Figure 59: Illustrations and illustrated books for instruction

 

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“Picturing knowledge” in Antiquity

Middle Ages

Comenius: „Orbis pictus“ (1658) – Leibniz: „Atlas universalis“ (1678)

 

 

In most books on „images of science“ we have much more „representations“ of things and processes which are real or are believed to be real, than of abstract objects or facts.

 

 

“Picturing knowledge” in Antiquity

 

Peter Jeffrey Booker starts his “History of Engineering Drawing” (1963) with the ancient Greeks. In his richly illustrated book on „images of science“, Brian J. Ford (1992) goes back to cave paintings and pictures of early civilizations. The painting of a snake in Mesopotamia (6000 or 5000 BC) may already be regarded as a teaching aid (Ford, 1992, 13).

For “picturing knowledge” see also Harry Robin (1992), Brian Scott Baigrie (1996), Jennifer B. Lee and Miriam Mandelbaum (1999), Wolfgang Lefèvre, Jürgen Renn and Urs Schoepflin (2003).

 

Pictures in books with the aim of instruction can be seen in the works of Kurt Weitzmann (1959) and Alfred Stückelberger (1994).

Clemens Schwender (2005, 8-38) starts with a map and a broken piece with a balloon in front of the mouth of a worker from Old Egypt and the picture of a wire rope hoist from Assyria. Other examples of visualization are the Egyptian books of the dead, which since the 26th dynasty (7th century BC) are divided in chapters and ornated with vignettes.

 

Because of the astir cultural interchange with Egypt since the 6th century BC (e. g. Thales, Hekataios, Pythagoras) book pictures as well as picture books came to old Greece.

On the one side schoolbooks needed illustrations: astronomical and geometrical instructive pictures were assumedly used since the 6th century BC, medical pictures since the 4th century BC (Kurt Weitzmann, 1959).

On the other side also mythological handbooks, the Homeric epics, the tragedies of Euripides and bucolic poems were provided with illustrations (Kurt Weitzmann, 1959).

 

In various works („De caelo“, „Meteorologica“, „Historia animalium“) Aristotle refers assertively to diagrammes and drawings (Alfred Stückelberger, 1994) Euclid’s „Elementa“ (after 300 BC) contain some hundred geometrical drawings, assumably already in antique times. For his „Mechanica syntaxis“ Philon of Byzanz himself draw a great number of „schemata“.

 

 

Middle Ages

 

With the diffusion of christianity rich illustrations of all kinds blew to illustrate texts of the Scripture and of Homer and Vergil as well as pictures of sometimes phantastic plants and animals, and also of mythological events and astronomical personifications.

 

More than pictures on scattered fragments of papyrus are preserved only since 500 AD, starting with the famous Dioscurides Codex with nearly 400 whole-page colored representations of plants. Rich illustrations to technical oeuvres are preserved only since about 1000 AD (Alfred Stückelberger, 1994).

 

Clemens Schwender (2005, 8-38) presents the „Hortus deliciarum“ of Herrad of Landsperg (1175-1195) and the famous sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt (1235), containing also many patterns for masons.

 

Comenius: „Orbis pictus“ (1658) – Leibniz: „Atlas universalis“ (1678)

 

A later famous book with didactic illustrations is the „Orbis pictus“ of Jan Amos Comenius (1658).

It is inspired by Campanella’s „City of the Sun“ (1602) and inspired itself Leibniz’ draft of an „Atlas universalis" (ca. 1678) in which he e. g. proposed to collect machines and models, but also “imprimis libri, qui dogmata sua figuris illustrant” (Leibniz, 1903, 222-224).

 

 

Bibliography

model: special topics:

Wissenschaft im Altertum

Abbildungen/ Illustrationen

Design/ technisches Zeichnen/ Gebrauchsgegenstände

 

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