Visualizing the Text: From Manuscript Culture to the Age of Caricature

By Janine Rogers, Rachel Schmidt, Cecilia Brain and 6 more

This volume presents in-depth and contextualized analyses of a wealth of visual materials. These documents provide viewers with a mesmerizing and informative glimpse into how the early modern world was interpreted by image-makers and presented to viewers during a period that spans from manuscript culture to the age of caricature. The premise of this collection responds to a fundamental question: how are early modern texts, objects, and systems of knowledge imaged and consumed through bimodal, hybrid, or intermedial products that rely on both words and pictures to convey meaning? The twelve contributors to this collection go beyond traditional lines of inquiry into word-and-image interaction to deconstruct visual dynamics and politics—to show how images were shaped, manipulated, displayed, and distributed to represent the material world, to propagate official and commercial messages, to support religious practice and ideology, or to embody relations of power. These chapters are anchored in various theoretical and disciplinary points of departure, such as the history of collections and collecting, literary theory and criticism, the histories of science, art history and visual culture, word-and-image studies, as well as print culture and book illustration. Authors draw upon a wide range of visual material hitherto insufficiently explored and placed in context, in some cases hidden in museums and archives, or previously assessed only from a disciplinary standpoint that favored either the image or the text but not both in relation to each other. They include manuscript illuminations representing compilers and collections, frontispieces and other accompanying plates published in catalogues and museographies, astronomical diagrams, mixed pictographic-alphabetic accounting documents, Spanish baroque paintings, illustrative frontispieces or series inspired by or designed for single novels or anthologies, anatomical drawings featured in encyclopedic publications, visual patterns of volcanic formations, engravings representing the New World that accompany non-fictional travelogues, commonplace books that interlace text and images, and graphic satire. Geographically, the collection covers imperial centers (Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Spain), as well as their colonial periphery (New France; Mexico; Central America; South America, in particular Brazil; parts of Africa; and the island of Ceylon). Emblematic and thought-provoking, these images are only fragments of the multifaceted and comprehensive visual mosaic created during the early modern period, but their consideration has far reaching implications.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: May 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781644530290

Book preview

Visualizing the Text

Visualizing the Text

From Manuscript Culture to the Age of Caricature

Edited by Lauren Beck and Christina Ionescu

University of Delaware Press

Newark

University of Delaware Press

© 2017 by the University of Delaware Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

ISBN 978-1-64453-028-3 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64453-029-0 (ebook)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file under LC# 2017005513

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Representing Space: Book Culture, Visual Perspectivism, and Intercultural Communication

Chapter 1: Compiling Creation

Chapter 2: Cosmography and Perspectivism

Chapter 3: The Development of Mixed Pictographic-Alphabetic Accounting Documents in Colonial Mexico

Part II: Annotating the Image: Baroque Painting, News Maps, and Print Captions

Chapter 4: Annotation and Books inEarly Modern Spanish Painting

Chapter 5: Visualizing the News

Chapter 6: Text on Image on Text

Part III: Imagining Empirical Knowledge: Illustrated Travelogues, Natural History Treatises, and Geological Texts

Chapter 7: Description and Representation in Oviedo’s and Staden’s Travel Accounts of the New World

Chapter 8: Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton’s Anatomic Descriptions Complemented by Jacques de Sève’s Drawings

Chapter 9: From Analogies to Patterns

Part IV: Illustrating the Text: Engraved Exotica, Traces of Reading, and Satirical Books

Chapter 10: Dialectic of / on Foreignness

Chapter 11: Illustrating for Posterity

Chapter 12: Caricature Untrammelled

Contributors

Acknowledgments

The editors wish to thank Julia Oestreich at the University of Delaware Press for her support and professionalism. In its development stage, this project was enthusiastically championed by Donald Mell; after its completion, Edward Larkin, the current interim director, expertly guided it through the peer review process. We wish to acknowledge the valuable input provided by the anonymous peer reviewers and the editorial board, whose insightful comments and practical suggestions helped us improve the coherence of the volume.

This book is one of the projects radiating from the workshop Text on Image, Image on Text (1450–1789), hosted at Mount Allison University (Sackville, New Brunswick), from August 21 to 23, 2013. The long and fervent discussions held in formal and informal surroundings were instrumental not only in sharpening our understanding of early modern visual culture but also in contributing to our awareness of the challenges facing academia today. For a unique and meaningful collaboration, we owe a debt of gratitude to the ready and willing participants in the workshop activities and to the generous contributors to this book, whom we sincerely thank for remaining patient during a long editorial process. The workshop was generously supported by a Connection Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and would not have been possible without it.

