1. Early Modern Science and the Creation of Knowledge through Images

2. Ed. Brian S. Baigrie (1996) Baigrie introduction
Rationality vs visualizing
Language vs imagery
Text vs illustration

3. De humani corporis fabrica (1543),
Andreas Vesalius's
De humani corporis fabrica (1543),
Michelangelo,
Studies for the Libyan Sibyl , Met NY

4. Looking at scientific and technical images
How did images come to have authority in science?
How did images come to be accepted as bearers of authentic information?
What do scientific images do?

5. Diagrams vs naturalism
Bert S. Hall, ‘The Didactic and the Elegant’, in Picturing Knowledge, pp. 3-39
‘All images … are crowded with features arising from expectations that the image-maker brings to the subject; every portrayal is a type of encoding that demands, at a minimum, a certain set of conventions common to both the individual doing the act of representation and the viewer of the representation’.

6. From the Salomon Glossaries, Prüfening, Germany, 1158 and 1165,
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Clm

7. Guido da Vigevano, Anatomy, 1345

8. Jacob Frohlich, 1544 (Boston Medical Library)

9. Italian military engineer Agostino Ramelli’s
Crankshaft well windlass, out of his 1588
Diverse and Artifactitious Machines.

10. Wang Cheng
Collected Diagrams and Explanations of the Wonderful Machines of the Far West, 1627

11. Ramelli’s book wheel, out of his 1588
Diverse and Artifactitious Machines.
To ensure that the books remained at a
constant angle, Ramelli incorporated an epicyclic
gearing arrangement, a complex device that had
only previously been used in astronomical clocks.
Ramelli undoubtedly understood that gravity
could have worked just as effectively
(as it does with a Ferris wheel),
but the gearing system allowed him to display
his mathematical prowess.

12. Antonello da Messina,
St Jerome in his Study
National Gallery, London

13. Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, 1543, Nuremberg

14. Vesalius, De humani corporis
fabbrica libri vii (Basel, 1555)

15. Joan Bleu, Geographia, vol1
Amsterdam 1662
Tycho Brahe’s observatory

16. Kepler, Rudolphine Tables 1627

17. John Wilkins,
A Discourse Concerning a New World,
London 1640