Image and Text in Natural History, 1500–1700

Abstract

The sixteenth century witnessed an explosion of natural history images. From the publication of the Herbarum vivae eicones in 1532 to that of Carolus Clusius’ Rariorum plantarum historia in 1601, European presses churned out thousands of copies of hundreds of illustrated botanical books. While fewer zoological titles flowed from the presses, they too were lavishly illustrated. The Renaissance naturalists who wrote these books had at their disposal new graphic techniques, woodcut and engraving, that permitted the easy reproduction of identical pictorial images (Ivins [1953]). Woodcut in particular allowed writers and publishers to easily juxtapose text and image, presenting both written descriptions and artists’ renditions of strange and familiar flora and fauna (fig. 1). By the end of the century, both image and text were necessary components of a marketable natural history book.