We are grateful for the financial support provided by our institution, which was used primarily to defray the costs of publishing a large number of images that appear in this collection. For his stalwart efforts in our fundraising campaign, we warmly thank David Bruce, director of Research Services. We wish to register the financial and scholarly support provided by our administration, which enabled us to complete the project, and profusely thank our provost (Jeff Ollerhead), dean of Arts (Elizabeth Wells), and head of the department of Modern Languages and Literatures (Kirsty Bell). We would be remiss if we did not also thank our colleagues in the department of Modern Languages and Literatures for supporting our research activities.

Last but not least, we acknowledge the administrative assistance expertly offered to the project by Natalie Pauley and the extensive technical support lent by Candace Sears at the Ralph Pickard Bell Library.

Introduction

Visualizing the Text from Manuscript Culture to the Age of Caricature: A Theoretical, Methodological, and Conceptual Framework¹

Christina Ionescu

Pictures form a point of peculiar friction and discomfort across a broad range of intellectual inquiry.

—W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory²

It is often suggested—or assumed—that in premodern societies, visual images were not especially important, partly because there were so few of them in circulation.

—Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies³

During the time that missionary Louis Hennepin spent exploring the Great Lakes region with René-Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, he penned a page-long report of Niagara Falls that was published in his Description de la Louisiane (1683); it constitutes the earliest print account of the landmark. Hennepin later returned to this subject and expanded his original report into a vibrant six-page description that first appeared in the 1697 French edition of his Nouvelle découverte d’un très grand pays situé dans l’Amérique entre le Nouveau-Mexique et la Mer glaciale and was subsequently translated with verve into other languages. Embracing a presublime means of verbal representation, Hennepin captures, in a combination of fear and rapture, a vast and prodigious Cadence of Water which falls down after a surprising and astonishing manner, insomuch that the Universe does not afford its Parallel.⁴ For the first time, European readers could see the Niagara Falls described by Hennepin in an engraving that accompanied this work, which was attributed to the Dutch artist Jan van Vianen and dated 1697 (Figure 1). Even though Hennepin does not specify that the source of the incredible amount of water is mountainous, van Vianen inserts massifs in the distant background of his work to suggest otherwise. The artist also shows spectators gazing in admiration at the natural spectacle and exaggerates the size of their hands to draw attention to the object of their attention. Like its written counterpart, the image amplifies the height of the falls: in his original account, Hennepin estimated them to be more than five hundred feet high, but fourteen years later, he augmented that measurement to over six hundred feet. Before the reader-viewer’s eyes are two great Cross-streams of Water, and two Falls, with an Isle sloping along the middle of it.⁵ Hennepin is referring to present-day Goat Island, the small landmass in the Niagara River named in the seventeenth century by John Stedman, which is located between Bridal Veil Falls and Horseshoe Falls, also shown in this image. To illustrate the horseshoe configuration of the falls on the right side of the image, the artist positions a stream of water flowing in a highly unrealistic manner behind what was at the time Table Rock—a large shelf of rock that jutted out from the shore of the Horseshoe Falls and has since fallen due to erosion.

A residual of our geographic past, van Vianen’s image is not only an eye-catching iconographic document of historic importance but also an influential vista that, inserted within the material framework of the book, responds along with the text to the public’s fascination with the New World. This late-seventeenth-century image of Niagara Falls became an iconic visual representation of the natural wonder and fundamentally impacted the way in which this site was imaged during the following one hundred years. This engraving constitutes, however, only one of the countless examples of the compelling ways in which textual descriptions and narratives were visually transposed throughout this important period in history that continues to be known more for its ideas than its images. The aim of the present collection is to showcase a wide array of such visually arresting and culturally significant early modern images to advance our understanding of how ideas, beliefs, fashions, values, and experiences were represented, disseminated, and debated during this formative period in the history of Western civilization. Before introducing the content and objectives of this collection, Visualizing the Text: From Manuscript Culture to the Age of Caricature, it is important to delineate the theoretical, methodological, and conceptual framework of our collective endeavor.

Figure 1. Description du Saut, ou chuete d’eau de Niagara, qui se voit entre Lac Ontario, & le Lac Erié, unsigned engraving, 1697.

