Picturing Machines 1400 1700

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Picturing Machines 1400-1700

Author : Wolfgang Lefevre
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262122696
Total Pages : 374 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (226 download)

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Book Synopsis Picturing Machines 1400-1700 by : Wolfgang Lefevre

Download or read book Picturing Machines 1400-1700 written by Wolfgang Lefevre and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-07-16 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How technical drawings shaped early engineering practice. Technical drawings by the architects and engineers of the Renaissance made use of a range of new methods of graphic representation. These drawings—among them Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawings of mechanical devices—have long been studied for their aesthetic qualities and technological ingenuity, but their significance for the architects and engineers themselves is seldom considered. The essays in Picturing Machines 1400–1700 take this alternate perspective and look at how drawing shaped the practice of early modern engineering. They do so through detailed investigations of specific images, looking at over 100 that range from sketches to perspective views to thoroughly constructed projections. In early modern engineering practice, drawings were not merely visualizations of ideas but acted as models that shaped ideas. Picturing Machines establishes basic categories for the origins, purposes, functions, and contexts of early modern engineering illustrations, then treats a series of topics that not only focus on the way drawings became an indispensable means of engineering but also reflect the main stages in their historical development. The authors examine the social interaction conveyed by early machine images and their function as communication between practitioners; the knowledge either conveyed or presupposed by technical drawings, as seen in those of Giorgio Martini and Leonardo; drawings that required familiarity with geometry or geometric optics, including the development of architectural plans; and technical illustrations that bridged the gap between practical and theoretical mechanics.

Picturing Machines 1400–1700

Author : Wolfgang Lefevre
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262550881
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Picturing Machines 1400–1700 by : Wolfgang Lefevre

Download or read book Picturing Machines 1400–1700 written by Wolfgang Lefevre and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-12-26 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How technical drawings shaped early engineering practice. Technical drawings by the architects and engineers of the Renaissance made use of a range of new methods of graphic representation. These drawings—among them Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawings of mechanical devices—have long been studied for their aesthetic qualities and technological ingenuity, but their significance for the architects and engineers themselves is seldom considered. The essays in Picturing Machines 1400–1700 take this alternate perspective and look at how drawing shaped the practice of early modern engineering. They do so through detailed investigations of specific images, looking at over 100 that range from sketches to perspective views to thoroughly constructed projections. In early modern engineering practice, drawings were not merely visualizations of ideas but acted as models that shaped ideas. Picturing Machines establishes basic categories for the origins, purposes, functions, and contexts of early modern engineering illustrations, then treats a series of topics that not only focus on the way drawings became an indispensable means of engineering but also reflect the main stages in their historical development. The authors examine the social interaction conveyed by early machine images and their function as communication between practitioners; the knowledge either conveyed or presupposed by technical drawings, as seen in those of Giorgio Martini and Leonardo; drawings that required familiarity with geometry or geometric optics, including the development of architectural plans; and technical illustrations that bridged the gap between practical and theoretical mechanics.

Watermarks

Author : Leslie A. Geddes
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691192693
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

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Book Synopsis Watermarks by : Leslie A. Geddes

Download or read book Watermarks written by Leslie A. Geddes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An exploration of depictions and use of water within Renaissance Italy, and especially in the work of polymath Leonardo da Vinci. Both a practical necessity and a powerful symbol, water presents one of the most challenging problems in visual art due to its formlessness, clarity, and mutability. In Renaissance Italy, it was a nearly inexhaustible subject of inquiry for artists, engineers, and architects alike: it represented an element to be productively harnessed and a force of untamed nature. Watermarks places the depiction and use of water within an intellectual history of early modern Italy, examining the parallel technological and aesthetic challenges of mastering water and the scientific and artistic practices that emerged in response to them. Focusing primarily on the wide-ranging work of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)-at once an artist, scientist, and inventor-Leslie Geddes shows how the deployment of artistic media, such as ink and watercolor, closely correlated with the engineering challenges of controlling water in the natural world. For da Vinci and his peers, she argues, drawing was an essential form of visual thinking. Geddes analyses a wide range of da Vinci's subject matter, including machine drawings, water management schemes, and depictions of the natural landscape, and demonstrates how drawing-as an intellectual practice, a form of scientific investigation, and a visual representation-constituted a distinct mode of problem solving integral to his understanding of the natural environment. Throughout, Geddes draws important connections between works by da Vinci that have long been overlooked, the artistic and engineering practices of his day, and critical questions about the nature of seeing and depicting the almost unseeable during the early modern period"--

