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  • All the Tools Fit to Print
  • Karen Reeds (bio)
Mark Bland, A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts.
Susan Dackerman, ed., Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe.

How big was the rhinoceros? More precisely, how big was the animal Albrecht Dürer portrayed in his famous 1515 woodcut? How big did the print's viewers think the creature was? And how big was the print itself?

These questions are prompted by the brilliant cover design for Susan Dackerman's edited volume on the exhibition Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Pp. 442. $60). The cover itself has practically the same dimensions (315 × 230 cm) as Dürer's folio sheet, but here the rhino's head and body have been magnified threefold and wrapped around the volume. The enlargement reveals the extraordinary graphic technique that convinced generations of viewers to trust Dürer's picture as a true likeness.

Yet Dürer himself had not seen the rhinoceros. He only knew—from a drawing and description sent from Lisbon where the creature had recently arrived from India—that it was "like an elephant in size but lower on its legs" (pp. 167, 170n15). To convey the beast's immensity Dürer made the rhinoceros serve as its own reference point: it was so big that it barely fit inside the print's border. It was an ingenious solution, but Dürer would unquestionably have preferred actual measurements. For his artist's manual on human proportions he had taken the measurements of hundreds of people. His hometown of Nuremberg took the business of measurement so [End Page 373] seriously that the city council regulated the quality of its instrument- and mapmakers' output.

As a maker, seller, and user of prints Dürer exemplifies Dackerman's argument that in early modern Europe people sought woodcuts, engravings, and etchings not only as objects for aesthetic and pious meditation, but also as sources of practical knowledge and tools of scientific thought. As the earliest known anatomical woodcut put it in 1493, "the art of printing" enabled images "to be fruitfully multiplied" (pp. 20, 54-55). A century later, Stradanus made the printing press the centerpiece of his Nova Reperta, a widely circulated series of engravings that celebrated the inventions and discoveries of his age (see the helpful commentaries in this volume by Daniel Margócsy and Katharine Park). Prints recorded new observations of the natural world in a fixed form and were markedly easier than drawings to obtain, see, share, and compare. This was most obvious in the rapidly developing fields of botany, zoology, and anatomy, as Lorraine Daston and Claudia Swan explore in their essays. But it was equally true for distant worlds, as Dackerman's discussions of cosmography and geography show. In the same year that Dürer rendered the rhinoceros he also produced the first printed celestial maps and the first map of the world seen as a sphere.

These points about the special importance of printed illustrations to Renaissance science and medicine should be familiar. George Sarton's 1953 Rosenbach Lectures took the invention of printing as the key demarcation between medieval and Renaissance science, and virtually every study of late-medieval and early modern science since Sarton includes some discussion of the issue.1

The originality of Dackerman's exhibition catalog lies in its contention that both the artists and the printed images they created have played a significantly larger role on the stage of Renaissance science than either art historians or historians of technology and science have usually acknowledged. I have indulged my fondness for Dürer in this review, but as the catalog's 300 illustrations demonstrate (in splendid reproductions), he was just one of many skilled artists who deployed the new medium to supply the demand for information-laden pictures.

Printmaking made possible the reliable replication of precisely drawn lines. It is easy to recognize this particular contribution to technology and science in, for example, the instruments designed by Dürer's colleague Georg Hartmann: paper versions of sundials, compass roses, astrolabes, and globes. His prints (spotlighted in Suzanne Karr...

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