Context and Challenges: The Field of Early Modern Visual Culture

In a thought-provoking 1992 study, W. J. T. Mitchell observed that contemporary theory and culture had taken a pictorial turn, which manifested itself through critics affording an unprecedented importance to pictures and the visual realm.⁶ When surveying the field of visual culture, it can be comfortably asserted, however, that specialists of the early modern period were slow to follow in that direction. While outlining the emergence of the field in a monograph published in 2014, Karen Stanworth notes that [m]any authors approach visual culture studies as a specifically modern phenomenon aligned with late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century advances in visual technology, such as television, film, and virtual spaces, and with research focusing on popular culture, media studies, and contemporary art practices.⁷ If critics dealing with the early modern period no doubt fully embraced the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, which communicates the idea that visual representation conveys information more economically and more successfully than verbal description, they remained, until recently, highly skeptical of the usefulness and reliability of visual documents—an observation that is confirmed by pre-2000 scholarly output in this area. This ingrained mistrust, which is perhaps justified by the semantic polyvalence inherent in visual representation, by the restricted impact of pre-nineteenth-century pictures because of their perceived scarcity, or by the habitual dissemination of images as vehicles of propaganda, was a barrier that had to be surmounted if studies on the early modern period were to take a pictorial turn as well. One of the most important challenges of conducting research within the context of, or centered upon, any vibrant and diverse visual culture defined by norms, conventions, and ideologies is of a theoretical and methodological nature.

As an autonomous field of study, visual culture has existed since the 1980s, but its domain and methodology are still nebulous despite the publication of a plethora of readers, introductions, histories, handbooks, and surveys. These publications aim at teaching visual literacy by deconstructing the practices of looking and interpreting with the help of various theoretical approaches and, in the process, present seminal contributions by specialists in visual theory.⁸ Prior to the emergence of visual culture as a field of study, images fell into the purview of art history, which mostly took into consideration fine art to the detriment of popular, marginal, or hybrid artifacts. In their groundbreaking introduction to Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (1994), which does not neglect the early modern period, editors Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey no doubt must have raised a few eyebrows when they referred to the essays included in their collection as contributions to a history of images rather than to a history of art.⁹ Their decision signaled an important turn in art history scholarship—a move away from the canon of aesthetic masterpieces upon which specialists normally lavished critical attention and toward the study of the cultural context and meaning of images in general. Once this democratic view that all images are worthy of attention became widely adopted, theorists began to focus on how to organize and interpret newly rediscovered visual corpora. Nonetheless, the complexity of this endeavor has to date prevented them from reaching a consensus on how it should be most productively conducted; thus, the study of early modern images is still somewhat interstitial.

What stands in the way of establishing a clear and universally applicable methodology is that visual culture as a field is not selective or discriminatory based on form, value, and importance. It encompasses, and equally values, visual expression in all of its richness, including drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, graphic design, photography, film, television, and digital media, as well as multimedia collaborations, such as installation and text-based conceptual art. Interestingly, this already broad field appears to be expanding: among the visual media and forms of expression that count as visual culture for theorists like Matthew Rampley are architecture, fashion, design, and the human body.¹⁰ Moreover, included in this growing list are performance-based practices that have a visual component (opera, ballet, theater, etc.).

This expansion is forcing scholars to revisit historical contexts that are now within the realm of visual culture, such as temporal segments of the early modern period. In her introduction to A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from the 18th to the 21st Century (2010), Jane Kromm observes the emergence of a fascinating plurality of approaches rather than a narrowly defined area of study to which all practitioners unanimously subscribe.¹¹ Disciplines and fields of inquiry as varied as anthropology, art history, book history, cartography, cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, graphic design, hermeneutics, the history of science and technology, image theory, museology, philosophy, semiotics, sociology, and word and image studies are heavily invested in images and view investigations of visual documents through theoretical and methodological lenses that are affixed to their own understanding of what the study of visual culture brings to the forefront of their concerns. To examine form, content, meaning, and impact, specialists rely on interdisciplinary approaches to visual culture that typically resort to a combination of the following considerations and perspectives, some of which overlap in scope: image aesthetics, the technical means of image production and reproduction, content analysis, representation theory, iconography, visual narratology, visual rhetoric and persuasion techniques, sensory and perceptual theories of visual communication, the semiotic interpretation of images and meaning, the hermeneutics of seeing, the reception of visual documents, images as vehicles for communication, images in their cultural context, and visual artifacts as historical sources. Useful concepts and fruitful lines of inquiry include: the conceptualization, organization, and use of space; typography and graphic design as visual constructs; collecting as a visual practice; text and image interaction in illustrated books; the notions of the gaze, spectacle, and spectatorship; the visual construction of race, gender, and class; the politics of visibility; visual models and tools of scientific knowledge; the displaying of artifacts in museum collections and institutional impact on visual knowledge; and the influence of technology and mass production on visual means of expression and communication practices.

