geometry (with a compass, square-ruler and a diagram of an ellipse), ‘stathmica’, namely the laws of the lever and balance (holding a balance, with the Sun at the fulcrum and a star at the end of the longer arm, an allusion to the slowing of a planet’s motion as the magnetic force of the Sun decreases with increasing distance), and magnetics (holding a lodestone and compass).
The ceiling of the pavilion depicts the Tychonic system of the cosmos with the Earth at the centre orbited by the Moon and the Sun with the other planets orbiting the sun. Hanging down from the Earth in the middle of the pavilion is a board with the title of the book, Tabulae Rudolphinae.
The six columns at the front each represent to work of an astronomer, starting from the left Aratus (c. 312–240 BCE), Hipparchus (c. 190–c. 120 BCE), Copernicus (1473–1543), Tycho (1546–1601), Ptolemaeus (fl, 150 CE), and Meton (5th century BCE). Aratus wrote a poem, Phenomena that describes the cosmology of Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 390–c. 340 BCE), his column is decorated with an armillary sphere. Hipparchus is, of course, next to Ptolemaeus the most important of the Greek astronomers and his column is decorated with a celestial sphere and he is depicted holding his star catalogue. Moving to the righthand side, Ptolemaeus is shown sitting whilst drawing a diagram. Part of the Greek title of the Almagest is visible and the diagram on the table in front of him shows Ptolemy’s theorem (if a quadrilateral is inscribed in a circle, then the sum of the products of its two pairs of opposite sides is equal to the product of its diagonals). Ptolemaeus’ column is decorated with an astrolabe. Behind Ptolemaeus is the column for Meton, who gave his name to the Meton cycle which aligns the solar and lunar cycles over a nineteen-year period, and amongst other things forms the basis for the Jewish lunar-solar calendar. Meton’s column is decorated with a dial displaying his cycle. At the back of the pavilion between the tree trunk columns stands a nameless Chaldean, that is Babylonian, astronomer who is measuring the angular distance between celestial bodies using his fingers.
We now move to the front and the centre of attraction framed by the two Corinthian columns. On the left sits Copernicus, his column is decorated with a Jacob’s staff and his parallactic rulers or triquetrum, which Tycho had brought to Hven. On the plinth of the column rests a tablet with observations of Regiomontanus (1436–1476) and Bernhard Walther (1430–1504), which were included in De revolutionibus. On the right stands Tyco Brahe dressed in a full-length ermine robe and wearing his Order of the Elephant medal. He is pointing out to Copernicus the model of his system of the cosmos on the ceiling. By his elbow on the plinth of his column is his Astronomiae instauratae Progymnasmata (Prague 1602/3), which was the publication of his model. His column is decorated with his quadrant and his sextant.
Underneath Copernicus and Tycho on the base of the pavilion is a panel depicting a map of Hven, the island where Tycho built his observatory, Uraniborg, where he carried out twenty years of, for the time, extremely accurate astronomical observations, the material that Kepler used to calculate the Tabulae Rudolphinae. To the right of this are two panels depicting the printing of the book. The first panel shows a pressman inking the exposed type lying on the platen. The pressman on the left has raised the frisket with his right hand and is now removing the printed sheet which he will pass to his left hand to place on the pile of printed sheets under the bed of the press, and replace it with a new sheet ready to be printed. The second panel shows a compositor setting type. The panel to the left of centre shows Kepler with a model of the roof of the pavilion and a list of some of his principal scientic texts, Mysterium Comographicum (1596), Astronomiae Pars Optica (1604), Astronomia Nova (1609), and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae (1618–1621). To the right of Kepler is another panel with an image of the schoolteacher and poet Johann Baptist Hebenstreit (c. 1580–1638), a friend of Kepler’s. Hebenstreit wrote a poem, ‘An idyll on the Keplerian star-spangled tower, showing depicted the birth and progress of astronomy up to our age and the quite new, long-desired and incomparable work of the Tables’, which explains the imagery of the frontispiece and which was printed as the preface to the book.
There is, of course, always the open question, just how much of this wonderful illustration could users of the Tabulae Rudolphinae actually interpret correctly.
When I first started delving into the history of astronomy there was a pantheon of the great historians, who ruled over the discipline far above us mere mortals–for example, I. Bernhard Cohen, Edward Rosen, Robert S. Westman, Richard S. Westfall, and others.
One of those giants, Owen Gingerich, died 28 May at the grand old age of 93. Gingerich was for many years a professor for both astronomy and the history of science at Harvard University.
His main area of research was the history of astronomy of the Early Modern Period, especially, but not exclusively, Copernicus and Kepler. Anybody, who reads this blog, will know that this in one of my key areas of interest, so over the years I have read many of Gingerich’s papers and books, several of the latter adorning my bookshelves. I learnt a great deal reading Gingerich. Just to give one example, I first learnt about the itinerant German mathematician, Paul Wittich (c. 1546–1586), who played a significant role in the evolution of the Tychonic geo-heliocentric model of the cosmos, as well as the distribution of prosthaphaeresis, a trigonometrical forerunner of logarithms, through a joint paper by Gingerich & Westman.[1]
Gingerich first ran across Wittich’s work on geo-heliocentric models in the marginalia of his copy of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus.
Paul Wittich’s geoheliocentric planetary model – as annotated in his copy of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus in February 1578 Source: Wikipedia Commons
Having been inspired by the marginalia in Erasmus Reinhold’s personal copy of De revolutionibus, Gingerich began a thirty-year-long survey of all the extant copies of the 1st and 2nd editions of De revolutionibus that he could find, recording provenance, marginalia, censorship etc.
The results of this odyssey were published in his An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ DeRevolutionibus (Nuremberg 1543 and Basel 1566) (Brill, 2002).
It is a monumental work of scholarship and an invaluable asset for all scholars of the history of Early Modern astronomy. It, of course, cost a fortune and was way outside of my book buying budget. However, one Sunday I walked past one of Erlangen’s university bookshops and espied a copy of the Census in their shop window on offer at a ridiculously low price. I returned to the shop when it was open and inquired why it was so cheap. The book seller explained that it had been ordered by a professor on approval and had been damaged and could not be returned. I didn’t hesitate and am as a result a proud owner of this unique volume. I have examined it many times over the years and still haven’t discovered the supposed damage. He also produced a much shorter, but equally useful, survey of the surviving copies of Peter Apian’s AstronomicumCaesareum.
Gingerich also wrote a highly entertaining collection of essays, documenting his adventures whilst researching his Copernicus Census, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (Walker, 2004).
I do not have heroes, but Owen Gingerich was very much one of my go to sources for accurate and in-depth scholarship on the history of astronomy. Imagine my surprise, or better said shock, when he turned up to comment on my humble blog. He didn’t use the blog’s comments column but sent me an email. When I opened up my email account and saw that first email, I nearly fell off my chair. I opened it with trepidation, it was a very warm and friendly email pointing out an error in my most recent blog post. Although they remained few and far between, it was not the only email that I received from him and not always negative. He particularly praised my post on Johannes Petreius (c. 1497–1550), the publisher of Derevolutionibus, saying that he had learned something new from it.
Yesterday the history of astronomy community lost one of its greats and the tributes are pouring in all over the Internet. Gingerich was, with justification, highly respected and, as everyone is reporting a generous and warm gentleman scholar.
[1] Gingerich & Westman, The Wittich Connection, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol 78, Part 7, 1988
I suppose it’s almost inevitable that if one begins to take a deeper interest in the history of science, then at some point one’s attention turns to the history of the book. After all, whether in the form of wedges impressed in clay tablets, symbols carved in stone or wood[1], or various forms of writing on leaves, papyrus, parchment, vellum or paper, books are the medium with which creators of knowledge transmit that knowledge to other. Science based only on oral transmission would develop very slowly and not very far.
My interest began with the cliché that the invention of the printed book was a major factor in the expansion of scientific activity in the Early Modern Period, in Europe that is called the scientific revolution. In this case it’s a cliché that is true. I acquired and read Elizabeth Eisenstein’s excellent, classic The printing press as an agent of change (ppb. CUP, 1980), which is a comprehensive introduction to the early world of the printed book. This was followed by the equally classic The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (Verso, 1976), originally published in French as L’Apparition du livre (Editions Albin Michel, 1958), now somewhat dated by still highly informative.
My interest in book history began to deepen when I began to examine the question, why was Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus published in Nürnberg, leading to the study of all aspects of Renaissance scientific book publishing.
Over the years I have acquired a shelf full of books on the history of the book that includes, Addrian Johns’ The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (University of Chicago Press, 1998), with it’s rejection of some of Eisenstein’s key theories. I followed the ensuing debate between the two in various papers. Also on that shelf, amongst others, are Erik Kwakkel’s excellent Books Before Print (ARC Humanities Press, 2018) on medieval manuscripts, Keith Houston’s delightful, and beautifully presented The Book: A Cover-to-cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Times (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), Andrew Pettegree’s The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010).
Not included in that earlier post is Tom Moles’ The Secret Life of Books (Elliot & Thompson, 2019), which looks at the functions that books fulfil outside of being reading material, and which I sort of reviewed here. As a footnote to the second footnote on that blog post, I did buy Henry Petroski’s TheBook on the Bookshelf (Vintage Books, 1999).
One book on book history that I’m very pleased to have acquired, relatively cheaply, was a second-hand copy of is Margaret Bingham Stillwell’s The Awaking Interest in Science During the First Century of Printing 1450–1550: An annotated Checklist of First Editions viewed from the Angle of their Subject Content – Astronomy • Mathematics • Medicine • Natural Science • Physics • Technology, which is a 430 page mine of information and proved very useful in writing my Renaissance Science series of blog posts.
A fairly recent acquisition is Book Parts edited by Dennis Duncan & Adam Smyth (OUP, 2019), which is what the title says it is, a collection of essays on the individual parts that make up a book – Introductions, Dust Jackets, Frontispieces, Title Pages and eighteen more. It contains a fascinating ten-page essay by Dennis Duncan on the history of indexes. So, it was fairly obvious that when he brought out a whole book on the subject Dennis Duncan Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventurefrom Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age (W. W. Norton, 2022) that I would acquire a copy. The hardback appeared in February, but economic straights caused me to wait until the paperback appeared in Penguin in October, but I can happily report that it was worth the wait.
Readers of my book reviews may have noticed that I always include a brief comment on the index of the book I’m reviewing. In my opinion, for an academic volume a good index is of prime importance. You have borrowed a massive tome out of the library and are only interested in one of the topics that it contains, you turn immediately to the index to find the relevant passages, to save you having to read the whole thing. A good index is a boon and an important research tool, a bad or non-existent index is a nightmare. I have a paperback of one very important history of science biography in which almost none of the pages listed in the index under a given heading match up with the pagination of the text. It frustrates me every time I turn to it. I suspect that the paperback has a different pagination to the hardback, and nobody thought to redo or adjust the index. Recently l borrowed Marshall Claggett, Archimedes in the Middle Ages, Volume Three: The Fate of the MedievalArchimedes 1300 to 1565, Part III The Medieval Archimedes in the Renaissance, 1450–1566 (The American Philosophical Society, 1978) from the library, only to discover when I got it home that it is 1246 pages long and has no table of contents and no index! For my purposes next to useless!
Indexes and tables of contents are important tools in academic books, which enable the reader to find things without having to read the entire texts. We tend to take them for granted and probably implicitly assumes that they are always there, will always be there, and always have been. The last, of course, is nonsense. The first books were not born with a neat table of contents at the front and a comprehensive index at the back, so where and when did they first appear, how do they differ from each other and how did they evolve into their current forms? These are the questions that Duncan’s volume answers and does so both excellently and highly entertainingly.
It is seldom the case that I read an academic book with a smile on my face, whilst doing so, or break out into laughter at irregular intervals in the text. I did with Duncan’s charming tome. He has a wry sense of humour and a love of bad jokes and is not reluctant to use them. These traits are already obvious in the book’s title, whereby Index, A history of the is a classic index entry, which also, rest assured, appears in the book’s index.
Duncan doesn’t start with the index but with alphabets, it’s a trivial fact that without an ordered alphabet, one can’t have an ordered index, but not something that one usually thinks about, so ingrained is our ability to rattle off the alphabet at the drop of a hat, that we give no thought to where and when this ordering comes from.
Having acquired part of the skeleton with which to compile an index we now move onto its birth in the writings of medieval monks or rather its twin parallel births! We also have the birth on the concordance and what differentiates an index from a concordance.