Transmitting Knowledge

Author : Sachiko Kusukawa
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 019928878X
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (992 download)

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Book Synopsis Transmitting Knowledge by : Sachiko Kusukawa

Download or read book Transmitting Knowledge written by Sachiko Kusukawa and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period between the fifteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries saw a great many changes and innovations in scientific thinking. These were communicated to various publics in diverse ways; not only through discursive prose and formal notations, but also in the form of instruments and images accompanying texts. The collected essays of this volume examine the modes of transmission of this knowledge in a variety of contexts. The schematic representation of instruments is examined in the case of the 'navicula' (a versatile version of a sundial) and the 'squadro' (a surveying instrument); the new forms of illustration of plants and the human body are investigated through the work of Fuchs and Vesalius; theories of optics and of matter are discussed in relation to the illustrations which accompany the texts of Ausonio and Descartes. The different diagrammatic strategies adopted to explain the complex medical theory of the latitude of health are charted through the work of medieval and sixteenth-century physicians; Kepler's use of illustration in his handbook of cosmology is placed in the context of book production and Copernican propaganda. The conception of astronomical instruments as either calculating devices or as cosmological models is examined in the case of Tycho Brahe and others. A study is devoted to the multiple functions of frontispieces and to the various readerships for which they were conceived. The papers in the volume are all based on new research, and they constitute together a coherent and convergent set of case studies which demonstrate the vitality and inventiveness of early modern natural philosophers, and their awareness of the media available to them for transmitting knowledge.

Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy

Author : Deborah L Krohn
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317134559
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy by : Deborah L Krohn

Download or read book Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy written by Deborah L Krohn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570), the first illustrated cookbook, is well known to historians of food, up to now there has been no study of its illustrations, unique in printed books through the early seventeenth century. In Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy, Krohn both treats the illustrations in Scappi's cookbook as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations, including several newly-discovered hand-colored examples, connects Scappi's Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books. What emerges from both of these approaches is a new way of thinking about the place of cookbooks in the history of knowledge. Krohn argues that with the increasing professionalization of many skills and trades, Scappi was at the vanguard of a new way of looking not just at the kitchen-as workshop or laboratory-but at the ways in which artisanal knowledge was visualized and disseminated by a range of craftsmen, from engineers to architects. The recipes in Scappi's Opera belong on the one hand to a genre of cookery books, household manuals, and courtesy books that was well established by the middle of the sixteenth century, but the illustrations suggest connections to an entirely different and emergent world of knowledge. It is through study of the illustrations that these connections are discerned, explained, and interpreted. As one of the most important cookbooks for early modern Europe, the time is ripe for a focused study of Scappi's Opera in the various contexts in which Krohn frames it: book history, antiquarianism, and visual studies.

The Machines of Leonardo Da Vinci and Franz Reuleaux

Author : Francis C. Moon
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 1402055994
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis The Machines of Leonardo Da Vinci and Franz Reuleaux by : Francis C. Moon

Download or read book The Machines of Leonardo Da Vinci and Franz Reuleaux written by Francis C. Moon and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-10-29 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book will be of as much interest to engineers as to art historians, examining as it does the evolution of machine design methodology from the Renaissance to the Age of Machines in the 19th century. It provides detailed analysis, comparing design concepts of engineers of the 15th century Renaissance and the 19th century age of machines from a workshop tradition to the rational scientific discipline used today.

Architecture and Abstraction

Author : Pier Vittorio Aureli
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262373688
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Architecture and Abstraction by : Pier Vittorio Aureli

Download or read book Architecture and Abstraction written by Pier Vittorio Aureli and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark study of abstraction in architectural history, theory, and practice that challenges our assumptions about the meaning of abstract forms. In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, this book presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries. These divisions were anticipated by the architecture of antiquity, which established a distinction between manual and intellectual labor, and placed the former in service to the latter. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. In our own time, architectural abstraction serves the logic of capitalism and embraces the premise that all things can be exchanged—even experience itself is a commodity. To resist this turn, Aureli seeks a critique of architecture that begins not by scaling philosophical heights, but by standing at the ground level of material practice.

Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences

Author : Karel Davids
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004236953
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (42 download)

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Book Synopsis Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences by : Karel Davids

Download or read book Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences written by Karel Davids and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-11-09 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences Karel Davids offers a new perspective on technological change in China and Europe before the Industrial Revolution. This book makes an innovative contribution to current debates on the origins of the 'Great Divergence' between China and Europe and the ' Little Divergence' within Europe by analysing the relationship between the evolution of technical knowledge and religious contexts. It deals with the question to what extent disparities in the evolution of technical knowledge can be explained by differences in religious environment. It takes a comparative look at the relation between technology and religion in China and Europe between c.700 and 1800 from four angles: visions on the uses of nature, the formation of human capital , the circulation of technical knowledge and technical innovation.

Sketching as Design Thinking

Author : Alma R. Hoffmann
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429668600
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (296 download)

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Book Synopsis Sketching as Design Thinking by : Alma R. Hoffmann

Download or read book Sketching as Design Thinking written by Alma R. Hoffmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues for the importance of sketching as a mode of thinking, and the relevance of sketching in the design process, design education, and design practice. Through a wide range of analysis and discussion, the book looks at the history of sketching as a resource throughout the design process and asks questions such as: where does sketching come from? When did sketching become something different to drawing and how did that happen? What does sketching look like in the present day? Alongside an in-depth case study of students, teachers, and practitioners, this book includes a fascinating range of interviews with designers from a wide variety of backgrounds, including fashion, user experience, and architecture. Sketching as Design Thinking explains how drawing and sketching remain a prominent aspect in our learning and creative process, and provides a rich resource for students of visual art and design.

Picturing Technology in China

Author : Peter J. Golas
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
ISBN 13 : 9888208152
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (882 download)

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Book Synopsis Picturing Technology in China by : Peter J. Golas

Download or read book Picturing Technology in China written by Peter J. Golas and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the history of technological and scientific illustrations is a well-established field in the West, scholarship on the much longer Chinese experience is still undeveloped. This work by Peter Golas is a short, illustrated overview tracing the subject to pre-Han inscriptions but focusing mainly on the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. His main theme is that technological drawings developed in a different way in China from in the West largely because they were made by artists rather than by specialist illustrators or practitioners of technology. He examines the techniques of these artists, their use of painting, woodblock prints and the book, and what their drawings reveal about changing technology in agriculture, industry, architecture, astronomical, military, and other spheres. The text is elegantly written, and the images, about 100 in all, are carefully chosen. This is likely to appeal to both scholars and general readers.

Birth Figures

Author : Rebecca Whiteley
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226823121
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (268 download)

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Book Synopsis Birth Figures by : Rebecca Whiteley

Download or read book Birth Figures written by Rebecca Whiteley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-03-13 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: picturing pregnancy -- Part I: Early printed birth figures (1540-1672). Using images in midwifery practice; Pluralistic images and the early modern body -- Part II: Birth figures as agents of change (1672-1751). Visual experiments; Visualizing touch and defining a professional persona -- Part III: The birth figure persists (1751-1774). Challenging the Hunterian hegemony -- Conclusion.

Minerva Meets Vulcan: Scientific and Technological Literature – 1450–1750

Author : Wolfgang Lefèvre
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030730859
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (37 download)

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Book Synopsis Minerva Meets Vulcan: Scientific and Technological Literature – 1450–1750 by : Wolfgang Lefèvre