The broadness and heterogeneity of the field can seem at first confusing and even discouraging to researchers. Using images as primary sources is a daring endeavor for those lacking formal or substantial training in art history, and considering visual culture from other disciplinary perspectives is not without its challenges. It may thus be useful to shift the focus from defining what visual culture is and questioning how best to examine it fruitfully, to the means through which it informs and shapes the understanding of history, culture, society, and the physical world. In Travelling Concepts of the Humanities (2002), narratologist and visual theorist Mieke Bal argues for a qualified return to the practice of ‘close reading’ that has gone out of style, which is in essence a revisitation of concept-based analysis as it applies to images.¹² Bal contends that [w]hile concepts are products of philosophy and tools of analysis, they are also embodiments of the cultural practices we seek to understand through them.¹³ Historically, geographically, ideologically, and disciplinarily nomadic, concepts serve a complex array of functions; for example, they specify relations, clarify meaning, articulate ideas, and frame discussions. The contributors to this collection, whose primary objective is not to theorize on early modern visual production or to establish its boundaries, embrace an approach to the study of images in which concepts and close reading matter above all. This critical approach, which is interpretative, multilayered, and most importantly, interdisciplinary, allows for a better understanding of the historical, cultural, and scientific processes reliant on images and visually constructed meanings, while inspiring a more informed assessment of visual impact during the early modern period.

Scholarly interest in early modern visual culture, which has intensified throughout the past ten years, led to the publication of topical and nuanced studies that transgress form to delve into context and thus have more wide-ranging implications than previous inquiries into images as artifacts that solely focus on style, technique, influences, and provenance. The subjects of studies published between 2005 and 2015 that position images as rich and reliable sources of information include the following: the imagery of witchcraft in sixteenth-century Europe,¹⁴ the visualization of sexual activities and eroticized bodies,¹⁵ objects in motion as points of entry into material and visual cultures,¹⁶ porcelain not only as refined artwork but also as an embodiment of an aesthetic ideal,¹⁷ pictures in relation to their audiences and cross-cultural contexts,¹⁸ visual products as international commodities and sources of scientific information,¹⁹ as well as the iconographic construction of national identity, historical narratives, and imperial landscapes.²⁰ Under the influence of postcolonial theory, it is not only continental visual culture that has preoccupied scholars.²¹ For text-based inquiries into word and image interaction, of particular importance are studies that analyze visual rhetoric from an interdisciplinary perspective or that conduct investigations into how authors, literary texts, and practices were shaped by visual culture.²² Studies like these, however, have only scratched the surface of the vast domain of early modern visual production, which, except for its fine art component, generally received scant attention from critics until the 1990s but more extensive consideration since 2000. It is interesting to note that to explain this lack of attention Gillian Rose points to the scholarly assumption that images were scarce in the period preceding the onset of modernity and, therefore, perceived as not all that important because of their minimal quantitative presence.²³ In the prefatory section to a 2001 collection, Elise Goodman underlines the neglect of eighteenth-century visual culture since the beginning of the twentieth century,²⁴ a poignant assessment that is echoed by critics dealing with other early modern historical periods. After noting the ubiquitous presence of visual materials during this period, Michael Hunter remarks, in the introduction to a collection of essays published in 2010, that by comparison with the texts with which they are often juxtaposed, the printed images that have come down to us from early modern Britain have until recently been surprisingly neglected, even by students of aspects of the history and culture of the period to whom they ought to be of the greatest interest.²⁵ One might suppose that scientific images have been afforded more consideration than historical and literary images. Yet Daniela Bleichmar, who examines an impressive but previously unstudied iconographic corpus of over 12,000 botanical images from the perspective of visual epistemology and Enlightenment thought, asserts in a lavishly illustrated monograph published in 2012, that this has not been true. In its introductory section, she speculates that these botanical illustrations were likely judged unimportant by scholars because, [a]s scientific illustrations, they tend to fall through the scholarly cracks, dismissed by most art historians and historians of science as neither great art nor important science.²⁶ The fate of these images appeared sealed in carefully preserved archival boxes at the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid. Bleichmar demonstrates with finesse that these botanical illustrations provide visual evidence that is convincing and valuable about the history of Spanish scientific expeditions in the Age of Enlightenment; moreover, she shows that these images played an important role in the advancement of science and the administration of the early Spanish empire. One cannot help but wonder how many such treasures remain buried in public archives and private collections.

