The five essays brought together in this special issue were originally delivered at a workshop organised in March 2009 by the Centre for the History of Medicine at Indiana University, Bloomington. The authors revised and expanded the essays in response to that day's discussions and numerous subsequent exchanges. We wish to thank all participants for their help and suggestions in the discussions, and particularly to thank Trevor Levere for his enthusiasm for this project and his editorial acumen.
The papers in this issue span the period from the Renaissance to the late seventeenth century and cover a number of topics ranging from the sources of the animals illustrated and the role of colour to the multiple functions of animal representation at the court of Louis XIV. The differing formats of illustrations, including manuscripts and varieties of print media, equally display a wide range. The development of printing and engraving techniques during this period allowed for the extensive use of illustrations in printed texts, and this new use of illustration had important consequences for the intellectual content and disciplinary scope of natural history and comparative anatomy. At the same time, manuscript illustrations served as models for print but also carried their own visual weight. Illustrations also served as templates for assigning names and identities to previously unknown animals.
Sachiko Kusukawa's detective work has identified a variety of sources for the illustrations in Conrad Gessner's Historia animalium (1551–1558), both declared and undeclared: they include live and dried specimens, as well as images from manuscripts and printed books. Kusukawa's detailed analysis shows that while Gessner's criteria for selecting his sources were not necessarily based on direct visual inspection, they were not arbitrary either, and need to be examined in a historically sensitive way. Her account complicates earlier historiographical discussions of Renaissance natural history illustration and expands our notion of just what constituted ‘experience’ in this era.
In her study of Hieronimus Fabricius and William Harvey, Karin Ekholm has analysed three forms of representation of animal generation, namely printed engravings, colour plates, and verbal descriptions. Ekholm's detailed analysis of images and texts offers a strikingly original iconographic and verbal triangulation which reveals contrasting views of the value of visual representation. Moreover, based on the peculiar features of the copy of Fabricius's work in Philadelphia, Ekholm has suggested that the hand-coloured plates Fabricius deposited at the Marciana Library in Venice were the likely inspiration for the printed coloured plates in Gasparo Aselli's De lactibus (1627). Her suggestion provides a novel context for grasping the origin of what is widely considered as the first anatomical book with printed coloured plates.
Colour plays a significant role in Kusukawa's and Ekholm's papers, at the intersection among private manuscripts, public manuscripts deposited in libraries for public use, hand-coloured printed copies, and printed coloured plates. Colour served a variety of purposes, from the identification of different types of weasels in Gessner, to the careful rendering of textures and the layering of membranes in Fabricius. Readers will find rich visual and intellectual material for reflection on these topics in Kusukawa's and Ekholm's papers.
Sarah Cohen has studied the drawing of human and animal heads by Charles Le Brun, Director of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and First Painter to Louis XIV. In the aftermath of the debates inspired by Descartes on the existence of soul in animals, Le Brun's drawings show humanised animal heads and human heads resembling the heads of animals, thus posing tantalising philosophical questions as to the identity and distinguishing features of animals and humans. LeBrun's heads blur the boundary between the animal and the human in suggestive and disturbing ways.
Anita Guerrini has made the Paris Academy's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux (1671 and 1676) the focus of her contribution. The lavishly produced volumes straddled different disciplinary domains, from natural history to art to comparative anatomy, and were addressed to multiple audiences, from the French aristocracy to the scholarly community. Unlike Gessner's Historia animalium, all the figures in the Histoire des animaux were based on direct inspection of the specimens. But the representation of animals in the Paris volume still raises questions, including the sources of the animals, their symbolic value in Louis's court, the collaboration between artists and anatomists, and the role of the highly artificial backgrounds.
Cohen and Guerrini look at Louis XIV's (and his minister Colbert's) control of cultural production, both scientific and artistic, and how science and art mingle in the representation of animals. The philosophical debates about animal soul are never far away from these representations.
Lastly, Domenico Bertoloni Meli focuses on the interplay between techniques of investigation and representation of insects. Insects pose unusual problems because of their diminutive size and esoteric nature: anatomists had to render figures of peculiar body parts intelligible and readers had to grapple with images that had no correspondence to their experiences. The use of the microscope revealed unexpectedly complex organisms, while also posing considerable technical and interpretive problems. Bertoloni Meli relies on a comparative approach highlighting the choices made in the investigation and especially the representation of insects in a few significant cases from Francesco Stelluti to Jan Swammerdam. His contribution identifies a number of iconographic dialogues in which investigators challenged and responded to each other through images.
Ekholm's and Bertoloni Meli's emphasis on a comparative approach helps the reader view images in a highly focused way: the interplay between Fabricius's oil plates and etchings of the same anatomical specimen offers striking perspectives on the relative merits of the two techniques of representation. Likewise, the many pairs of images of insects in Bertoloni Meli's essay, from Stelluti's and Redi's weevil to Hodierna's and Hooke's eye of the fly, from Hooke's and Swammerdam's water gnat to Malpighi's and Swammerdam's nervous system of the silkworm, provide effective instantiations of the fruitfulness of a comparative approach.
During the sixty or more years between the events described in Kusukawa's essay and those in Ekholm's, and an additional sixty between Ekholm's essay and Guerrini's, comparative anatomy developed significantly. Gessner cited anatomical investigations, but these played little role in the greater scheme of the Historia animalium, which focused primarily on external characteristics. Fabricius referred to his larger project as a ‘theatre of the entire animal structure’ (‘totius animalis fabricae theatrum’), which included humans. His illustrations of different types of placentas, for example, supported his Aristotelian idea that animals could be classified in broad groups based on particular characteristics. By contrast, Perrault and his colleagues at the Paris Academy of Sciences claimed to look at animals as individuals and as entire organisms rather than as members of a group. Particular parts enhanced their singularity rather than aiding in classification. Perrault claimed that classification was impossible in the current state of knowledge, and humans remained a distant referent. Yet as Cohen's essay shows, the relationship in this period between human and animal was uneasy and the boundaries contested. Identifying ‘the animal’ would not be a simple task. Creatures such as insects only complicated the picture further in that seventeenth-century investigators showed that their internal anatomy was as complex as that of larger animals.
Seen together, the essays that compose this special issue offer a striking picture—intellectually as well as visually—of the complex world associated with the representation of animals in the early modern period. They also give insight into the central role played by animals in early modern natural philosophy. We very much hope that readers will establish other connections among the papers and will be stimulated to reflect further on these issues.