I said before that we had acquired part of the skeleton with which to compile an index, why only part? What’s missing? What is missing is pagination, without the page number an index entry is a lost term in search of a page. Having launched the alphabetical, paginated index on the world stage, our author know takes it on a romp and at time a wild ride through its evolution down to the present, its changing status its pros and cons, and its uses and abuses. Along the way we meet the table of contents and sort out the similarities and differences between it, the index, and the concordance. A stimulating and fascinating journey, which I can only recommend that you embark on. The price of a ticket is Duncan’s wonderful book. The paperback is one of the best €10.77[2]s I have every spent on a book.
Embellished with the now ubiquitous grayscale illustrations, Duncan’s book is, naturally, equipped with a first-class apparatus, an intriguing table of contents, extensive endnotes, and of course probably the best index that a book ever had.
You don’t have to be a book historian, or even interested in book history to enjoy this book. It is a truly delightful read for all those who love reading and who have an open and inquiring mind.
[1] I find it a fascinating etymological fact that the English word book comes from the German Buch, which derives from Buche the German for beech tree as German books were originally written on sheets of beech wood.
[2] Prices will of course vary, depending on where you buy a copy
Whether they were introducing materia medica into the medical curriculum at the universities, going out into the countryside to search for and study plants for themselves, leading students on field trips to do the same, establishing and developing botanical gardens, or creating their herbaria, the Renaissance humanist physicians in the first half of the sixteenth century always had their botanical guides from antiquity to hand. Mostly one or other edition of Dioscorides but also Theophrastus on plants, Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, and Galen’s texts on medical simples. The work of all four of these authors concentrated largely on plants growing around the Mediterranean, although they did include some medical herbs from other areas, India for example. The North Italian, Renaissance, medical humanists also started out studying the Mediterranean plants, but soon their field of study widened, as the changes they had initiated spread throughout Europe led to other medical humanists to search for and study the plants of their own local regions. This expansion became even larger as colleagues began to study and compare the plants growing in the newly discovered land in the so-called age of exploration. Reports began coming into Europe of plants growing in the Americas and Asia. These developments meant that Dioscorides et al were no longer adequate guides for the teaching of medical herbal lore and the age of the Early Modern printed herbal began.
As already noted in an earlier episode of this series Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, which is, of course, a herbal, was well known and widely available throughout the Middle Ages, but it was by no means the only medieval herbal. Herbal medicine was widely used throughout the Middle Ages and many monks, apothecaries, and herbalists, who utilised herbal cures, compiled their own herbals, some of which were copied and distributed amongst others. A few of these herbals were printed during the incunabula period in the second half of the fifteenth century. Many printer publishers in this early period were on the lookout for potential money earning publications and herbals certainly fit the mould.
The earliest of these was the De proprietatibus rerum of the Franciscan friar Bartholomeus Anglicus (before 1203–1272), written in the thirteenth century and printed for the first time about 1470, which went through twenty-five editions before the end of the century. This was an encyclopaedia containing a long section on trees and herbs.
De proprietatibus rerum, Lyon 1482, erste Seite (Eisenbibliothek, Schlatt) via Wikipedia Commons
This was followed by the herbal of Apuleius Platonicus, also known as Pseudo-Apuleius, about whom almost nothing is known, but it is assumed he probably wrote his herbal the Herbarium Apuleii Platonici in the fifth century; the oldest known manuscript dates from the sixth century. It is a derivative text based on Dioscorides and Pliny. It is a much shorter and simpler herbal than Dioscorides, but was immensely popular throughout the Middle Ages, existing in many manuscripts. The first printed edition appeared in Rome in 1481.
Shortly after the Herbarium Apuleii Platonici, three other medieval herbals were printed and published in Mainz in Germany. The Latin Herbarius (1484), and the Herbariuszu Teutsch or German Herbarius (1485), which evolved into the Hortus or Ortus sanitates (1491).
Fruits of Paradise. Hortus sanitatis 1491 Source: Wikimedia Commons
These herbals probably date back to the Early Medieval Period but unlike the Herbarium Apuleii Platonici there is no hard proof for this. All three books went through numerous editions under various titles in various languages. In England the first printed herbal was by Rycharde Banckes in which the title page begins Here begynneth a newe mater, the whiche sheweth and treateth of ye vertues and proprytes of herbes, the which is called an Herball, which appeared in 1525.
It had no illustrations. This was followed by the more successful The grete herbal, printed by Peter Treveris in 1526 and then again in 1529. Many of the illustrations were taken from the French Le GrantHerbier,but which originated in the Herbariuszu Teutsch, continuing an old process of copying illustrations from earlier books, which as we will see continued with the new Renaissance herbals to which we now turn.
Whereas the printed medieval herbals were largely derived from the works of Dioscorides and Pliny, the Renaissance humanist physicians produced new printed herbals based on new material, which they and their colleagues had collected on field trips. However, these new herbals were still based in concept on Dioscorides’ De materia medica, were medical in detail, although they gradually led towards botany as an independent discipline throughout the century.
We begin with four Germans, who are often described as “The Fathers of Botany”. The first of these was Otto Brunfels (possibly 1488–1534), a Carthusian monk, who converted to Lutheran Protestantism and became a pastor.
Otto Brunfels portrait by Hans Baldung Grien Source: Wikimedia Common
He was the nominal author of the Herbarumvivae eicones published in three volumes between 1530 and 1536 and the German version of the same, Contrafayt Kräuterbuch published in two volumes between 1532 and 1537. Both publications were published by Hans Schott in Straßburg and were illustrated by Hans Weiditz the Younger (1495–c. 1537). I said nominal author because it is thought that the initiative for the book was Schott’s centred around Weidnitz’s illustrations with Brunfels basically employed to provide the written descriptions of the plants. Weidnitz’s illustrations, drawn from nature, are excellent and set new standards in the illustration of herbals.
Nymphaea alba, also known as the European White Waterlily, White Lotus, or Nenuphar from “Herbarium Vivae Eicones” Hans Weiditz the Younger Source: Wikimedia Commons
They are, however, not matched by Brunfels’ descriptions, which are very poor quality, simply cobbled together from early descriptions.
The second of the so-called “German Fathers of Botany” was Hieronymus Bock (1498–1554), whose Latin texts were published under the name Hieronymus Tragus (Tragus is the Greek for the German bock, a male goat).
David Kandel (1546) – Kreütter Büch, (1546) a Herbal Source: Wikimedia Commons
Like Brunfels he converted from Catholicism to Lutheran Protestantism. His knowledge of plants was acquired empirically on botanical excursions. His first publication was Deherbarum quarundam nomenclaturis, a tract linking Greek and Latin names to local plants, which, interestingly was published in the second volume of Brunfels’ Herbarumvivae eicones. It was also Brunfels who persuaded him to publish his own herbal. This was titled Neu Kreütterbuch and appeared in 1539. Unlike Brunfels book, Bock’s herbal had no illustration, however, his plant descriptions were excellent, setting new standards. In 1546 there was a second expanded edition with illustration by David Kandel (1520–1592).
Neu Kreütterbuch Steinbrech David Kandel Source: Wikimedia Commons
A third expanded edition was published in 1551 of which a Latin translation, De stirpium, maxime earum, quae in Germania nostra nascuntur …, was published in 1552. All these editions were published by Wendel Rihel in Straßburg, who produced an edition without the text in 1553 and several editions after Bock’s death.
The original German edition without illustrations had less impact that Brunfels’ herbal but after the addition of the illustrations and the Latin edition his work became successful. Bock was very innovative in that instead of listing the plants in his book in alphabetical order, he listed them in groups based on what he perceived as their similarities. An early step towards systematic classification.
The third of the German herbal authors Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566) was the most well-known and successful of the quartet.
Leonhart Fuchs portrait by Heinrich Füllmaurer Source: Wikimedia Commons
He received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Ingolstadt in 1524. After two years of private practice followed by two as professor of medicine in Ingolstadt, he became court physician to George von Brandenburg Margrave of Ansbach. He acquired a very good reputation and was reappointed to the professorship in Ingolstadt in 1533. As a Lutheran, he was prevented from taking up the appointment and became professor for medicine in Tübingen instead in 1535, where he remained until his death despite many offers of other positions. In Tübingen he created the botanical garden. He edited a Greek edition of Galen’s work and translated both Hippocratic and Galenic medical texts. Fuchs became somewhat notorious for his bitter controversies with other medical authors and the sharpness of his invective.
Unlike Brunfels and Bock, whose herbals were based on the own empirical studiers of local German herbs, Fuchs concentrated on identifying the plants described by the classical authors, although when published his herbal included a large number of reports on local plants as well as new plants discovered in the Americas. In 1542 he published his De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes (Notable commentaries on the history of plants) in Latin and Greek, it contained 512 pictures of plants, which are even more spectacular than the illustrations in Brunfels’ Herbarumvivae eicones.
Cannabis plant from ‘De historia stirpivm commentarii insignes … ‘ Source: Wellcome Library, London. via Wikimedia Commons
In a rare innovation he named the Illustrators, Heinrich Füllmaurer and Albrecht Meyer along with the woodcutter Veit Rudolph Speckle including portraits of all three.
Portrait of the three engravers of Fuchs’ ‘de Historia….’ Credit: Wellcome Library, London. via Wikimedia Commons
A German translation New Kreüterbuch was published in 1543. Alone, during Fuch’s lifetime 39 editions of the book appeared in Dutch, French, German, Latin, and Spanish. Twenty years after his death an English edition was published.
Fuchs influence went further than the editions of his own books. The excellent illustrations in his Historia Stirpium were borrowed/pirated reused in a number of later herbals and botanical books:
The majority of the wood-engravings in Doeden’s Crūÿdeboek (1554), Turner’s New Herbal (1551-68), Lyte’s Nievve Herball (1578), Jean Bauhin’s Historia plantarum universalis (1650/1), and Schinz’s Anleitung (1774), are copied from Fuchs, or even printed from his actual wood-blocks, while use was made of his figures in the herbals of Bock, Egenolph, d’Aléchamps, Tabernaemontanus, Gerard, Nylandt, etc., and in the commentaries on Dioscorides of Amatus Lusitanus and Ruellius. It was not the large woodcuts in De Historia Stirpium (1542) which chiefly served for these borrowings, but the smaller versions of the blocjks, made for Fuchs’ octavo herbal of 1545.[1]
If Fuchs is the most well known of the so-called four German “Fathers of Botany”, then Valeriuis Cordus (1515–1544) is the least well known.
Artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
His father was Euricius Cordus (1486–1535), who published his Botanologican, a guide to the empirical study of plants in 1534. Valerius can be said to have gone into the family business, studying medicine and botany under his father at the University of Marburg from the age of twelve in 1527. He graduated bachelor in 1531 and changed to the University of Leipzig, also working in the apothecary shop of his uncle Johannes Ralla (1509–1560), where he learnt pharmacology. In 1539 he changed to the University of Wittenberg, where he once again studied medicine and botany, and lectured on the De materia medica of Dioscorides. In Wittenberg he continued his studies of pharmacology in the apothecary shop of the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1473–1553), where he wrote his Dispensatorium, a pharmacopoeia, a systematic list of medicaments. During a short visit to Nürnberg in 1542, there were strong ties between Wittenberg and Nürnberg, Cordus presented his Dispensatorium to the city council, who awarded him with 100 gulden, paid for it to be printed posthumously in 1546, as the Dispensatorium Norimbergense. It was the first officially government approved pharmacopoeia, Nürnberg being a self-governing city state. It soon became the obligatory standard throughout Germany.
Source: Wellcome Library, London. via Wikimedia Commons
On the last of his many journeys from Wittenberg, Cordus travelled through Italy visiting Padua, Lucca, Florence, and Rome, where he died, aged just twenty-nine in 1544. When he died, he had published almost nothing, his Dispensatorium, as already stated was published posthumously as were two further important books on botany. In 1549, Conrad Gessner published the notes on his Wittenberg lectures on Dioscorides De materia medica, which had collected by his students, as Annotationes in Dioscoridis de materia medica lihros in Straßburg.
Gessner also published his Historiae stirpium libri IV (Straßburg 1561), which was followed in 1563 by his Stirpium descriptionis liber quintus. As with the other German herbals, Cordus’ books were issued in many further editions. Like Brock, Cordus rejected the alphabetic listing of the earlier herbals and in fact went much further down the road of trying to distinguish what we now call species and genus.
Not considered one of the “German Fathers of Botany”, the work of Joachim Camerarius the Younger (1534–1598) was also highly influential.
