Conclusion

Summary

The four chapters of this book have traced a complex web of interrelationships among people, material objects, drawings, and intaglio printed images, all of which were actively involved in the development of understandings of accuracy in the period. As these chapters have shown, these relationships were not simply binaries. Prints and drawings were not related through a logic of exclusion, that is, the carving of information into a copper plate did not negate the value of the drawing on which the print was based. Instead, the durable interdependencies of different modes of representation put pressure on an understanding of the relationship between prints and drawings as adversarial. As the chapters on Willughby's Ornithology and the Philosophical Transactions show, drawings were not necessarily the preliminary step toward creating a printed image. Drawings were made after prints and prints were made after other prints. Prints and drawing were intricately wound together in the early visual culture of the Royal Society. Further, I have stressed over these four chapters that their relationship was neither adversarial nor linear. Both drawings and prints were essential to the visual communication of knowledge by Fellows of the Royal Society and their correspondents, and the same care that went into performing experiments also went into creating images.

Following the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I have treated each of the works considered in this study as rhizomatic structures that exceed their bindings; that is, as interconnected networks of information. The works considered are intertextual and intermedial—they are interconnected with other texts, images, and objects and, thus, the chapters were necessarily “comparative” in that they set the books in a dense web of other books, single-sheet prints, and drawings. The chapters traced the complex interrelationships between material objects and images by both looking closely at the resulting printed images and by systematically tracing the source material for those images. The intermediality of the works under consideration was not proposed in abstract terms, but rather in concretehistoricized terms allowing for a deeper understanding of how accuracy was produced at a given moment in the past.

By including the burin in the pantheon of scientific instruments, I have thus argued that illustration was integral to the experiments and their communication.