Download or read book Minerva Meets Vulcan: Scientific and Technological Literature – 1450–1750 written by Wolfgang Lefèvre and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-06-16 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive study and account of the co-evolution of technological and scientific literature in the early modern period (1450-1750). It examines the various relationships of these literatures in six areas of knowledge – Architecture, Chemistry, Gunnery, Mechanical Engineering, Mining, and Practical Mathematics – which represent the main types of advanced technological and scientific knowledge of the era. These six fields of technologically advanced knowledge and their interrelations and interactions with learned knowledge are investigated and discussed through a specific lens: by focusing on the technological literature. Among present-day historians of science, it hardly remains controversial that contact and exchange between educated and practical knowledge played a significant role in the development of the natural sciences and technology in early modern Europe. Several paths for such exchange arose from the late Middle Ages onward due to the formation of an economy of knowledge that fostered contacts and exchange between the two worlds. How can this development be adequately described and how, on the basis of such a description, can the significance of this process for the early modern history of knowledge in the West be assessed? These are the overarching questions this book tries to answer. There exists a considerable amount of literature concerning several stations and events in the course of this long development process as well as its various aspects. As meritorious and indispensable as many of these studies are, none of them tried to portray this process as a whole with its most essential branches. What is more, many of them implicitly or explicitly took physics as a model of science, and thus highlighted mechanics and mechanical engineering as the model of all interrelations of practical and learned knowledge. By contrast, this book aims at a more complete portrait of the early modern interrelations and interactions between learned and practical knowledge. It tries to convey a new idea of the variety and disunity of these relations by discussing and comparing altogether six widely different fields of knowledge and practice. The targeted audience of this book is first of all the historians of science and technology. As one of the peer reviewers suggested – the book could very well become a textbook used for teaching the history of science and technology at universities. Furthermore, since the book addresses fundamental aspects of the significance emergence and development of modern science has for the self-image of the West, it can be expected that it will attract the attention and interest of a wider readership than professional historians.

Skepticism’s Pictures

Author : Melissa Lo
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271096381
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Skepticism’s Pictures by : Melissa Lo

Download or read book Skepticism’s Pictures written by Melissa Lo and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2023-05-26 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In seventeenth-century northern Europe, as the Aristotelian foundations of scientia were rocked by observation, experiment, confessional strife, and political pressure, natural philosophers came to rely on the printed image to fortify their epistemologies—and none more so than René Descartes. In Skepticism’s Pictures, historian of science Melissa Lo chronicles the visual idioms that made, sustained, revised, and resisted Descartes’s new philosophy. Drawing on moon maps, political cartoons, student notebooks, treatises on practical mathematics, and other sources, Lo argues that Descartes transformed natural philosophy with the introduction of a new graphic language that inspired a wide range of pictorial responses shaped by religious affiliation, political commitment, and cultural convention. She begins by historicizing the graphic vocabularies of Descartes’s Essais and Principia philosophiae and goes on to analyze the religious and civic volatility of Descartes’s thought, which compelled defenders (such as Jacques Rohault and Wolferd Senguerd) to reconfigure his pictures according to their local visual cultures—and stimulated enemies (such as Gabriel Daniel) to unravel Descartes’s visual logic with devastating irony. In the epilogue, Lo explains why nineteenth-century French philosophers divorced Descartes’s thought from his pictures, creating a modern image of reason and a version of philosophy absent visuality. Engaging and accessible, Skepticism’s Pictures presents an exciting new approach to Descartes and the visual reception of seventeenth-century physics. It will appeal to historians of early modern European science, philosophy, art, and culture and to art historians interested in histories that give images their argumentative power.

The Process Genre

Author : Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478007079
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis The Process Genre by : Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky

Download or read book The Process Genre written by Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From IKEA assembly guides and “hands and pans” cooking videos on social media to Mister Rogers's classic factory tours, representations of the step-by-step fabrication of objects and food are ubiquitous in popular media. In The Process Genre Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky introduces and theorizes the process genre—a heretofore unacknowledged and untheorized transmedial genre characterized by its representation of chronologically ordered steps in which some form of labor results in a finished product. Originating in the fifteenth century with machine drawings, and now including everything from cookbooks to instructional videos and art cinema, the process genre achieves its most powerful affective and ideological results in film. By visualizing technique and absorbing viewers into the actions of social actors and machines, industrial, educational, ethnographic, and other process films stake out diverse ideological positions on the meaning of labor and on a society's level of technological development. In systematically theorizing a genre familiar to anyone with access to a screen, Skvirsky opens up new possibilities for film theory.