Content and Coherence: Visualizing the Text

This collection features select and revised contributions from the workshop Image on Text, Text on Image (1450–1789) (August 21–23, 2013), held at Mount Allison University (Sackville, New Brunswick), and coorganized by Lauren Beck and Christina Ionescu. This scholarly endeavor received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through its Connection Grant Program. This workshop provided a forum for discussion on the interaction of texts and images during a defining period in the history of Western civilization extending from the advent of the Gutenberg printing press and the mass-produced book to the French Revolution and its impact on European visual culture. This volume, which pursues the investigation further into the last stretch of the long eighteenth century, presents layered and contextualized analyses of a wealth of visual materials that represent people, places, knowledge, and objects, while encoding belief systems, social interactions, power relations, and cultural realities. These images provide viewers with a mesmerizing glimpse into how the early modern world was interpreted by image-makers and presented to viewers during a period that spans from manuscript culture to the age of caricature. The premise of this collection is that all images deserve critical attention regardless of what text-focused researchers may assess to be their significance, of what art historians may think of their so-called quality, or what the public may estimate to be their aesthetic or commercial value. This is an argument increasingly made by scholars examining book illustration, a segment of artistic production that through time has borne the brunt of preconceived ideas about artistic merit.²⁷ This endeavor is underscored by a fundamental question: how are early modern texts, objects, and systems of knowledge imaged, disseminated, and consumed through bimodal, hybrid, or intermedial products that rely on both words and pictures to convey meaning? It should be noted that, in our broad understanding of the term, image-makers refers to any individuals actively involved in the production and dissemination of images, such as craftsmen and artists (draftsmen, engravers, painters, sculptors, etc.), scientists dynamically engaged in visual representation, patrons who commissioned and displayed artworks, and editors and publishers who selected subjects for visual representation and were involved in book design and production. In our collective view, visualizing the text refers to the process of intersemiotically transcribing, transposing, and translating words into images and not to the use of digital tools to assist in its processing and contextualization.

In this volume, contributors venture beyond traditional lines of inquiry into word and image interaction to deconstruct visual dynamics and politics—to show how images were shaped, manipulated, displayed, and distributed to represent the material world, to disseminate official and commercial messages, to support religious practice and ideology, or to embody relations of power. The twelve contributions that are included in this collection are anchored in various theoretical and disciplinary points of departure, such as the history of collections and collecting, literary theory and criticism, art history and visual culture, word and image studies, the history of science, as well as print culture and book illustration. Contributors draw upon a wide range of visual material hitherto insufficiently explored and contextualized, in some cases hidden in museums and archives, or previously assessed only from a disciplinary standpoint that favored either the image or the text but not both in relation to each other. They include manuscript illuminations representing compilers and collections, frontispieces and other accompanying plates published in catalogues and museographies, astronomical diagrams, mixed pictographic-alphabetic accounting documents, Spanish baroque paintings, illustrative frontispieces or series inspired by or designed for single novels or anthologies, anatomical drawings featured in encyclopedic publications, visual patterns of volcanic formations, engravings representing the New World that accompany nonfictional travelogues, commonplace books that interlace text and images, and graphic satire. Geographically, the collection covers imperial centers (Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Spain), as well as their colonial periphery (New France; Mexico; Central America; South America, particularly Brazil; parts of Africa; and the island of Ceylon).

Among the image-makers featured extensively are the following: the illuminator who depicted Vincent de Beauvais, compiler of the monumental Speculum Maius [The Great Mirror]; Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés and Hans Staden, who were actively involved in the production of illustrations for their travel accounts to the New World; Jean-Frédéric Schall, one of the last rococo painters of Ancien Régime France, who created an exquisite illustrative series inspired by La Nouvelle Héloïse; Jacques de Sève, an underappreciated draftsman who meticulously designed the beautiful copperplate engravings for Comte de Buffon’s Histoire des quadrupèdes; Charles-Nicolas Cochin and his team of artists, who produced the plates for Abbé Prévost’s collection of travelogues; Claes Jansz Visscher, a Dutch engraver and publisher of news maps who was hired as a spin-doctor of controversial historical events by the West India Company; and Thomas Tegg, London publisher of popular and affordable satirical books accompanied by color plates. Most of the texts that are examined in detail fall into important categories such as foundational works, compilations of knowledge, or canonical literary texts. For example, La matrícula de tributos is a surviving pictographic tribute book of the Aztec empire; Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s bestseller La Nouvelle Héloïse paved the way for French romanticism and profoundly touched generations of readers; the volumes devoted to the quadrupeds in Buffon’s Histoire naturelle dispelled myths and advanced scientific inquiry about animals; and Abbé Prévost’s illustrated collection of voyages, Histoire générale des voyages, informed and shaped the French public’s understanding of exotic lands, people, and objects.

