Picturing the Book of Nature. Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany by Sachiko Kusukawa (review)

That two of the most visually stunning books of the Renaissance should have been published within a year of each other has often been remarked — Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium (Basel, 1542) and Andreas Vesalius, De corporis humani fabrica (Basel, 1543). Both are universally acknowledged milestones in the history of science, yet modern disciplinary boundaries mean they have not been studied side by side, nor has proper attention been paid to the role of their images in making knowledge claims. Sachiko Kusukawa does both brilliantly, taking the materiality of the books as her starting point, arguing that it was the printed book itself that made their form of visual argumentation possible.

Medical botany and anatomy were both subjects that were largely outside the university curriculum; both, in the course of the sixteenth-century, would become academic subjects and be made more visible with the establishment of botanical gardens and anatomy theatres. Both Fuchs and Vesalius were university-educated physicians who wanted to understand the workings of nature; in modern terms to make scientific knowledge out of natural history. Their books were aimed in the first instance at a learned audience. Crucially for this study both authors made extensive use of visual arguments, both exercised an unusual degree of control over the production of their images and the layout of their books, and they both wrote down and argued in print about the value of pictures in the production of knowledge. This is what makes these two books key documents for understanding the role of images in printed books and in the creation of knowledge in a wider context.

It seems only right in reviewing a book about pictures to comment on the illustrations before discussing the text. The book is printed throughout in full colour with 120 figures within 258 pages of text. These are well integrated into the text and have informative captions that can be read independently of the text: like the subjects of her study, Kusukawa makes her arguments with both text and image. There is a nice balance of details taken from whole pages or sheets of drawings and the full pages. It is a pity, however, that the full pages are rarely shown with full margins and are rather flat, so we don't see the books as three-dimensional objects. The colour printing is superb.

The book is divided into three major sections with an introduction and epilogue. The main sections begin with 'Printing Pictures', on the early history of the use of images in printed scientific books, detailing the technical and economic barriers that con fronted authors and publishers. Next comes 'Picturing Medicinal Plants' focusing on Fuchs's great herbal and Gessner's projected but unpublished Historia plantarum. Kusukawa demonstrates how annotated watercolour drawings, together with Gessner's marginal drawings and annotations in the printed books that he owned, were his research tools. Such evidence for the early stages in the production of a major illustrated book is particularly valuable as it is sparse in the case of Fuchs and limited to just two preliminary drawings in the case of Vesalius.

Fuchs described his images as Pictura absolutissima, absolute or complete images. They are not 'naturalistic' or 'counterfeit' (concepts Kusukawa explains in the introduction), but 'analytic', to use Brian Ogilvie's terminology. Kusukawa's contribution is to show how these images are used to advance knowledge. Having securely identified a plant with the description of Dioscorides, the complete image shows morphological features and parts of the plant, for example the roots, not recorded by Dioscorides; the medicinal benefits are then described. Furthermore the complete ness of the pictures means they can adjudicate between competing classical authors who describe only some of the parts. Thus Kusukawa argues that a 'visual argument' is developed by Fuchs through a combination of text and...