Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

by Susan Dackerman (Editor), Claudia Swan (Contributor), Suzanne Karr Schmidt (Contributor)

An unusual collaboration among distinguished art historians and historians of science, this book demonstrates how printmakers of the Northern Renaissance, far from merely illustrating the ideas of others, contributed to scientific investigations of their time. Hans Holbein, for instance, worked with cosmographers and instrument makers on some of the earliest sundial manuals published; Albrecht Dürer produced the first printed maps of the constellations, which astronomers copied for over a century; and Hendrick Goltzius's depiction of the muscle-bound Hercules served as a study aid for students of anatomy. 

Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe features fascinating reproductions of woodcuts, engravings, and etchings; maps, globe gores, and globes; multilayered anatomical "flap" prints; and paper scientific instruments used for observation and measurement. Among the "do-it-yourself" paper instruments were sundials and astrolabes, and the book incorporates a facsimile of globe gores for the reader to cut out and assemble.

Genres: Art, Art History, History Of Science, History

442 pages, Paperback

First published September 27, 2011

Reviews

[Firefox]

Only went through the pictures

[Kon · Rating 4 out of 5]

so many cool prints of rhinoceros

[Lette Hass]

...By the mid-sixteenth century, observations had become a word to conjure with --not only among astronomers but also among philologist, jurists, and especially physicians; by the late seventeenth century, it was paired with another new form of learned experience, the experiment, as the proud emblem of the reformed natural history and natural philosophy cultivated by the first scientific academies. By the mid-eighteenth century, observation was the most fundamental and pervasive practice of all the empirical sciences, and also the most prestigious. ...