Joachim Camerarius the Younger Engraving by Bartholomaeus Kilian Source: Wikimedia Commons
Son of the famous philologist and the friend and biographer of Philip Melanchthon, Joachim Camerarius the Elder (1500–1574), he studied at Wittenberg and other universities before completing his doctorate in medicine in Bologna in 1562. Following graduation, Camerarius returned to Nürnberg where he set up as a physician practicing there for the rest of his life. Already a lifelong fan of botany, influenced by his time in North Italy he set up a botanical garden in his home city. He was a central figure in the reforms in the practice of medicine in Nürnberg similar to those I outlined in episode XXXII of this series, of which the publication and adoption of Cordus’ Dispensatorium was an important element.[2] Camerarius was also a central figure in the medical-botanical republic of letters that I will deal with in a later episode. As well as his own herbal Hortus Medicus et Philosophicus (Frankfurt/M., 1598), he published an expanded German translation of the Di Pedacio Dioscoride Anazarbeo Libri cinque Della historia, et materia medicinale tradotti in lingua volgare italiana (1554 and later editions) of Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–c. 1577), as Kreutterbuch deß hochgelehrten unnd weitberühmten Herrn D. Petri Andreae Matthioli : jetzt widerumb mit viel schönen neuwen Figuren, auch nützlichen Artzeneyen, und andern guten Stücken, zum andern mal auß sonderm Fleiß gemehret und verfertigt (Frankfurt, 1586).
J. Camerarius. Mattiolisches Kräuterbuch Cichorium intybus Source: Wikimedia Commons
As with the introduction of the materia medica into the university medical curriculum, the field trips, the botanical gardens, and the herbaria, which all spread out through Europe from Northern Italy, the new style herbals also spread throughout the continent during the sixteenth century.
In the Netherlands, the printer-publisher and bookseller Christophe Plantin (c. 1520–1589), who I dealt with fairly extensively in an earlier post, contributed much to the dissemination of herbals and other plant books. The first notable Flemish author was the physician and botanist Rembert Dodoens (1517–1585), who published a herbal in Dutch, his Cruydeboeck, with an emphasis on the local flora of the Netherlands, with 715 images, 515 borrowed from the Dutch edition of Fuchs’ herbal, and 200 drawn by Pieter van der Borcht the Elder (c. 1530–1608) with the blocks cut by Arnold Nicolai (fl. 1550–1596), published in Antwerp in 1554 and again in 1563.
Rembert Dodoens portrait by Theodor de Bry Source: Wikimedia Commons
Unlike Fuchs, who still listed his herbs alphabetically, Dodoens grouped his herbs according to their properties and reciprocal affinities, making his book as much a pharmacopoeia as a herbal. The Cruydeboeck was translated into French by Charles de l’Ecluse (1526–1609) in 1557, Histoire des Plantes, into English via the l’Ecluse French by Henry Lyte, A new herbal of historie of plants in 1578. Later in 1583, it was translated into Latin Stirpium historiae pemptades sex. Both the French and the Latin translations were commissioned and published by Platin. It is claimed that it was the most translated book after the bible during the late sixteenth century and in its numerous versions it remained a standard text for two hundred years.
Title page of the Crvydt-Boeck (1618 ed.) Source: Wikimedia Commons
Charles de l’Ecluse, better known as Carolus Clusius, was himself a physician and botanist, a student of Guillaume Rondelet (1507–1566) at the University of Montpellier, he became one of the leading medical botanists in Europe.
This portrait is the only known painted portrait of Clusius. It was made in 1585 when Clusius was in Vienna. Attributed to Jacob de Monte Source: Wikipedia Commons
Clusius had two great passions languages and botany. He was said to be fluent in Greek. Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Flemish, and German He was also a polymath deeply knowledgeable in law, philosophy, history, cartography, zoology, minerology, numismatics, and epigraphy. In 1573, he was appointed director of the imperial botanical garden in Vienna by Maximillian II (1564–1576) but dismissed again shortly after Maximillian’s death, when Rudolph II (1576–1612) moved the imperial court to Prague. Later in his life, when he was called to the University of Leiden in 1593, he created the university’s first botanical garden. His first botanical publication was his translation into French of Dodoens’ Cruydeboeck.This was followed by a Latin translation from the Portuguese of Garcia de Orta’s Colóquios dos simples e Drogas da India, Aromatum et simplicium aliquot medicamentorum apud Indios nascentium historia (1567) and a Latin translation from Spanish of Nicolás Monardes’ Historia medicinal delas cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales que sirven al uso de la medicina, , De simplicibus medicamentis ex occidentali India delatis quorum in medicina usus est (1574), with a second edition (1579), both published by Plantin.His own Rariorum alioquot stirpium per Hispanias observatarum historia: libris duobus expressas (1576), based on an expedition to Spain and Portugal followed. Next up Rariorum aliquot stirpium, per Pannoniam, Austriam, & vicinas quasdam provincias observatarum historia, quatuor libris expressa … (1583). All of these were printed and published by Plantin. His Rariorum plantarum historia: quae accesserint, proxima pagina docebit (1601) was published by Plantin’s son-in-law Jan Moretus, who inherited the Antwerp printing house. Appended to this last publication was a Fungorum historia, the very first publication of this kind. In his publications on plants, Clusius definitely crossed the boundary from materia medica into the discipline of botany qua botany.
Title page, Rariorvm plantarvm historia Source: Wikimedia CommonsChestnuts Source: Wikimedia Commons
The third Platin author, who made major contributions to the herbal literature was another of Guillaume Rondelet’s students from Montpellier, Mathias de l’Obel (1538–1616), a Frenchman from Lille also known as Lobilus.
Matthias de l’Obel by Francis Delaram, print, 1615 Source: Wikimedia Commons
His Stirpium aduersaria noua… (A new notebook of plants) was originally published in London in 1571, but a much-extended edition, Plantarum seu stirpiumhistoria…, with 1, 486 engravings in two volumes was printed and published by Plantin in 1576.
Plantarum, seu, Stirpium historia /Matthiae de l’Obel page 111 Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1581 Plantin also published a Dutch translation of his herbal, Kruydtboek oft beschrÿuinghe van allerleye ghewassen… There is also an anonymous Stirpium seu Plantarum Icones (images of plants) published by Plantin in 1581, with a second edition in 1591, that has been attributed to Loblius but is now thought to have been together by Plantin himself from his extensive stock of plant engravings. Like others already mentioned, de l’Obel abandoned the traditional listing of the plants alphabetically and introduced a system of classification based on the character of their leaves.
The major Italian contributor to the new herbal movement in Europe was Pietro Andrea Gregorio Mattioli (1501–c. 1577),
Pietro Andrea Mattioli portrait by Moretto da Brescia Source: Wikimedia Commons
who, as already mentioned in the episode on the publication of the classical texts as printed books, produced a heavily annotated Italian translation version of Dioscorides’ De materia medica, which included descriptions of one hundred new plants, Commentarii in libros sex Pedacii Dioscoridis Anazarbei, de medica materia, which went through four editions between 1544 and 1550, published by Vincenzo Valgrisi (c. 1490– after 1572) in Venice, and selling thirty-two thousand copies by 1572.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Mattioli’s annotations, or commentaries, were translated into translated into French (Lyon, 1561), Czech (Prague, 1562) and German (Prague, 1563).
Another Italian botanist was Fabio Colonna (1567–1640)
Fabio Colonna artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
who disappointed by the errors that he found in Dioscorides researched and wrote two herbals of his own Phytobasanos (plant touchstone), published in Naples, 1592 and Ekphrasis altera, published in Rome, 1616. Both books display a high standard in the illustrations and in the descriptions of the plants.
Fabio Colonna, Phytobasanos Sive Plantarum Aliquot Historia Source
The main Portuguese contribution was the Coloquios dos simples, e drogas he cousasmediçinaisda India by Garcia de Orta (1501–1568) published in Goa in 1563, one of the earliest European books printed in India, which as we have seen was translated into Latin by Clusius.
Statue of Garcia de Orta by Martins Correia at the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Lisbon Source: Wikimedia CommonsTitle page of Colóquio dos Simples de Garcia de Orta. Goa, 1563. Source: Wikimedia Commons
It was the Portuguese, who brought the herbs of Asia into the European herbals in the sixteenth century, those of the newly discovered Americas were brought into Europe by the Spanish, most notably by Nicolás Monrades (1493–1588).
Nicolás Monrades Source: Wikimedia Commons
Monrades learnt about the American herbs and drugs not by visiting the Americas but by collecting information at the docks in Seville. He published the results initially in three separate parts the first two parts in 1569 and 1571 and in complete form in 1574 under the title Primera y Segunda y Tercera partes de la Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales que sirven en Medicina.
Nicolas Monardes, Dos libros, 1565, title page Source: Wikimedia Commons
This is the book that once again Clusius translated into Latin. It was also translated into English by John Frampton, a merchant, who specialised in books on various aspects of exploration, and published under the titles The Three Books of Monardes, 1577, and Joyfull newes out of the new founde worlde, 1580.
Nicolas Monardes, John Frampton translation Joyfull newes out of the new-found world (1596), University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives, SPEC Fraser 567.Source
The most significant herbal produced in Switzerland didn’t become published in the sixteenth century. This was the general history of plants, Historia plantarum compiled by the polymath Conrad Gessner (1516–1565), which was still unfinished when he died.
Conrad Gesner by Tobias Stimme Source: Wikimedia Commons
It was partially published in 1750, with the first full publication being by the Swizz Government at the end of the nineteenth century. The quality of the drawings and the descriptions of the plants would have set new standards in botany if Gessner had published it during his lifetime. A student of Gessner’s, who also went on to study under Fuchs was Jean Bauhin (1541–1613).
Jean Bauhin Source: Wikimedia Commons
As a young man he became an assistant to Gessner and worked with him collecting material for his Historia plantarum. Later he decided to compile his own Historia plantarum universalis. Like his teacher he died before he could complete and publish his work. It was first published in full in three volumes in 1650/1.
Historia plantarum universalis, 1650 Source: Wikimedia Commons
Jeans younger brother Garpard (1560–1624) also set out to produce a complete catalogue of all known plants, but like Jean he never lived to see it published.
Gaspard Bauhin Source: Wikimedia Commons
In fact, unlike Jean’s Historia plantarum universalis, it was not even published posthumously. He did, however, publish sections of it during his life: Phytopinax (1596), Prodromos theatre botanici (1620,) and Pinax theatre botanici (1623). The Pinax contains a complete and methodological concordance of the names of plants, sorting out the confusing tangle of different names awarded by different authors to the same plant.
Caspar Bauhin (1623), Pinax Theatri Botanici, page 291. On this page, a number of Tithymalus species (now Euphorbia) is listed, described and provided with synonyms and references. Bauhin already used binomial names but did not consistently give all species throughout the work binomials. Source: Wikimedia Commons
This was a major step in the development of scientific botany. The work of all three Swiss authors transcends the bounds of the herbal into the science of botany.
The only notable French botanical author of the sixteenth century was Jean Ruel (1474–1537), who produced a Latin translation of Dioscorides in 1516, which served as the basis for Mattioli’s Commentarrii. He also wrote a general botanical treatise on Aristotelian lines, De Natura stirpium, published in 1536.
De natura stirpium Basel 1537. Title page Source: wikimedia Commons
One should, however, remember that the students of Guillaume Rondelet in Montpellier form a veritable who’s who of botanical authors in the sixteenth century.
Turning finally to England the earliest herbal author was William Turner (c. 1509–1568), who during his wanderings through Europe had studied botany at the University of Bologna under Luca Ghini (1490–1556), who, as we saw in the previous episode, had a massive influence on the early development of medical botany in the early sixteenth century. Turner also knew and corresponded with Conrad Gessner and Leonhart Fuchs. Turner’s first work was his Latin, Libellus de re herbari novus (1538). In 1548, he produced his The names of herbes in Greke, Latin, Englishe, Duche, and Frenche with the common names that Herberies and Apotecaries use. His magnum opus was his A new herball, wherin are conteyned the names of herbes… published in three volumes, the first in London 1551, the first and second on Cologne in 1562, and the third together with the first and second in 1568.
llustration of Mandrake plant from William Turner’s Herbal,
It was illustrated with the pictures from Fuchs’ De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes. Henry Lyte (1529?–1607),
Henry Lyte Source: Wikimedia Commons
an antiquary, published an English translation of Dodoens Cruydeboeck, A nievve Herball, or Historie of Plantes,…, from the French of Clusius in 1578. This included new material provided by Dodoens himself. Once again the illustration were taken largely from Fuchs.
