Introduction

Summary

Accuracy is not a characteristic that is innate in an image. It does not simply reside there, perfect and unchanging. Instead it is made. Made by hand. Made by a person. In the case of early modern scientific illustrations, it was often made with a burin. The engraver used a burin to carve lines into a prepared copper plate. These lines were then inked and printed onto dampened paper. As the paper moved through the press, the rollers pressed the damp paper into the carved lines. The ink was soaked up into the paper and an intaglio print was made. Whether accuracy was achieved depended on many variables: who made it, how he made it, where it appeared, how the surrounding text described it, what other images the viewer had seen. These variables could be controlled and needed to be to produce the effect of accuracy.

Early modern scholars and artisans worked together and separately to preclude the introduction of errors at every step. This is not to say that all the images then looked the same. On the contrary, accuracy implied careful methods of production, not visual consistency across instances of representation. Accuracy was constructed through a series of decisions by the author/artist and perceived by the reader through a series of judgments based on a reader's experience of the world, an image's relationship to other images, and the text accompanying it. The perception of an image's accuracy was the product of participation in a shared visual culture. Visual training was a precursor to the mutual acceptance of the accuracy of images. This training operated across a range of disciplines and through an unrecognized, but significant genealogy of image makers, consumers, and contexts. To understand how accuracy developed as a desired trait in an image, this book examines intaglio printed images produced by and for the Fellows of the Royal Society of London from 1660 to 1680.

“Claiming the Resemblance of Life”

Founded in 1660 for the promotion of experimental learning, the Royal Society brought together like-minded individuals intent on gaining a betterunderstanding of nature through the collection of observations and the production of experiments. Fellows published the results of their experiments and observations both in single-author works and in the Philosophical Transactions, which in this period were the unofficial corporate record of their activities.