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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Jennifer Tucker and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Notes
1. For excellent overviews of the intellectual, cultural, and economic background surrounding the creation and publication of the Encyclopédie, see Blom, Enlightening the World, and Darnton, Business of Enlightenment. For discussions of the development of the plates, see Gillispie, A Diderot Pictorial Encyclopedia, and Pinault, ‘Les Métamorphoses des Planches.’ For a superb in-depth study of how trades and engineering were visualized in the eighteenth century, including in the Encyclopédie, see Fox’s The Arts of Industry.
2. Pinault (‘Les Métamorphoses des Planches’) documents how the Encyclopédie appropriated images from previous encyclopedias and scientific and technical texts, including Chambers’ Cyclopaedia and the Académie des Sciences’ Descriptions des Arts et Métiers. Although the Encyclopédie’s chief illustrator, Louis-Jacques Goussier, was charged with overseeing the rendering of the plates, which included a vast array of new images, many of the plates were copies or adaptations of previous plates (Blom, 46–47, 255–57; Fox, 269–71; Gillispie, Vol. 1, xxi-xxiii), creating a complex interweaving of sources and of old and new images.
3. Kostelnick and Hassett, Shaping Information, 10–42.
4. Israel, Revolution of the Mind, vii–viii. According to Israel, Diderot was among a handful of intellectuals who promoted the egalitarian values of the “Radical Enlightenment.”
5. Ashwin, ‘Drawing, Design, and Semiotics,’ 45–47.
6. For example, see water-pumping devices in Ramelli (Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine), Figures II, V, X, and XXIX; see also Branca, Le Machine, Pt. 2, Figure 8.
7. Böckler’s windmill drawings (Figures 31 and 32) in mirror-image form resemble very closely Ramelli’s drawings (Figures CXXXII and CXXXIII) from the previous century.
8. Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind’s Eye, 130–35; see also Fox, 266, and Blom, 263–64.
9. Diderot, Encyclopédie, V, 645.
10. See, for example, Switzer’s picture of a waterworks (Vol. 2, Pl. 16).
11. Buchanan, ‘Declaration by Design,’ 9–14.
12. Booker, A History of Engineering Drawing, narrates this transition to more abstract and specialized conventional codes in the nineteenth century (37–47).
13. For example, previous engineering books like Agricola (1556), Besson (1578), Ramelli (1588), Zonca (1607), Branca (1629), Böckler (1673), and Leupold (1724) include human figures in many of their plates, though often as one or two figures at a time, presumably to emphasize the small amount of human power required to operate the depicted machines. In the eighteenth century, the Académie Royale des Sciences’ Machines et Inventions pictured human figures engaged with technology, but on a far smaller scale than the Encyclopédie or the Académie des Sciences’ Descriptions des Arts et Métiers; human figures appear only occasionally in Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia and the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
14. See, for example, Böckler’s Theatrum Machinarum Novum, Plates 12, 26, and 101.
15. Pannabecker, ‘Diderot, Rousseau, and the Mechanical Arts,’ 12–14.
16. Geisler, ‘How Ought We to Understand,’ provides an overview of contemporary approaches to rhetorical agency.
17. Among several theorists who have provided the impetus for a widening expanse of agency are Said, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Latour.
18. Jackson, ‘Bodies of Enlightenment,’ 49. The constant presence of people in the plates echoes visually what Edelstein (The Enlightenment) argues is the focus of the Enlightenment narrative: society (31--36).
19. As Blom (Enlightening the World) observes, “By implicitly shifting the balance away from the nobility and the lives of the great towards humble, often anonymous, manual work, Diderot, the son of a cutler, and d’Alembert, adopted by a glazier, intended to declare boldly, if not loudly, what was really important in the world” (46).
20. Indeed, as Sonenscher (Work and Wages) points out, the hierarchical power relations among various categories of workers in eighteenth-century French workshops were fairly contingent and changeable (47).
21. Women are visualized in several plates in Agricola’s De Re Metallica (1556), but these figures typically do gender-specific tasks like washing and sorting rather than more skilled and specialized tasks.
22. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 4–23, elaborates on Will Eisner’s earlier use of the term in Comics and Sequential Art.
23. Peaucelle (‘Adam Smith’s Use of Multiple References’) documents how Smith in his Wealth of Nations (Vol. I, 6–9) consulted several sources, including the Encyclopédie, to illustrate the division of labor with pin making.
24. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, xv.
25. Académie des Sciences, Descriptions des Arts et Métiers, Vols. 4–5.
26. See Hussey (The Picturesque) for a seminal history of the English picturesque, and Hunt (The Picturesque Garden) for a history of its influence across Europe and for an account of Watelet’s picturesque project Moulin-Joli at Colombes (115–7).
27. Hussey (The Picturesque) associates several of these visual elements with picturesque landscape and aesthetics. Numerous plates from the Descriptions des Arts et Métiers also contain elements of picturesque landscape.
28. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, xv.
29. See Bender and Merrinan, The Culture of Diagram, 35–38.
30. Russell and Thornton, Gardens and Landscapes, compile and explain the many textual and pictorial descriptions of gardens that appear throughout the Encyclopédie.
31. Several examples of picturesque ruins appear in the plates on ‘Antiquités’ in Recueil de Planches (Vol. 1). Although Piranesi was the master of this genre, pictures of reclaimed ruins appear throughout the eighteenth century, including in Hubert Robert’s paintings and in Joseph Turner’s famous 1790s drawing of Tintern Abbey. An early textual account of the emerging picturesque aesthetic, and the importance of ruins, appears in Gilpin’s 1748 Dialogue on the gardens at Stowe.
32. The domestic picturesque was promoted by English landscape designers like Capability Brown and his successors Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price, and Humphry Repton.