A page on gillofers (gillyflowers, that is, carnations and pinks), from A niewe Herball by Henry Lyte, 1578. Source: Wikimedia Commons
John Gerrard produced the most successful English herbal, his The Herball or GenerallHistorie of Plantes(1597), which was however, a plagiarism.
John Gerard Frontispiece of 1636 edition of Herball Source: Wikimedia Commons
A Dr Priest had been commissioned by the publisher John North to translate Dodoen’s Stirpium historiae pemptades sex into English, but he died before completing it. Gerrard took the work, completed it, and rearranged the plants according to the scheme of de l’Obel from that of Dodoens, and then published it as his own work.
Gerrard Herball 1579Virginia Potato
As I hope is clear from the above herbals were an important genre of books in the sixteenth century, which over time gradually evolved from books of a medical nature into the earliest works in the science of botany.
[1] Agnes Arber, Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany 1470–1670, CUP; 1912, republished Hafner Publishing Company, Darien Conn., 1970, p. 70
[2] This is wonderfully described in Hannah Murphy, A New Order of Medicine: The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2019, which I reviewed here
One of the products of the Republic of Letters during the Humanist Renaissance was the beginning or the foundation of the modern European library. Naturally they didn’t invent libraries; the concept of the library goes back quite a long way into antiquity. To a great extent, libraries are a natural consequence of the invention of writing. When you have writing, then you have written documents. If you preserve those written documents then at some point you have a collection of written documents and when that collection becomes big enough, then you start to think about storage, sorting, classification, listing, cataloguing and you have created an archive or a library. I’m not going try and sort out the difference between an archive and a library and will from now on only use the term library, meaning a collection of books, without answering the question, what constitutes a book?
The oldest know libraries are the collections of clay tablets found in the temples of Sumer, some of which date back to the middle of the third millennium BCE. There were probably parallel developments in ancient Egypt but as papyrus doesn’t survive as well as clay tablets there is less surviving evidence for early Egyptian libraries. There is evidence of a library in the Sumerian city of Nippur around two thousand BCE and a library with a classification system in the Assyrian city of Nineveh around seven hundred BCE. The Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh contained more than thirty thousand clay tablets containing literary, religious, administrative, and scientific works. Other ancient cultures such as China and India also developed early libraries.
Library of Ashurbanipal Mesopotamia 1500-539 BC Gallery, British Museum, Source: Wikimedia Commons
Artistic rendering of the Library of Alexandria, based on some archaeological evidence Source: Wikimedia Commons
With the gradual decline of the Western Roman Empire, libraries disappeared out of Europe but continued to thrive in the Eastern Empire, the future Byzantium. The Islamic Empire became the major inheritor of the early written records of ancient Greece, Egypt, Persia, and Rome creating in turn their own libraries throughout their territories. These libraries became to source of the twelfth century translation movement, also known as the scientific renaissance, when those books first began to re-enter medieval Europe.
The manuscript collections of the medieval libraries were very small in comparison to the great Greek libraries such as Alexandria and Pergamum or the many public libraries of Rome, numbering in the best cases in the hundreds but often only in the tens. However, the guardians of these precious written documents did everything in their power to keep the books safe and in good condition and also endeavouring to acquire new manuscripts by copying those from other monastery libraries, often undertaking very arduous journeys to do so.
Chained library in Hereford Cathedral Most of the books in the collection date to about 1100. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Things began to improve in the twelfth century with the scientific renaissance and the translation movement, which coincided with the founding of the European universities. The number of works available in manuscript increased substantially but they still had to be copied time and again to gradually spread throughout Europe. Like the monasteries the universities also began to collect books and to establish libraries but if we look at the figures for Cambridge University founded in 1209. The university library has its roots in the beginning of the fifteenth century, there would have been earlier individual college libraries earlier. The earliest surviving catalogue from c. 1424 list 122 volumes in the library. By 1473 a second catalogue lists 330 volumes. It is first in the sixteenth century that things really take off and the library begins to grow substantially. The equally famous Oxford University Bodleian Library was first founded in 1600 by the humanist scholar Thomas Bodley in 1600, replacing the earlier university library from 1444, which had been stripped and dissipated during the Reformation.
Thomas Bodley Artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
We have of course now reached the Humanist Renaissance and it is here that the roots of the modern library were laid. The Humanist Renaissance was all about written texts. The humanists read texts, analysed the content of texts, annotated texts, translated texts, and applied philological analysis to texts to correct and/or eliminate errors introduced into texts by repeated copying and translations. The text was everything for the humanists, so they began to accumulate collections of manuscripts. Both humanist scholars and the various potentates, who sponsored the humanist movement began to create libraries, as new spaces of learning.
The Malatestiana Library was founded by Malatesta Novello of Cesena (1418–1485) in 1454.
Malatestiana Library of Cesena, the first European civic library Source: Wikimedia Commons
The foundations of the Laurentian Library in Florence were laid by Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464), as one of a sequence of libraries that he funded.
Reading room of the Laurentian Library Source: Wikimedia Commons
Pope Nicholas V (1397–1455) brought the papal Greek and Latin collections together in separate libraries in Rome and they were then housed by Pope Sixtus IV (1414–1484), who appointed the humanist Bartolomeo Platina (1421–1481) librarian of the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana.
Sixtus IV appointing Bartolomeo Platina librarian of the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana. From left Giovanni della Rovere, Girolamo Riario, Bartolomeo Platina, later Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere), Raffaele Riario, Pope Sixtus IV Source: Wikimedia Commons
This was followed by the establishment of many private libraries both in Rome and in other Italian cities. As with other aspects of the Humanist Renaissance this movement spread outside of Italy to other European Countries. For example, the Bibliotheca Palatina was founded by Elector Ludwig III (1378–1436) in Heidelberg in the 1430s.
Elector Ludwig III. Contemporary image on the choir ceiling of the Stiftskirche (Neustadt an der Weinstraße). Source: Wikimedia Commons
These new humanist libraries were not just book depositories but as stated above new spaces for learning. The groups of humanist scholars would meet regularly in the new libraries to discuss, debate or dispute over new texts, new translations, or new philological corrections to old, corrupted manuscripts.
The (re)invention of movable type printing in about 1450 meant that libraries began to collect printed books as well as manuscripts. The first printer publishers in Italy concentrated on publishing the newly translated texts of the humanists even creating a new type face, Antiqua, which imitated the handwriting that had been developed and propagated by the first generations of humanist scholars.
The spread of libraries during the Renaissance is a vast subject, too much to deal with in a blog post, but one can get a perspective on this development by looking at a sketch of the career of Johannes Müller (1436–1476) aka Regiomontanus or as he was known during his live time, Johannes de Monte Regio.
Smithsonian “Print Artist: Braeht” (whereby the signature appears to be rather Brühl sculps[it] possibly Johann Benjamin Brühl (1691-1763) ) – Smithsonian Institution Libraries Digital Collection Source: Wikimedia Commons
Regiomontanus is, today, best known as the most significant European mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer of the fifteenth century, so it comes as something of a surprise to discover that he spent a substantial part of his life working as a librarian for various humanist book collectors.
Regiomontanus graduated MA at the University of Vienna on his twenty-first birthday in 1457. He had actually completed the degree requirements much earlier, but university regulations required MA graduates to be at least twenty-one years old. He then joined his teacher Georg von Peuerbach as a teacher at the university, lecturing on optics amongst other things. Both Regiomontanus and Peuerbach were convinced humanists. In 1460 Basilios Bessarion (1403–1472) came to Vienna.
Basilios Bessarion Justus van Gent and Pedro Berruguete Source: Wikimedia Commons
Bessarion was an avid book collector and Regiomontanus’ job in his personal entourage was to seek out and make copies of new manuscripts for Bessarion’s collection. A task that he fulfilled with esprit. Bessarion had in the meantime also taught him Greek. In 1468, Bessarion presented his personal library to the Senate of Venice in 1468 and the 482 Greek manuscripts and 264 Latin manuscripts today still form the core of the St. Mark’s Biblioteca Marciana.
Cardinal Bessarion’s letter to Doge Cristoforo Moro and the Senate of Venice, announcing the donation of his library. BNM Lat. XIV, 14 (= 4235), fol. 1r. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Regiomontanus left Bessarion’s entourage around 1465 and reappears in 1467 at the court of János Vitéz Archbishop of Esztergom (German, Gran) in Hungary.
János Vitéz frontispiece of a manuscript Source: Wikimedia Commons
Vitéz, an old friend of Peuerbach, was a humanist scholar and an avid book collector. Although Regiomontanus served as court astrologer, his Tabulae Directionum, one of the most important Renaissance astrological texts was produced at Vitéz’s request, his main function at Vitéz’s court was as court librarian. From Esztergom he moved to the court of the Hungarian King, Matthias Corvinus (1443–1490), who had been educated by Vitéz.
Matthias Corvinus of Hungary portrait by Andrea Mantegna Source: Wikimedia Commons
Like his teacher, Corvinus was a humanist scholar and a major book collector. Once more, Regiomontanus served as a court librarian. The Bibliotheca Corviniana had become one of the largest libraries in Europe, second only to the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, when Corvinus died. Unfortunately, following his death, his library was dissipated.
Long before Corvinus’ death, Regiomontanus had left Hungary for Nürnberg, with Corvinus’ blessing and a royal pension, to set up a programme to reform astronomy in order to improve astrological divination. During his travels, Regiomontanus had not only made copies of manuscripts for his patrons, but also for himself, so he arrived in Nürnberg with a large collection of manuscript in 1471. His aim was to set up a printing house and publish philologically corrected editions of a long list of Greek and Latin mathematical, astronomical, and astrological texts, which he advertised in a publisher’s list that he printed and published. Unfortunately, he died in 1476 having only published nine texts including his publishers list and to the shame of the city council of Nürnberg, his large manuscript collection was not housed in a library but dissipated.
To close a last example of a lost and dissipated Renaissance library. The English mathematicus John Dee (1527–1609) hoped to establish a national library, but he failed to get the sponsorship he wished for.
John Dee artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
Instead, he collected books and manuscripts in his own house in Mortlake, acquiring the largest library in England and one of the largest in Europe. In the humanist tradition, this became a research centre, with other scholars coming to Mortlake to consult the books and to discuss their research with Dee and other visitors. However, when Dee left England for the continent, in the 1580s with Edward Kelly, to try and find sponsors for his occult activities, his house was broken into, and his library pillaged and sold off.
Despite the loss of some of the largest Renaissance book collections and libraries, the period saw the establishment of the library both public and private, as a centre for collecting books and a space for learning from them.
The publication of Vesalius’ De fabrica certainly marks a major change in the study and teaching of anatomy at the medieval university, but, as I hope is clear, that change did not come out of thin air but was the result of a couple of centuries of gradual developments in the discipline. It also didn’t trigger an instant revolution in the discipline throughout the university system but spread slowly, as is almost always the case with major innovations in a branch of knowledge. In the case of Vesalius’ anatomy, it was not just the normal inertia inherent in theory change, but also a long-prolonged opposition by neo-Galenists.
The beginnings of the acceptance of Vesalius anatomy took place, naturally, in his own university of Padua and other North Italian universities resulting in a dynasty of excellent professors at those universities, leading to a major influx of eager students from all over Europe.
Following Vesalius, the first of the significant Paduan anatomists was Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1562). Born in Modena, the son of an impoverished noble family. Lacking money, he joined the clergy, was appointed a canon of Modena Cathedral, and received an education in medicine at the University of Ferrara, graduating in 1548. In the same year he was appointed professor for anatomy at the university. In 1549 he was appointed professor for anatomy at the University of Pisa and in 1551 he received the same position at the University of Padua. Although, most well know today for his study of the reproductive organs leading to the naming of the Fallopian tubes after him, he made major contributions to our knowledge of bones and muscles. His major area of research was, however, the anatomy of the head where he systematically expanded our knowledge.
Portrait of Gabriele Falloppio artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
Earlier that Falloppio was Matteo Realdo Colombo (c. 1515 – 1559), who was a colleague of Vesalius at Padua. The son of apothecary born in Cremona he initially apprenticed to his father but then became apprentice to the surgeon Giovanni Antonio Lonigo for seven years. In 1538 he enrolled as a medical student at Padua, where he quickly acquired a reputation for the study of anatomy. He became friends with Vesalius and was appointed to teach his courses while Vesalius was in Basel overseeing the publication of De fabrica. Vesalius attributes many of the discoveries in De fabrica to Colombo. Their relationship declined, when Colombo pointed out errors in Vesalius’ work, leading to them becoming rivals.