This collection is not organized by themes or geographic areas, although such organizational methods also had the potential of generating a coherent and relevant ensemble. Rooted in word and image interaction, its organization is conceived with the primary objective of showcasing our collective and unique focus on deconstructing the process of imaging texts, objects, and systems of knowledge. Titled Representing Space: Book Culture, Visual Perspectivism, and Intercultural Communication, the first part focuses on intermedial products that materially fuse together texts and images to construct and structure space, perceived in either its physical or conceptual state. In the opening chapter, Janine Rogers revisits seventeenth- and eighteenth-century frontispieces as well as other accompanying plates designed for catalogues and museographies to examine the spatial configuration of the page and the function of the image as a locus for collected knowledge. She not only uncovers a strong connection between medieval manuscript culture and images conceived for catalogues and museographies but also advances our understanding of the book as a symbol of early modern scientific practice, particularly the practice of collecting. The author emphasizes the allegorical, analogical, and metaphorical nature of the images that represent museums, collector’s cabinets, and other spaces displaying material culture—such as those that have belonged to Athanasius Kircher, Caspar Friedrich Neickel, and Levinus Vincent—demonstrating that they were often highly symbolic and idealized depictions rather than exact reproductions of actual collection spaces, as the reader-viewer might surmise at first glance. By importing their visual features and syntax from illuminated manuscripts, these plates recall codicological models and exemplify the text-based philosophy of collecting inherited from the Middle Ages.

In the second essay, Rachel Schmidt reflects on the process of conceptualizing and visualizing cosmological space during the sixteenth century and, in the process, relates it to a larger philosophical context in which vision and perspectivism play vital roles. Schmidt devotes her attention to Summa de philosophia natural de astrología y astronomía y otras sciencias (1547) by Alonso de Fuentes, an author about whom we know remarkably little today. His Summa, which is presented as a dialogue on natural philosophy with moral and didactic rather than technical or scientific objectives, was originally accompanied by an anonymous series of seventeen woodblocks that could appear as crude and whimsical to the uninitiated eye. In 1905, a critic suggested that the Summa had inspired Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, for it contains a tale of a man driven crazy by reading the bestselling romance Palmerín de Oliva. Digging deeper into both textual and iconographic strata to explore this fascinating suggestion, Schmidt finds enough stylistic, thematic, and visual evidence to argue convincingly that the links between the two texts are neither fortuitous nor superficial. Center stage in her analysis of intertextual and intericonic residue are the concepts of madness, cosmography, and perspectivism. At the outset, Schmidt discusses at length Fuentes’s theory of mind and vision to spotlight his skepticism toward sight, a faculty that in his view has the capacity to deceive even more than hearing and touch. Illustrating the subgenre of the philosophical dialogue was highly unusual at the time, astronomical diagrams being normally found in volumes on geography, chorography, and cosmography. It would have been natural to disregard as trivial those comical and schematic diagrams, some of which position stick figures in disproportionate relation to a simplified universe that includes a moon with an expressive human face. Astutely attuned to the fusion of text and illustration in the original edition of the Summa, Schmidt, however, does the exact opposite and situates this iconographic component in the context of Ptolemaic-inspired sixteenth-century astronomical illustrations, which in their transposition of optical illusions and visual phenomena exemplify multiple vulnerabilities.

From cosmological space, we move on to colonial space in the contribution that completes this first section, which geographically transports readers from the center of the Spanish empire to one of its colonies located across the Atlantic and draws their attention to a set of colorful compositions that served a practical function. Cecilia Brain analyzes a representative sample of accounting records from Mexico that concurrently employ pictographic and alphabetic systems of communication, a hybrid form of legal documents that emerged during the period following the Spanish victory against the Aztecs in 1521. While devoting her attention to the administration of colonial space, Brain deconstructs how intercultural means of communication were deployed to record human relations and spatial divisions. These codices, which carefully recorded financial transactions and obligations while supporting mercantile dealings and the administration of the colony, have elicited little interest from historians until more recent years. In the early colonial period, the Spanish were unable to impose their accounting system upon the indigenous inhabitants of conquered lands, who were accustomed to storing information using an image-based system and could not decrypt the colonizers’ Roman alphabet, Indo-Arabic numerals, or Castilian measures and mediums of exchange. Therefore, Spanish administrators had to resign themselves to accepting a system in which words and pictures coexisted for the benefit of all those who were involved in registering tribute collection, judicial disputes, and general record keeping at various administrative levels. The author disputes the derogatory characterization of pictograms as unfixed or strongly mnemonic, as well as the assertion that speech-based communicative systems are superior to image-based systems. By decoding sample pages from codices and providing a historic context for the information contained therein, she demonstrates that both Mesoamerican and Spanish linguistic codes were equally well equipped to document economic, religious, and social information of vital importance to the individuals, communities, and powers that used them. Communicative effectiveness and cross-cultural adaptability are concepts underscoring the investigation of this verbal-pictorial combination. For Brain, careful record keeping not only preserves the collective memory of a place and its people but also reduces conflict and maintains order.