The Structures of Practical Knowledge

Author : Matteo Valleriani
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319456717
Total Pages : 491 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (194 download)

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Book Synopsis The Structures of Practical Knowledge by : Matteo Valleriani

Download or read book The Structures of Practical Knowledge written by Matteo Valleriani and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-20 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Structures of Practical Knowledge investigates the nature of practical knowledge – why, how, when and by whom it is codified, and once codified, how this knowledge is structured. The inquiry unfolds in a series of fifteen case studies, which range in focus from early modern Italy to eighteenth century China. At the heart of each study is a shared definition of practical knowledge, that is, knowledge needed to obtain a certain outcome, whether that be an artistic or mechanical artifact, a healing practice, or a mathematical result. While the content of practical knowledge is widely variable, this study shows that all practical knowledge is formally equivalent in following a defined workflow, as reflected in a construction procedure, a recipe, or an algorithm. As explored in the volume’s fifteen contributions, there are three levels at which structures of practical knowledge may be understood and examined. At the most immediate level, there are the individual workflows that encompasses practical knowledge itself. Probing further, it is possible to examine the structure of practical knowledge as it is externalized and codified in texts, drawings, and artifacts such as models. Finally, practical knowledge is also related to social structures, which fundamentally determine its dissemination and evolution into new knowledge structures. The social structures of professionals and institutions represent the critical means by which practical knowledge takes form. These actors are the agents of codification, and by means of selection, appropriation, investment, and knowledge development, they determine the formation of new structures of practical knowledge. On a more abstract level, the creation of new knowledge structures is understood as constituting the basis for the further development of scientific knowledge. Rich in subject matter and incisive in the theory it lays out, this volume represents an important contribution to the history of science and epistemology. Individually, the fifteen case studies – encompassing the history of architecture, mining, brewing, glass production, printing, ballistics, mechanics, cartography, cosmology and astronomy – are replete with original research, and offer new insights into the history of science. Taken together, the contributions remodel historical epistemology as a whole, elucidating the underlining knowledge structures that transcend disciplinary boundaries, and that unite practitioners across time and space.

Observing the World through Images

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004263853
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (42 download)

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Book Synopsis Observing the World through Images by :

Download or read book Observing the World through Images written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The well-illustrated articles in Observing the World through Images offer insights into the uses of images in astronomy, mathematics, instrument-making, medicine and alchemy, highlighting shared forms as well as those peculiar to individual disciplines. Themes addressed include: the processes of image production and communication; the transformation of images through copying and adaptation for new purposes; genres and traditions of imagery in particular scientific disciplines; the mnemonic and pedagogical value of diagrams; the relationship between text and image; and the roles of diagrams as tools to think with. Contributors include: Isabelle Pantin, Jennifer Rampling, Samuel Gessner, Renee Raphael, Karin Ekholm, Hester Higton, and Katie Taylor.

Picturing the Book of Nature

Author : Sachiko Kusukawa
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226465292
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

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Book Synopsis Picturing the Book of Nature by : Sachiko Kusukawa

Download or read book Picturing the Book of Nature written by Sachiko Kusukawa and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-05-21 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because of their spectacular, naturalistic pictures of plants and the human body, Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium and Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica are landmark publications in the history of the printed book. But as Picturing the Book of Nature makes clear, they do more than bear witness to the development of book publishing during the Renaissance and to the prominence attained by the fields of medical botany and anatomy in European medicine. Sachiko Kusukawa examines these texts, as well as Conrad Gessner’s unpublished Historia plantarum, and demonstrates how their illustrations were integral to the emergence of a new type of argument during this period—a visual argument for the scientific study of nature. To set the stage, Kusukawa begins with a survey of the technical, financial, artistic, and political conditions that governed the production of printed books during the Renaissance. It was during the first half of the sixteenth century that learned authors began using images in their research and writing, but because the technology was so new, there was a great deal of variety of thought—and often disagreement—about exactly what images could do: how they should be used, what degree of authority should be attributed to them, which graphic elements were bearers of that authority, and what sorts of truths images could and did encode. Kusukawa investigates the works of Fuchs, Gessner, and Vesalius in light of these debates, scrutinizing the scientists’ treatment of illustrations and tracing their motivation for including them in their works. What results is a fascinating and original study of the visual dimension of scientific knowledge in the sixteenth century.