Matteo Realdo Colombo artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
Colombo left Padua in 1544 and went to the University of Pisa and from 1548 he worked at the papal university teaching anatomy until his death in 1459. Colombo was also involved in priority disputes with Falloppio. His only published text, De re anotomica issued posthumously in 1559 contains many discoveries also claimed by Falloppio, most notably the discovery of the clitoris and its sexual function.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Colombo made many contributions to the study of anatomy, perhaps his most important discovery was the rediscovery of the so-called pulmonary circulation, previously discovered by Ibn al-Nafis (1213–1288) and Michael Servetus (c. 1511–1553).
Bartolomeo Eustachi (c. 1510–1574), a contemporary of Vesalius, who belonged to the competition, was a dedicated supporter of Galen working at the Sapienza University of Rome.
Bartolomeo Eustachi artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
However, he made many important anatomical discoveries. He collated his work in his Tabulae anatomicae in 1552, but unfortunately this work was first published in 1714.
Julius Caesar Aranzi (1529/30–1589) was born in Bologna and studied surgery under his uncle Bartolomeo Maggi (1477–1552), who lectured on surgery at the University of Bologna.
Portrait of Julius Caesar Arantius (Giulio Cesare Aranzi, 1530–1589). From the Collection Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna, Italy. Source.
He studied medicine at Padua, where he made his first anatomical discovery at the age of nineteen in 1548. He finished his studies at the University of Bologna graduating in 1556. At the age of twenty-seven he was appointed lecturer for surgery at the university. Like the others he made numerous small contributions to our understanding of human anatomy, of particular importance was his study of foetuses. However, his major contribution was in the status of anatomy as a discipline. As professor for anatomy and surgery in Bologna starting in 1556, he established anatomy as a major discipline in its own right.
A very central figure in the elevation of anatomy as a discipline at the medieval university was Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente (1533–1619). Fabrici studied medicine in Padua under Falloppio graduating in 1559. He went into private practice in Padua and was very successful, numbering many rich and powerful figures amongst his patients. From 1562 till 1565 he also lectured at the university on anatomy. In 1565 he succeeded Falloppi as professor for anatomy and surgery at the university, a post he retained until 1613. As an anatomist he is considered one of the founders of modern embryology and as also renowned for discovering the valves that prevent blood following backwards in the veins, an important step towards the correct description of blood circulation.
Girolamo Fabrizi d’Acquapendente artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
Girolamo Fabrici is also renowned for several of the students, who studied under him in Padua. Giulio Cesare Casseri (1552 – 8 March 1616) not only studied under Fabrici but was also employed as his servant.
Giulio Cesare Casseri artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
The two of them later had a major falling out, but Casseri still succeeded Fabrici as professor in Padua. His biggest contribution was his Tabulae anatomicae, containing 97 copperplate engravings, published posthumously in in Venice 1627, which became one of the most important anatomical texts in the seventeenth century.
Casseri was succeeded as professor in Padua by another of Fabrici’s students the Netherlander, Adriaan van den Spiegel (1578–1625).
Adriaan van den Spiegel artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
Van den Spiegel was born in Brussels but studied initially in Leuven and Leiden, in 1601 he transferred to Padua, where he graduated in 1604. His main text, his De humani corporis fabrica libri decem, which he saw as an updated version of Vesalius’ book of the same title, was also published in Venice in 1627.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
For English readers Girolamo Fabrici’s most well-known student was William Harvey (1578–1657). Born the eldest of nine children to the jurist Thomas Harvey and his wife Joan Halke.
William Harvey, after a painting by Cornelius Jansen Source: Wikimedia Commons
He was educated at King’s School Canterbury and matriculated at Gonville & Caius College Cambridge in 1593. He graduated BA in 1597 and then set off on travels through mainland Europe. He travelled through France and Germany and matriculated as a medical student at Padua in 1599. During his time in Padua, he developed a close relationship with Fabrici graduating in 1602. Upon graduation he returned to England and having obtained a medical degree from Cambridge University, he became a fellow of Gonville & Caius. The start of a very successful career. His major contribution was, of course, his Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Living Beings), the first correct account of the blood circulation and the function of the heart published in Frankfurt in 1628.
He also published an important work on the development of chicken embryos in the egg, Exercitationes de generatione animalium (On Animal Generation) published in 1651.
L0010265 W. Harvey, Exercitationes de generatione animalium Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
It could be argued that Girolamo Fabrici’s most important contribution to the history of anatomy was the erection of the university’s anatomical theatre. We saw in the last episode that the universities had been erecting temporary wooden dissecting spaces in winter for a couple of centuries, as described by Alessandro Benedetti (1450?–1512) in his Anatomice: sive, de historia corporis humani libri quique (Anatomy: or, Five Books on the History of the Human Body) in 1502:
A temporary theatre should be built at a large and well-ventilated place, with seats arranged in a circle, as in the Colosseum in Rome and the Area in Verona, sufficiently large to accommodate a great number of spectators in such a manner that the teacher would not be inconvenienced by the crowd… The corpse has to be put on a table in the centre of the theatre in an elevated and clear place easily accessible to the dissector.
During the second half of the sixteenth century several institutions began to assign a permanent room for such spaces, the University of Montpellier in 1556, the Company of Barber Surgeons in London in 1557 and so on. Girolamo Fabrici raised the stakes by having the first ever purpose-built anatomical theatre designed and built in Padua in 1594. The project was the work of the Venetian polymath Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623) and the artist-architect Dario Varotari (c. 1539–1596). A closed elliptical shape with tiers of standing spaces for the observers rising steeply up the sides, giving a clear view of the dissecting table in the centre.
Anatomical Theatre Padua design Source: Wikimedia CommonsAnatomical Theatre Padua as it is today Source: Wikimedia Commons
In Northern Italy the first to follow suit was the University of Bologna, which one year later opened its Anatomical Theatre of the Archiginnasio now situated in the Archiginnasio Palace the main building of the university.
A general view of the Anatomical theatre reconstructed after WWI when it was destroyed by bombing. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Originally situated elsewhere, it was rebuilt in its current setting between 1636 and 1638. The Bolognese rejected the Paduan Ellipse for a rectangular room claiming it to be superior.
Of greatest interest however was the Theatrum Anatomicum built far away from Northern Italy in 1596 in the still young university of Leiden. The University of Leiden was established in 1575, in the early phases of the Eighty Years’ War, as the first university of the newly founded United Provinces.
The Academy building of Leiden University in 1614. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Leuven, the original alma mater of Vesalius, was located in the remaining Spanish Netherlands. Home to both Rudolph Snel (1546–1613) and his son Willebrord (1580–1626) as well as Simon Stevin (1548–1629), who founded its school of engineering, the university was strong on the sciences for its early days. However, it was its school of medicine that would become most influential in the seventeenth century, and this school of medicine had deep connections to Padua and Girolamo Fabrici.
The connections start with Johannes Heurnius (Jan van Heurne) (1543–1601), born in Utrecht, he initially studied in Leuven and Paris before going to Padua to study under Fabrici, where he graduated MD in 1566. Returning to the Netherlands he became a town physician in Utrecht before being appointed professor of medicine at the new University of Leiden in 1581. He introduced anatomy in the tradition of Vesalius into the still young Dutch university, as well as the Paduan emphasis on anatomical demonstrations and practical clinical work.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The anatomical theatre was introduced by Pieter Pauw (1564–1617), born in Amsterdam the son of the politician Pieter Pauw and his wife Geertruide Spiegel, he studied medicine at the University of Leiden, under Johannes Heurnius and Gerard Bontius (c. 1537–1599), another Padua graduate, graduating in 1584.
Pieter Pauw Source: Wikimedia Commons
He continued his studies in Rostock graduating MD in 1587. From here, he moved to Padua to study under Fabrici. Forced by his father’s illness he returned to Leiden in 1589, he was appointed assistant to Bontius, taking over responsibility for the medical botany. In 1592 he was appointed professor for anatomy and in 1596 he erected the permanent anatomical theatre in the same year.
Leiden anatomical theatre in 1610. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Otto Heurnius (otto van Heurne) (1577–1652) was the son of Johannes Heurnius and studied medicine under his father and Pieter Pauw in Leiden. He graduated MD in 1601 and was appointed assistant to his father, whom he succeeded a year later as professor, not without criticism. In 1617 he then succeeded Pieter Pauw as professor for anatomy.
Otto Heurnius Source: Wikimedia Commons
Otto’s most famous student was Franciscus Sylvius (Franz de le Boë) (1614–1672). Born into an affluent family in Hanau he studied medicine at the Protestant Academy of Sedan then from 1632 to 1634 in Leiden, where he studied under Otto Heurius and Adolphus Vorstius (Adolphe Vorst) (1597–1663), who had also studied at Padua under Adriaan van den Spiegel, graduating MD in 1622. Vorstius was appointed an assistant in Leiden in 1624 and full professor in 1625. Sylvius continued his studies in Jena and Wittenberg, graduating MD in Basel in 1637. He initial practice medicine in Hanau but returned to Leiden to lecture in 1639. From 1641 he had a successful private practice in Amsterdam. In 1658 he was appointed professor for medicine at Leiden, with twice the normal salary.
Franciscus Sylvius and his wife by Frans van Mieris, Sr. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Under Sylvius it became obvious, what had been true for some time, that Leiden had, in the place of Padua, become the leading European medical school, particularly in terms of anatomy. By the middle of the seventeenth century the change that Vesalius had introduced into the study and teaching of anatomy at the medieval university had been completed. Previously a minor aspect of the medical education, anatomy had now become a prominent and central discipline in that course of studies. Sylvius produced a stream of first-class graduates, who would go on to dominate the life sciences in the next decades that included Reinier de Graaf (1641–1673), who made important contributions to the understanding of reproduction,
Reinier de Graaf Source: Wikimedia Commons
Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680), an early microscopist, who made important studies of insects,
Jan Swammerdam Reproductive organs of the bee drawn with a microscope Credit: Wellcome Library, London. There is no known portrait of Swammerdam
Nicolas Steno (1638–1686), who made important contribution to anatomy and geology,
Portrait of Nicolas Steno (1666–1677). Unsigned but attributed to court painter Justus Sustermans. (Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy) Source: Wikimedia Commons
and Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731), an anatomist best know for his techniques for conserving anatomical specimens.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Frederick Ruysch by Jan van Neck (1683). Amsterdam Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Sylvius was also one of those, who introduced chemistry into the study of medicine, which we will look at in the next episode.
For a detailed study of the work on reproduction of Harvey and many of the Leiden anatomist, I recommend Matthew Cobb’s The Egg & Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth, The Free Press, London, 2006
One area of knowledge that changed substantially during the Renaissance was the study of medicine and the branch of medicine that probably changed the most was anatomy. This change has produced two notable myths that need to be quickly dealt with before we tackle the real history.
The myths concern Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), the two most well-known anatomical practitioners of the period. According to the first myth that applies to both of them, although most often associated with Leonardo, is that they had to carry out their anatomical studies of the human body secretly, because dissection was forbidden by the Church. The second applies to Vesalius and is the oft repeated claim, in one form or another, that he singlehandedly launched a revolution in the study of anatomy out of the blue. I will deal with the Leonardo did it all in secret myth first and the Vesalius myth in due course.
To start with there was no Church ban on dissections. Like most apprentice artists in the Renaissance, Leonardo began his study of human anatomy during his apprenticeship. His master, Andrea del Verrochio (1435–1488), insisted that his apprentices gain a thorough grounding in anatomy.
Half-length portrait of Andrea del Verrocchio, Italian painter and sculptor, engraved on a copperplate by Nicolas de Larmessin and printed in a book “Académie des Sciences et des Arts” written by Isaac Bullart and published in Amsterdam by Elzevier in 1682.
Leonardo would probably have attended the public dissections carried out in winter at the local university. Leonardo being Leonardo took a greater interest in the topic than that required by an artist, and he was granted permission to carry out dissections in the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence.
Old facade of the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florencebefore the completion of the porch (painting by Fabio Borbottoni, 1820-1902)
Later he carried out dissections in hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511, he collaborated with Marcantonio della Torre (1481–1511) lecturer on anatomy at the universities of Pavia and Padua.
There is evidence that they intended to publish a book together, but the endeavour was torpedoed by della Torre’s death in 1511. Leonardo never published his extensive collection of anatomical drawings, and although there is some evidence that they were viewed by other Renaissance artists, they only became generally known in the nineteenth century and had no real influence on the development of medicine.