The second section, Annotating the Image: Baroque Painting, News Maps, and Print Captions, examines the superposition of text onto images, a mixed-media phenomenon that has diverse implications. In the first essay in this section, which is anchored in art history and word and image theory, Lauren Beck considers the use and functions of textual inscriptions and books as material objects in Spanish baroque painting. Even before the Renaissance, Spanish artists employed text blocks in painting for descriptive purposes and relied on books as pictorial objects to help viewers decode the meaning of artworks. Referring to a treasure trove of paintings from cathedrals and lesser-known art collections located throughout Spain, Beck argues that a significant shift occurs during the baroque period when textual labels are transformed into pictorial brands, verbal inscriptions assume increasing importance in relation to visual content, and books start to be depicted not only as aesthetically pleasing artifacts but also as culturally significant objects. The interaction of image and text in the pictorial realm, which emerges in a climate of interartistic collaboration and saturation of literary works with visual terminology, results in intermedial products that are carefully constructed to engage the viewer’s attention. Books open to blank pages or deposed on bookshelves, excerpts from the Bible featured on columns or tapestry, scrolls and stone plates inscribed with legible text—these are not insignificant elements of the pictorial composition but conventional vehicles that provide textual support and inspire reflection. While probing how the text is visualized in artworks from this period, the critic is sensitive to the material appearance of painted words and to the cross-cultural practice of inserting writing into painting. Interestingly, this widespread practice served artists well but failed to impress art critics Giorgio Vasari and Francisco Pacheco, who rallied against what they perceived to be a simplistic device that limited the power of the imagination. At the core of this investigation is a search for a clear and appropriate vocabulary to describe accurately the use of text in pictorial contexts, a challenge all too familiar to word and image theorists.

Authored by cultural historian Michiel van Groesen, the next chapter delves into visual historiography by bringing to the forefront a forgotten image-maker of the Dutch empire, who played an important role throughout early modern Europe in the dissemination of news concerning the Atlantic world by means of unique maps tactically annotated by text. Based in Amsterdam and well connected to its urban authorities, Claes Jansz Visscher operated his workshop at a time when words, presumed to carry polemical charges, were generally distrusted by readers of historical news, whereas images were considered reliable because they were thought to show events as they actually took place. Hired by the West India Company to strategically control its public image while informing the public of its transatlantic ventures, Visscher produced instantly recognizable and highly influential news maps: they feature, on a single sheet of paper, an elaborate illustration showing the unfolding of a newsworthy event, upon which is superimposed a cartographic vignette outlining its geographic location, a print caption, and on occasion a scene inspired by genre painting. Copied, translated, and reissued across the continent, Visscher’s news maps of Brazil and the Caribbean were hot commodities designed to satisfy the public’s insatiable appetite for military reportage, but they were also deftly manipulated visual documents. Like most other nonpictorial historical iconography, however, they have received insufficient attention from scholars despite their international circulation and canonical status. Through an interdisciplinary discussion on text/image interaction in five highly sophisticated news maps showcasing Dutch expansion in Brazil, van Groesen argues that the printmaker’s copperplate engravings are a key component in the transformation of the genre that occurs during the second quarter of the seventeenth century.