Leonardo Anatomical study of the arm (c. 1510) Source: Wikimedia Commons
I said above that Leonardo might well have attended public dissections at the local university, this was a well-established practice by the time Leonardo was learning anatomy. The most prominent anatomist in antiquity was Galen of Pergamon (129–c. 216 CE), whose work, however, suffered from the problem that it was largely based on the dissection of animals rather than humans. His medical text had arrived in medieval Europe via the Arabic world in the twelfth century, but his major anatomy texts were somehow not translated at this time. In the early period of the medieval university anatomy was taught from authoritative texts rather than from dissection. This changed in the fourteenth century with the work of Mondino de Luzzi (c. 1270–1326), professor in Bologna, who carried out the first public dissection on a human corpse in 1315. He was possibly inspired by animal dissections carried out in Salerno in the previous century. He published the results of his anatomical work, Anthomia corporis humani in 1316. This became a standard textbook.
Titelpage ofAnathomia Mundini Emèdata p doctoré melerstat (“Anatomy of Mundinus. Published byDoktor Mellrichstadt”, 1493. Source: Erlangen University Library via Wikimedia Commons
It soon became obligatory for all medical students to attend at least one or sometimes two public dissections during their studies. These dissections were always conducted in winter, to keep the corpse fresher longer, usually in a specially constructed, temporary wooden building in the grounds of the university. By 1400 regular anatomical dissections were an established part of the curriculum in most medical schools. The corpse was dissected on a table in the middle of the room, usually by a barber-surgeon, surrounded by the students and other observers, whilst the professor on a raised lecture platform read the prescribed text (see image above), usually Mondino, sometimes supplemented by Galen’s De Juvamentis. This although Niccoò da Reggio (1280-?) had produced the first full Latin translation of Galen’s anatomical text On the Use of the Parts in 1322. The first printed edition of Anthomia corporis humani appeared in 1476 and more than 40 editions had appeared altogether by the end of the sixteenth century. A tradition of published commentaries on Modino also became established by the professors who lectured on anatomy.
In the early years of the sixteenth century the Humanist Renaissance made its appearance in the study of anatomy with new translations of Galen directly from the Greek and a growing disdain for the earlier translations from Arabic. In 1528 a series of four handy texts in pocket size was published for students including Galen’s On the Use of Parts, in the da Reggio translation, a new translation of On the Motion of Muscles, and the translation by Thomas Linacre (c. 1460–1524) of On the Natural Faculties from 1523. Paris had now risen to be a major centre for the study of medicine and the professor for anatomy, Johannes Winter von Andernach (1505–1574) produced the first Latin translation of Galen’s newly discovered and most important De Anatomicis Administrationibus (On Anatomical Procedures) 9 vols. Paris in 1531.
Bibliotheca chalcographica, hoc est Virtute et eruditione clarorum Virorum Imagines, Jean-Jacques Boissard (1528-1602), Teodoro de Bry (1528-1598)SOurce: Wikimedia Commons
Equally important was his own textbook, Anatomicarum institutionum, secundum Galeni sententiam (Anatomical Institutions according to the opinions of Galen) 4 vols, Paris and Basel, 1536; Venice, 1538; Padua, 1558.
Earlier than this Berengario da Capri (c. 1460–c. 1530) was the first to include anatomical illustrations into his work, a commentary on Mondino published in 1521 and his Isagogae breves in anatomiam humani corporis (A Short but very Clear and Fruitful Introduction to the Anatomy of the Human Body, Published by Request of his Students) a year later. From the 1520s onwards there was an increasing stream of anatomy books entering the market.
Berengario da Capri Isagogae breves in anatomiam humani corporis 1523Anatomical plate by Jacopo Berengario da Carpi depicting a pregnant woman with opened uterus Source: Wikimedia Commons
It should by now be clear that when Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) appeared on the scene that both anatomy and dissection were well establish areas of study in the European schools of medicine, albeit the oft highly inaccurate anatomy of Galen. Of interest here is that when dissectors discovered things in their work that contradicted the contents of Galen’s work, they tended to believe the written text rather than their own eyes.
Vesalius was born Andries van Wesel in Brussels, then part of the Spanish Netherlands, in 1514, the son of Andries van Wesel (1479–1544) and Isabel Crabbe. He was born into a well-connected medical family, his father was apothecary to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian (1459–1519) and then valet de chambre to his son Charles V (1500–1558), His grandfather Everard van Wessel was Royal Physician to Maximillian and His great grandfather Jan van Wesel received his medical degree from the University of Parvia and was professor for medicine at the University of Leuven.
A portrait of Vesalius from his De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) Source: Wikimedia Commons
Vesalius studied Greek and Latin with the Brethren of the Common Life a pietist religious community before entering the University of Leuven in 1528. In 1533 he transferred to the University of Paris where he came under the Galenic influence of Johannes Winter von Andernach and in fact assisted him in preparing his Anatomicarum institutionum for the press. In 1536 he was forced to leave Paris due to hostilities between France and the Holy Roman Empire. He returned to the University of Leuven to complete his studied graduating in 1537. His doctoral thesis was a commentary on the ninth book of the ten century, twenty-three volume Al-Hawi or Kitāb al-Ḥāwī fī al-ṭibb by the Persian physician Abū Bakr Muhammad Zakariyyā Rāzī (854–925) known in medieval Europe as Rhazes. This was translated, in the fourteenth century as The Comprehensive Book on Medicine and was a central textbook on the medieval European universities.
During his time in Leuven his was friends with Gemma Frisius (1508–1555), who became professor of medicine at the university, but is more famous for his work as a mathematician, cartographer, astronomer, astrologer, and instrument maker. According to one story the two of them, whilst out walking one day, stole parts of a corpse from a gallows to study.
Vesalius and Gemma Frisius remove a dead man from the gallows (Artist unknown).
On the day of his graduation, he was offered the position of professor for surgery and anatomy (explicator chirurgiae) at the University of Padua. With the assistance of the artist Johan van Calcar (c. 1499–1546), a student of Titian, he produced six large posters of anatomical illustrations for his students. When he realised that they were being pirated, he published them himself as Tabulae anatomicae sex in 1538. He followed this in 1539 with an updated edition of Winter von Andernach’s Anatomicarum institutionum.
Tabulae II of Vesalius’s ” Tabulae Anatomicae Sex ” (1538). Note the 5-lobed liver, which is reminiscent of simian anatomy. The original text surrounding the figure has been removed. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London, UK.
Vesalius’s great change was that rather than regurgitating Galen and/or Mondino he devoted himself to doing his own basic research on the dissection table. Well trained by Winter von Andernach he approached his task with an open mind and wide open eyes. The result was a new catalogue of human anatomy that corrected many of the errors and mistaken beliefs contained in the works of Galen. Mistakes produced because Galen’s work was, as Vesalius was keen to point out, carried out on animals and not humans, under the assumption that a liver is a liver, whether in a dog or a human. It is also important to note that Vesalius did not think that he had overthrown Galen, as is often claimed, but that he had corrected Galen.
Vesalius took the results of his investigations to Basel, where he assisted the printer/publisher Johannes Oporinus (1507–1568) to prepare his monumental, and, its fair to say, revolutionary work, De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, published in 1543.
Portrait of Johannes Oporinus by Hans Bock Source: Wikimedia Commons
He simultaneously published an abridged edition for students, his Andrea Vesalii suorum de humani corporis fabrica librorum epitome (which only contained six images)
The book contains 273 highly impressive and informative illustration that are usually attributed to Johan van Calcar, but there are doubts about this attribution.
Each of the seven books is devoted to a different aspect of the body: Book 1: The Bones and Cartilages,
Book 2: The Ligaments and Muscles,
Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
Book 3: The Veins and Arteries,
Book 4: The Nerves, Book 5: The Organs of Nutrition and Generation,
Book 6: The Heart and Associated Organs,
Figure of the heart rolled toward the right side but also showing the recurrent laryngeal nerves. Woodcut illustration from the Fabrica (Vesalii, 1543), Liber VI, p. 564 (due to a mistake in the page numbering, this should be p. 664). Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
Book 7: The Brain.
From the 1543 book in the collection in National Institute of Medicine. Andreas Vesalius’ Fabrica, showing the Base Of The Brain, including the cerebellum, olfactory bulbs, optic nerve.
(All De Fabrica images via Wikimedia Commons
Vesalius almost singlehandedly raised the study of anatomy to new levels and the book was a financial success despite the very high printing costs. A second edition was published in 1555 and there is evidence that Vesalius was preparing a third edition, which, however, never appeared. The fame that De fabrica brought him led to him being appointed imperial physician to Charles V. When he announced his intention to leave the University of Padua, Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici offered him a position at the University of Pisa, which he declined. He remained at the imperial court becoming physician to Philipp II, following Charles V’s abdication. In 1559 when Philipp moved his court to Madrid, Vesalius remained at the court in the Netherland. In 1564 he went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from which he never returned, dying on the journey home. There are numerous speculations as to why he undertook this pilgrimage, but the final answer is that we don’t know why.
Vesalius revolutionised the study of anatomy and was followed by many prominent successors in Padua and other North Italian universities, which we will look at in the next episode of this series. However, his own work was not without error, and he left much still to be discovered by those successors. Also, he was much attacked by the neo-Galenists, that is those whose work was based on the new translations direct from the Greek originals and who rejected the earlier ‘corrupt translations’ from Arabic. Jacobus Sylvius (1478–1555), one of his earlier teachers from Paris, even went so far as to claim that the human body had changed since Galen had studied it.
In the previous episode we saw how the Renaissance rediscovery of Vitruvius’ De architectura influenced the development of architecture during the Renaissance and dissolved the boundary between the intellectual theoreticians and the practical artisans. However, as stated there Vitruvius was not just an architect, but was also an engineer and his Book X deals quite extensively with machines both civil and military. This had a massive influence on a new type of artisan the Renaissance artist-engineer and it is to these that we now turn our attention.
Artist-engineers were very much a Northern Italian Renaissance phenomenon, but even earlier artists had been categorised as craftsmen or artisans and not as artists as we would understand the term. The occupation of artist-engineer was very much influenced by the popularity of Vitruvius’ De architectura. The most well-known Renaissance artist engineer is, of course, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), but he was by no means unique, as he is often presented in popular accounts, but he stood at the end of a line of other artist-engineers, who are known to have influenced him. Here I will deal principally with those artisan artist-engineers, who dissolved the boundary between practice and theory by witing and circulating treatises on their work.
At the beginning of the line were the Florentine rival, goldsmiths Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) and Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446). In 1401 there was a competition to design the first set of new doors for the Florence Baptistery. Ghiberti and Brunelleschi were two of the seven artists on the short list. Ghiberti won the commission and set up a major engineering workshop to carry out the work.
It took Ghiberti twenty-one years to complete the first set of doors featuring twenty New Testament Bible scenes, the four evangelists and four of the Church Fathers, but once finished they established his reputation, as a great Renaissance artist. In 1425 he was awarded a second commission for another set of doors, these featuring ten Old Testament scenes in realistic perspective presentation took another twenty-seven years. The second set of doors included portraits of both Ghiberti and his father Bartolomeo Ghiberti.
Ghiberti self portrait from his second set of doors (modern copy Source: Wikimedia Commons
We don’t need to go into any great detail here about the doors or the other commissions that Ghiberti’s workshop finished.
Ghiberti’s second set of doors, known as the Gates of Paradise (modern copy) Source: Wikimedia Commons
What is much more relevant to our theme is his activities as an author. Although he was the artisan son of an artisan father, Ghiberti crossed the medieval boundary between theory and practice with his Commentarii, a thesis on the history of art, written in Italian. He drew on various sources from antiquity including the first century BCE illustrated Greek text on machines by Athenaeus Mechanicus and Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, a text much discussed by the Renaissance Humanists, but his major source was Vitruvius’ De architectura. Ghiberti died without finishing his Commentarii and it was never published. However, many important Renaissance artist, such as Donatello and Paolo Uccello, served their apprenticeships in his workshop, so his influence on future generations was very large.
One probable graduate of Ghiberti’s workshop was Antonio Averlino (c. 1400–c. 1469) known as Filarete, a sculptor and architect.
Filarete, Self-portrait medal, obverse, c. 1460, bronze. London, V & A
Between 1461 and 1464, he wrote a vernacular volume on architecture in twenty-five books, his illustrated Trattato di Architettura, which circulated widely in manuscript. Central to his theory of architecture was the Vitruvian ideal of practice combined with theory. The most significant part of his book was his design for Sforzinda an ideal city named after his patron Francesco Sforza (1401–1466). This was the first of several ideal cities, which became a feature of the Renaissance. It is thought that his inspiration came from the works of Plato and his knowledge of this came from his friend at the Sforza court, the humanist scholar and philologist Francesco da Tolentino (1398–1481) known as Filelfo. Once again, we have, as in the last episode, a cooperation across the old boundaries between a scholar and an artisan.
Filarete Sforzinda
Filippo Brunelleschi poses a different problem. Like Ghiberti trained as a goldsmith, he went on to become the epitome of a Renaissance Vitruvian architect. However, there is no direct evidence that connects him with De architectura or its author. There is no direct evidence that connects him with anything except for the products of his life’s work, most notably the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiori cathedral in Florence. He is also renowned as the inventor or discoverer of the mathematical principles of linear perspective, as explained in episode seven of this series. This links him indirectly to Vitruvius, as some authors insist that he only rediscovered linear perspective, quoting Book 7 of De architectura, where Vitruvius describes the use of some form of perspective on the ancient Greek theatre flats.
Filippo Brunelleschi in an anonymous portrait of the 2nd half of the 15th century (Louvre, Paris) Source: Wikimedia Commons
More importantly, Brunelleschi, as an architect, not only designed and supervised the construction of the buildings that he was commissioned to build but also devised and constructed the machines that he needed on his building sites to facilitate those constructions. For his work on the Santa Maria dome, for example he designed a crane to lift the building materials up to the top of the cathedral.
Brunelleschi’s revolving crane
A drawing of that crane can be found in Leonardo’s manuscripts. He was also granted a patent by the ruling council of Florence for the design of a ship to transport heavy loads of stone on rivers and canals.
Reproduction of Brunelleschi’s patent boat Source: Wikimedia Commons
Brunelleschi was also like, Vitruvius, a successful hydraulic engineer. It is hard to believe that he wasn’t influenced by De architectura.
There is no doubt about the Vitruvian influence of our next artist-engineer, Mariano di Jacopo (1382–c. 1453) known as Taccola (the jackdaw), who, as I explained in an earlier post on that Renaissance iconic figure, included a Vitruvian Man in his drawings. Taccola, who is known to have worked as a sculptor, superintendent of roads and hydraulic engineer, was from Sienna. He met and talked with Brunelleschi, one of the few people known to have done so.
Taccola produced two annotated manuscripts the four books of De ingeneis, written between 1419 and 1433, and De machnis issued in 1449, which was partially an improved version of his De ingeneis.
ResearchGate Jacopo Mariano Taccola, De ingeneis, Book I. Codex Latinus 197,..
Both manuscripts contain numerous illustrations of machines for hydraulic engineering, milling (and mills were one of the most important types of machines in medieval and Renaissance culture), construction and military machinery, all topics covered by Vitruvius.
First European depiction of a piston pump by Taccola, c.1450 Source: Wikimedia Commons
His manuscripts also some of Brunelleschi’s construction machines. Taccola is in one sense a transitional figure as his representations, of three-dimensional machines, often use medieval drawing conventions rather than Brunelleschi’s recently discovered linear perspective.
Taccola’s works were never printed but copies of his manuscripts are known to have circulated widely during his lifetime and to have been highly influential. After his death his influence waned as his work was superceded by the more advance work of Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Leonardo da Vinci both of whom were heavily influenced by Taccola.
Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1501) was, like Taccola, from Siena and was an architect, engineer, painter, sculptor, and writer.
His Vitruvian influence is very obvious in his work, as also the influence of Taccola. Francesco worked for much of his life on an Italian translation of Vitruvius’ De architectura, which he never published. Like Filarete he wrote an architectural treatise Trattato di archtettura, ingegneria e arte militare, worked on over decades and finished sometime after 1482. Many of his machines are taken from Taccola’s manuscripts. As can be seen from the title, it continues the Vitruvian tradition. Like Filarete’s volume it contains a design for an ideal town. Probably inspired by Sulpizio’s first printed edition of De architectura and Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, he produced a new edition of his own book known as Trattato II.
Edificij et machine, Martini, Francesco di Giorgio, 1439-1501, brown ink and wash, ca. 1475-ca. 1480, The volume comprises 103 drawings by Francesco di Giorgio Martini and his assistants, featuring machines and devices for lifting columns and other heavy weights, schemes for transporting water, and mechanisms for milling and moving boats. There are also a few drawings showing how people could walk or float on water standing on inflatable containers and using an oar to propel themselves. PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: LCD2_180906_23583
Both Taccola and Francesco are known to have influenced the most famous of the Renaissance artist-engineers, Leonardo da Vinci. As well as the obvious direct influence of Vitruvius, many of the machines illustrated in Leonardo’s manuscripts are taken from the work of Brunelleschi, Taccola and Francesco di Giorgio. As an apprentice, Leonardo had worked on the final phase of Brunelleschi’s dome for the Santa Maria Cathedral, and he took the opportunity to study Brunelleschi’s building site machines and scaffolding. He owned copies of the manuscripts of both Taccola and Francesco, the latter of which he annotated heavily. Leonardo, as is well known, wrote reams of annotated manuscripts on his machines but never published any of them.
Watter wheel, just one of Leonardo’s hundreds of drawings of machines Source
All of the artist-engineers that I have briefly sketched here are examples of artisans who crossed over or better dissolved the boundaries between theoretical and practical knowledge. They are also, so to speak, the stars of a much larger and widespread group of Renaissance artist-engineers, whose influence spread throughout the Renaissance, changing and elevating the status of the skilled artisan.
In the last post we looked at the European re-invention of moveable-type and the advent of the printed book, which played a highly significant role in the history of science in general and in Renaissance science in particular. I also emphasised the various print technologies developed for reproducing images, because they played a very important role in various areas of the sciences during the Renaissance, as we shall see in later posts in this series. Parallel to these technological developments there were two major developments in the arts, which would have a very major impact on the illustration in Renaissance science publications, the (re?)-discovery of linear perspective and the development of naturalism.
Linear perspective is the geometrical method required to reproduce three-dimensional objects realistically on a two-dimensional surface; the discovery or invention of linear perspective is usually attributed to the Renaissance artist-engineer and architect, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), about whom more below, but already in the Renaissance it was often referred to as a re-discovery. This Renaissance re-discovery trope was very much in line with the general Renaissance concept of a rebirth of classical knowledge. Here the belief that linear perspective was a re-discovery is based on the concept of skenographia in ancient Greek theatre, which consists of using painted flat panels on a stage to give the illusion of depth. This is mentioned in Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335 BCE) a general work on drama. More importantly, from a Renaissance perspective, it is briefly described in Vitruvius’ De Architectura libri dicem (Ten Books on Architecture) from the first century BCE. Once again, as we shall see later, Vitruvius’ De Architectura played a central role in Renaissance thought. In his Book 7 On Finishing, Vitruvius wrote in the preface:
In Athens, when Aechylus was producing tragedies, Agathachus was the first to work for the theatre and wrote a treatise about it. Learning from this, Democritus and Anaxagoras wrote on the same subject, namely how the extension of rays from a certain established centre point ought to correspond in a natural ration to the eyes’ line of sight, so that they could represent the appearance of buildings in scene painting, no longer by some uncertain method, but precisely, both the surfaces that were depicted frontally, and those that seemed either to be receding or projecting[1].
Of course, ancient Greek theatre flats no longer exist, but some Greek and many more Roman wall paintings have survived, which very obviously display some degree of perspective. However, closer analysis of these paintings has shown that while they are in fact constructed on some sort of perspective scheme it is not the linear perspective that was developed in the Renaissance.
Villa of P. Fannius Synistor Cubiculum M alcove Panel with temple at east end of the alcove, the north end of the east wall Middle of the first century B.C. Boscoreale (Pompeii), Italy Source:
Although linear perspective was not strictly a re-discovery, it also didn’t emerge at the beginning of the fifteenth century out of thin air. Already, more than a century earlier the so-called proto-Renaissance artists, in particular Giotto (1267–1337), were producing paintings that displayed depth based on a mathematical model, when not quite that of linear perspective and not consistent.
‘Jesus Before the Caïf’, by Giotto (1305). The ceiling rafters show the Giotto’s introduction of convergent perspective. B. Detailed analysis, however, reveals that the ceiling has an inconsistent vanishing point and that the Caïf’s dais is in parallel perspective, with no vanishing point. Source
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Renaissance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) used linear perspective in the panels of the second set of bronze doors he was commissioned to produce for the Florence Baptistry, dubbed the Gates of Paradise by Michelangelo.
A panel of Adam and Eve in Ghiberti’s “Gate’s of Paradise”. Photo by Thermos.Source: Wikimedia Commons
As already stated, Brunelleschi is credited with having invented linear perspective according to his biographer Antonio di Tuccio Manetti (1423–1497), he compared the reality of his painting using linear perspective of the Florence Baptistery with the building itself using mirrors.
Filippo Brunelleschi in an anonymous portrait of the 2nd half of the 15th century (Louvre, Paris) via Wikimedia Commons
According to Manetti, he used a grid or set of crosshairs to copy the exact scene square by square and produced a reverse image. The results were compositions with accurate perspective, as seen through a mirror. To compare the accuracy of his image with the real object, he made a small hole in his painting, and had an observer look through the back of his painting to observe the scene. A mirror was then raised, reflecting Brunelleschi’s composition, and the observer saw the striking similarity between the reality and painting. Both panels have since been lost. (Wikipedia)
Brunelleschi left no written account of how he constructed his painting and the first written account we have of the geometry of linear perspective is from another Renaissance humanist artist and architect, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) in his book On painting, published in Tuscan dialect as Della Pittura in 1436/6 and in Latin as De pictura first in 1450, although the Latin edition was also written in 1435. The book contains a comparatively simple account of the geometrical rudiments of linear perspective.
Presumed self-portrait of Leon Battista Alberti Source: Wikimedia Commons
Figure from the 1804 edition of Della pittura showing the vanishing point Source: Wikimedia Commons
A much fuller written account of the mathematics of linear perspective was produced in manuscript by the painter Piero della Francesca (c. 1415–1492), De Prospectiva pingendi (On the Perspective of painting), around 1470-80.
An icosahedron in perspective from De Prospectiva pingendi Source: Wikimedia Commons
He never published this work, but his ideas on perspective were incorporated in his book Divina proportione by the mathematician Luca Pacioli (c. 1447–1517), written around 1498 but first published in 1509. Pacioli’s book also plagiarised another manuscript of della Francesca’s on perspective, his De quinque corporibus regularibus (The Five Regular Solids).
Piero della Francesca by Giorgio Vasari Source: Wikimedia Commons
Mathematicians and artists continued over the centuries to write books describing and investigating the geometrical principles of linear perspective the most notable of, which during the Renaissance was Albrecht Dürer’s Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt(Instructions for Measuring with Compass and Ruler) published in 1525, which contains the first account of two point perspective. Dürer is credited with introducing linear perspective into the Northern Renaissance.
Dürer, draughtsman Making a Perspective Drawing of a Reclining Woman
Naturalism is, as its name would suggest, the development in art to depict things naturally i.e., as we see them with our own eyes. Linear perspective is actually one aspect of naturalism. In her The Body of the Artisan, Pamala H. Smith writes the following:
It is difficult to know where to begin a discussion of naturalism (which can encompass the striving for “verisimilitude,” “illusionism,” “realism,” and the “imitation of nature”) in the early modern period, for the secondary literature in art history alone is vast. David Summers has defined naturalism as the attempt to make the elements of the artwork (in his account primarily painting) coincide with the elements of the optical experience[2]. (Her endnote: Summers, The Judgement of Sense, p. 3)
Smith also quotes in this context Alberti, “[He] put it in about 1435, making a picture that was an “open window” through which the world was seen.[3]” There is no neat timeline of events for Naturalism, as I have recreated above for linear perspective. Smith gives as her first historical example of Naturalism the so-called Carrara Herbal produced in Padua around 1400, with till then unknown, for this type of literature, unprecedented naturalism in its illustrations.[4]
As we will see in a later blog post it was in natural history, in particular in botany, that naturalism made a major impact in printed scientific illustrations.
Although, they still hadn’t really adopted the techniques of linear perspective it was the artists of the Northern Renaissance, rather than their Southern brethren, who first extensively adopted Naturalism, most notably Jan van Eyck (before 1390 – 1441). An attribute of the Naturalism of these painters was the use of mirrors in their paintings to symbolise the reflection of nature or reality.