In the notable contribution that closes this section, Ann Lewis largely devotes her attention to the unusually extensive captions that annotate Schall’s series for La Nouvelle Héloïse, which support the visualization of the canonical novel in multifarious ways while hinting at the autonomy of the visual ensemble. In the history of French eighteenth-century book illustration, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse is an exception to the rule. Even though first editions of novels were rarely illustrated at that time, the author famously commissioned an extensive series from Gravelot and then closely directed its execution. The product of a high degree of authorial involvement, Gravelot’s series is considered integral to the epistolary novel and has inspired generations of artists entrusted with its illustration. Lewis concentrates on an illustrative series known to critics who have examined the iconographic corpus of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse but which remained surprisingly unstudied until now despite its superb execution and visual complexity. Schall’s series of four large-scale engravings stages, with great subtlety, semantically charged character interactions in exterior settings of the novel that are remarkably elaborate. As no doubt expected, the artist presents his own take on an iconographic topos, the first kiss between Julie and Saint-Preux, but he does not fall prey to imitation in his depiction of this scene or the other three that form his iconographic ensemble. It is not known whether Schall’s engraved sequence was intended as a stand-alone quadriptych or produced for a particular edition (in fact, it was discovered by Lewis in an extra-illustrated folio copy at the British Library, and each engraving had to be folded twice to fit into it). Lewis provides a close reading of this unique series, situating its components in relation to other illustrations commissioned for La Nouvelle Héloïse and highlighting the artist’s original interpretation of key scenes from the novel. She demonstrates that these captions belong to a bimodal system of meaning in which they are syntagmatically and intricately connected to the titles of the engravings, the visual tableaux to which they are materially attached, the specific excerpts that they reference, and the text of the novel that provides their larger context.

The third section, Imaging Empirical Knowledge: Illustrated Travelogues, Natural History Treatises, and Geological Texts, examines the production and dissemination of observation-derived knowledge and cultural ideologies from the perspective of visual rhetoric and semiotics. Its authors employ what Gillian Rose calls a critical visual methodology—that is, an approach that thinks about the visual in terms of the cultural significance, social practices and power relations in which it is embedded.²⁸ As researchers interested in the early modern representation of the Americas have already established, the earliest illustrated travel accounts of the New World, such as those showing Christopher Columbus landing on Hispaniola, did not generally contain images created from actual reality or always inspired by firsthand textual reporting. Artists and publishers commonly relied on recycled woodblocks that were used as single units or assembled in various compositions to supply visual accompaniment. The resulting iconographic product thus had no direct connection to its matching counterpart and purported source of inspiration—verbal description and narration. In this early period, artists filtered the representation of the New World through European lenses and resorted to the familiar iconographic language of the Old World, which resulted in a largely invented and Westernized vision of the Americas. During the sixteenth century, however, interest in mapping this uncharted territory sparked and, charged with creating ad vivum, authentic, and representative images of this part of the world, artists started to take part in voyages of discovery. In an essay rooted in art history, Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez examines the dynamic intersection of textual description and iconographic representation in two less-studied travel accounts from this period and their print afterlives: the first was produced by the Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, and the second is the work of the German soldier and mariner Hans Staden. The travelogues authored and financed by Oviedo and Staden exemplify a new outlook on the visual representation of the Americas and establish a close connection between the text and its illustrations, but their subsequent reincarnations are conceived in editorial and artistic contexts that are poles apart from their original context of production. Using examples that range from a meticulous manuscript drawing of a pineapple, to instructive plates depicting Amerindians making fire, to a sensational scene of cannibalism, to an illustration of exotic objects such as a hammock and a maraca, Sáenz-López Pérez reflects on the technical, expressive, and conceptual challenges faced by ambitious image-makers such as Oviedo and Staden as they grappled with the complexity of recording history and collided with established paradigms for visual expression.

The thirty-six illustrated quarto volumes of Comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle have been among the scientific compendiums most prized by book collectors since the eighteenth century, and their iconographic complement constitutes an important component of Enlightenment visual culture. It thus seems natural to include in this collection a chapter on the copperplate engravings commissioned for the Histoire naturelle. Swann Paradis examines the parts devoted to the quadrupeds in this encyclopedic work (namely, the Histoire des quadrupèdes and its supplement), to challenge the timeworn belief that the French naturalist was an eloquent writer but a mediocre scientist. To frame his investigation, Paradis reveals what he terms the hidden gem of this scientific treatise, an intricate and well-designed web of connections among the following elements that form a verbal-visual triptych: the tableaux d’histoire, or history paintings, rendered in vivid prose by Buffon; the scientifically accurate and meticulous anatomical descriptions provided by his collaborator, Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton; and the aesthetically appealing plates designed primarily by the skilled Jacques de Sève, a French designer whose noteworthy and multidisciplinary contribution to book illustration is currently being rediscovered by art historians, literary scholars, and historians of science. With scientific expertise, Swann explains how Buffon cleverly used both words and images to liberate fauna from the chains of myth, magic, and legend that had restrained its meaning since antiquity. In addition to