Jan van Eyck Detail with mirror and signature; Arnolfini Portrait, 1434 Source: Wikimedia Commons
Once again, we meet here Albrecht Dürer, who is justifiably renowned for his lifelike reproduction of various aspects of nature in his artwork.
Albrecht Dürer Young Hare, (1502), Source: Wikimedia Commons
Albrecht Dürer Great Piece of Turf, 1503 Source: Wikimedia commons
It is important to note here that although this picture looks very realistic, when first viewed, it is actually an example of illusion or hyperrealism. There are none of the old or withered plants that such a scene in nature would inevitably have. Also none of the plants obscure other plants with their shadows, as they would in reality. What Dürer delivers up here is an idealised naturalism, almost a contradiction in terms. This conflict between real naturalism and the demands of clear to interpret illustrations would play a significant role in the illustrations of Renaissance books on natural history.
However, as we shall see in later posts both linear perspective and Naturalism made a massive impact on the scientific and technological book illustrations that were produced during the Renaissance.
[1] Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, Eds. Ingrid D. Rowland & Thomas Noble Howe, CUP, 1999 p. 86
[2] Pamala H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, University of Chicago Press, 2004 p. 9
There is no doubt that the fifteenth and sixteenth century introduction of print technologies in Europe, making possible the advent of the printed book, was one of the most important developments in the history of not just Renaissance science, but the history of science in general. Many people go much further and list the invention of movable-type, as one of the most important or significant inventions in the whole of human history. The ‘in Europe’ is important, because two of those technologies, moveable-type and woodblock printing, were both known and used in Asia long before their introduction in Europe. It is also important to note that despite extensive research no evidence has ever been found of a technology transfer of moveable-type printing from Asia to Europe and the introduction into Europe appears to be a genuinely independent reinvention.
The Chinese artisan Bì Shēng (972–1051) invented the earliest systems of moveable-type around 1040 CE, one in ceramic materials the other using wood. Another wood-based system was invented by the mechanical engineer, Wang Zhen (fl. 1290–1333), in the fourteenth century. Metal moveable-type, made of bronze, definitely existed in China in the thirteenth century. Bronze moveable-type was also in use in Korea in the thirteenth century.
A revolving table typecase with individual movable type characters arranged primarily by rhyming scheme, from Wang Zhen’s Nong Shu, published 1313. Source: Wikimedia Commons
As already stated, there is no evidence of a technology transfer and moveable-type was independently invented in Europe in the fifteenth century. There were tentative experiments with moveable-type early in in the century that came to nothing and the European invention is generally attributed to Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (c.1400–1468), who is usually known simply as Johannes Gutenberg.
Gutenberg-Statue in Straßburg No portraits of the man are known to exist Source: Wikimedia Commons
Gutenberg was born sometime around 1400 in the city of Mainz, the youngest son of the patrician merchant Friele Gensfleisch zur Laden. Almost nothing is known about his early life, but he turns up living in Strasbourg working as a gold smith in 1434. He moved back to Mainz at some point. He was involved in various, possibly dubious, schemes to make money and it’s not really known how or why he developed his system of moveable-type printing. He supposedly announced his system of printing in 1440 but it wasn’t until around 1450 that his printing press was in operation.
Gutenberg’s real claim to fame is not just that he developed a system of metal moveable-type but that he created a complete system of mechanical printing. As well as the metal type, he modified a wine press to produce a printing press and developed a printing ink. Normal ink is too fluid to be used effectively in a printing press, so Gutenberg developed a more viscous, oil-based ink which stuck to the type, rather than running off.
In this woodblock from 1568, the printer at left is removing a page from the press while the one at right inks the text-blocks Source: Wikimedia Commons
For his press Gutenberg’s business partner was Johann Furst Fust, who lent Gutenberg 800 guilders for the enterprise. Also involved was Furst’s future son-in-law Peter Schöffler. Having conceived his legendary Bible project around 1451, Gutenberg borrowed another 800 guilders from Furst Fust, and printing began in 1452. The Bible began to appear around 1455. In 1456 Furst Fust sued Gutenberg for misappropriation of funds and Gutenberg Europe’s first printer-publisher became Europe’s first bankrupt printer-publisher. Furst Fust and Schöffler took over the publishing house.
Between the 1460s and 1470s Gutenberg’s invention spread rapidly, first throughout Germany and then over the borders into other European countries.
The rapid spread of moveable-type printing throughout Europe in the first fifty years Source: Wikimedia Commons
Gutenberg had nothing to do with the humanist Renaissance, although one of his first printed products was a wall calendar, which as we will see later was an integral part of Renaissance science. However, as his invention crossed the border into Italy it quickly became part of the humanist movement.
The first printer-publishers in Italy were Arnold Pannartz and Conrad Sweynheym, who set up a press in the Benedictine abbey of Subiaco in 1464. Their output was from the beginning humanist orientated. Their first book was by Aelius Donatus a Roman grammarian of which no copied survived. Next, they printed Cicero’s De oratore followed by religious books by Lactantius and Augustinus.
An important innovation was their typeface. German printers following Gutenberg used Blackletter or Gothic typefaces. The humanists had developed a new hand script based on capital Roman letters and Carolingian miniscule, which they mistakenly thought was original antique Latin script. This was modified to make the two different scripts compatible becoming Roman or Antiqua script. The Pannartz-Sweynheym type face was halfway between the German Blackletter typefaces and the humanist Roman script, as was expected from the humanists.
Specimen of a typeface by Pannartz and Sweinheim, considered to be the earliest form of Roman type, c. 1465. Source: Wikimedia Commons
n 1467 Pannartz & Sweynheym left Subiaco and set up a publishing house in Rome, where they continued to publish religious and humanist texts until 1472 when they, like Gutenberg before them, went bankrupt.
Very early, Venice established itself the centre of book printing in Italy and the Venetian printer-publishers, created full blown Roman or Antique type faces to print humanist literature. Most notable in this development were the type designer Nicholas Jensen (c. 1420–1480) and humanist scholar and publisher Aldus Manutius (c.1450–1515), who founded the Aldine Press, which specialised in printing classical Greek and Latin texts.
Aldus Pius Manutius, illustration in Vita di Aldo Pio Manuzio (1759) Source: Wikimedia Commons
The John Rylands Library copy of the Aldine Vergil of 1501, printed on vellum and hand-coloured Source: Wikimedia Commons
Johannes Regiomontanus (1436–1476), also a humanist scholar about whom we will have more to say later, and who established the worlds first scientific publishing house in Nürnberg in 1471, is credited with being the first printer-publisher to bring the Antiqua type faces back over the border into Germany.
Another humanist scholar Niccolò de’Niccoli (1364–1437) dissatisfied with the Roman script for writing humanist manuscripts developed the more flowing Italic script, which in turn generated the Italic type face.
Sample of Niccoli’s cursive script, which developed into Italic type. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Whilst the invention of moveable-type played the major role in the creation of the printed book, it is important to recognise that the possibility of generating reproduceable illustrations in printed books played a very major role in the production of science books, in particular in several areas of Renaissance knowledge, as we shall see later. Image reproduction was made possible by three different print technologies, woodblock printing, engraving and etching, and we will now take a brief look at the histories of each of these.
Woodblock printing was by a long way the oldest of these technologies and was in the early days of printed book productions the most frequently used method of illustration reproduction. In woodblock or woodcut printing the image to be printed in cut into the prepared flat surface of a block of wood, inked and then pressed onto the surface to be printed. It originated in China as a method of printing on textiles and later also to printing on paper, The earliest surviving examples of woodblock printing date to before 220 CE. The method spread throughout East Asia from China. Interestingly, despite its widespread use throughout Asia, it didn’t arrive in Europe until around the early of fourteenth century, when it was used to print textiles. Woodblock printing on paper began in Europe around the beginning of the fifteenth century with religious images and playing cards. During the first half of the fifteenth century woodblock prints became quite popular, but the quality of the prints declined steeply. With the advent of the printed book and the demand for woodblock illustrations grew the quality began to improve with, for example the painter and illustrator Michael Wolgemut (1434–1519) setting standards. Wolgemut’s most famous apprentice, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), became possibly the greatest ever creator of woodblock prints. A woodcut is usually produced by two craftsmen, the illustrator or artist, who draws the image on the block and the block cutter, who actually cuts it.
Block Cutter at Work woodcut by Jost Amman, 1568 Source: Wikimedia Commons
The oldest known printed book, the Chinese Dunhuang Diamond Sūtra dated to 868 CE, was entirely printed using woodcuts and not moveable-type.
The Chinese Diamond Sutra (868), the oldest existent woodblock printed book in the world. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The Buddhists were very fond of woodblock printing because they believed that objects with texts of the Buddha’s words are talismanic, so they mass produced leaflets with such texts using woodcuts to print them. A book like the Dunhuang Diamond Sūtra is known as a block-book. There was a brief period in the fifteenth century, mainly around 1460, 1470, when block-books were produced in Europe, usually with religious themes. Strangely it appears that none of the known surviving block-books predates the invention of moveable-type printing. It seems that they were offered as a cheaper alternative to moveable-type printed books but never really caught on.
The next technology for producing illustrations in printed books is engraving. Engraving is very similar to woodcut printing, but the image is cut, scratched or engraved into the surface of a sheet of metal, usually copper, rather than a block of wood. The earliest known printed objects produced in Europe using engraving are some German playing cards probably dating from the late 1430s. Engraving had long been used by gold and silver smiths to decorate metalwork, including amour musical instruments, jewellery etc. It is thought that the idea to use engraving as a print technology developed out of the process whereby goldsmiths filled the groves of an engraved pattern with chalk or similar to make an impression on paper, as a record of their work. It was also common practice when making an elaborate engraved breastplate, for example, to engrave one half of the pattern, left or right, then to make an impression to use to make the other half, thereby ensuring that the pattern was truly symmetrical.
The German artist Martin Schongauer (c.1450–1491) made the greatest early development in the art of producing engraved prints.
Martin Schongauer (German, Colmar ca. 1435/50–1491 Breisach) Griffin, 15th century German, Engraving; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1927 (27.54.5) via Wikimedia Commons http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/336196
Of course, it was, once again, Albrecht Dürer, who became the great master of producing engraved prints. Although engraving allows the reproduction of much finer lines that woodcuts and so more delicate and accurate images, it is also more expensive that woodcuts and more difficult to integrate with moveable-type when printing. These factors led to a dominance from woodcuts over engraving in the early book production.
St. Jerome in His Study (1514), an engraving by Northern Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer Source: Wikimedia Commons
The final print technology for producing illustration is etching. Like engraving, etching uses metal sheets to hold the images to be reproduced but instead of the images being cut into the surface with a tool it is burnt in using acid. The basic technology of etching goes back into antiquity and was used, for example, to decorate jewellery. The earliest examples from the Indus valley date back to the third millennium BCE. Etching used by gold and silver smiths to decorate guns, armour and other metal objects was well-known in Europe in the Middle Ages. The application of etching to printing is thought to have been the work of the German artist and metalworker Daniel Hopfer (c. 1470–1536), who produced etched prints using iron plates.
Daniel Hopfer Three German Soldiers Armed with Halberds, c. 1510. An original etched iron plate from which prints would be made. National Gallery of Art via Wikimedia Commons
The oldest dated etching is by Albrecht Dürer from 1515. Dürer only produced six etchings before returning to engraving as his preferred technique. The move from iron to copper etching plates is thought to have been made by the Italians, once a suitable chemical agent had been found.
As a technology for printing illustrations in books, etching didn’t really become established until the eighteenth century. One major problem was the production of the etching fluids. These were often of very poor quality and contained contaminates, which cause damage during the etching process. In the first couple of centuries of book production, it was woodcuts that dominated illustration reproduction only very gradually being replaced by engraving.
As we shall see in later posts the printed book and especially the illustrated book played a very central role in the development of various areas of Renaissance knowledge. The ability to mechanically reproduce illustrations in large quantities playing a very central role. Before this, however, as I have briefly indicated above the early literary humanists were quick to adopt the new medium, creating their own distinctive typefaces to give themselves a clear identity in print and also from the beginning producing printed editions of the works of their classical role models such as Cicero and Quintillion, as well as printed editions of the first humanist scholars such as Plutarch.
If your philosophy of [scientific] history claims that the sequence should have been A→B→C, and it is C→A→B, then your philosophy of history is wrong. You have to take the data of history seriously.
John S. Wilkins 30th August 2009
Culture is part of the unholy trinity—culture, chaos, and cock-up—which roam through our versions of history, substituting for traditional theories of causation. – Filipe Fernández–Armesto “Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration”
The Renaissance Mathematicus 