`PRINTED VISUALS`

More than a generation before Johannes Gutenberg (ca. 1400–1468) supervised the printing of the first books using movable type in the 1450s in Mainz, multiple copies of visual images were printed on paper and distributed in substantial numbers in Europe. Although it is often argued that the invention of movable type initiated a revolution in the transmission of information throughout Europe, the role of printed images in the dissemination of information is only beginning to be understood. Historians disagree about such matters as whether prints were a necessary precondition for the emergence of the Protestant *Reformation or just one factor that facilitated it and whether prints engendered the international *Renaissance style, a hybrid ensemble of physical characteristics that juxtaposed elements from classical, Gothic, Italian, and Flemish works and presented particular inflections in various sites. William Ivins Jr. (1881–1961), one of the earliest and most passionate advocates of the importance of prints in intellectual endeavors, argues in Prints and Visual Communication that “exactly repeatable pictorial statements” were a prerequisite to certain scientific advances. In response, Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) contends that Ivins exaggerates the roles of printed pictorial statements at the expense of verbal communication. In The Art of Philosophy, I underline the importance of both text and image in the organization and exchange of information. Printed text and image—often in tandem with one another—played crucial roles in some of early modern Europe’s most influential movements, whether ideological ones like the Reformation or artistic ones like the international Renaissance style. They were also integral to the spread of information beyond the European continent and to the interrelations between Europe and other parts of the world.

The term printed visual denotes images, texts, designs, or combinations of these that are impressed onto a support, such as a piece of paper or fabric. This notion encapsulates a broad range of methods employed to create numerous copies of a scheme. Printed visuals not only have played an important role in the organization of information and the transmission and generation of knowledge, but their technologies have also functioned as enduring metaphors for cognition and memory. At the same time, printed visuals were often viewed with suspicion and understood as entities that could increase confusion and multiply errors and misunderstanding.

To create a woodcut, a design is drawn onto a block, and the areas that are meant to be white in the print are removed from the block with a knife or a chisel. Rather than being drawn onto the block directly, the design can also be transferred to the block in a variety of ways, such as carboning, incising, or pouncing. The cut woodblock is coated with ink, and in the process of printing, its design is inverted. Because both woodcuts and movable type are printed in relief, they could be placed together within a single form, making it possible for printers to impress images and texts concurrently and also to integrate images inside of texts. As Lucille Chia has emphasized, in Chinese imprints from the Song dynasty (1127–1279) onward the physical relationship between text and tu—an untranslatable term that could refer to a map, picture, diagram, portrait, chart, or table—is arguably still tighter, insofar as the tu were often inscribed on the same block as the text.

Whereas woodcuts and movable type are relief-printing technologies, engravings are a technique of intaglio printmaking—that is, a technique whereby an image is incised into a surface and the sunken image is made to contain the ink. In the creation of engravings, a burin is employed to inscribe metal (typically copper) plates. By contrast, in producing etchings—another intaglio printmaking technique—artists used corrosive acids to incise plates. In either case, pressure is then employed to push the paper into the inked lines below the plate’s surface. By the end of the fifteenth century, the roller press was used to ease this printing process. A disadvantage of intaglio prints as compared to woodcuts for the production of books was that they could not be printed concurrently with movable type.

Textual and pictorial seals, technologies that produce printed visuals, existed already in the Western Han period (206 BCE–9 CE) in China. By the Eastern Han era (25–220 CE) woodcut blocks were used to print textiles; and they were employed on paper toward the late seventh century CE. Woodblock printing prevailed as the most widespread type of relief printing in China until the nineteenth century. Most of the oldest surviving Chinese prints are Buddhist. From the Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1279–1368) periods, prints survive in classical Confucian works and publications on governments. Printed portraits can also be found in biographical works. In addition, prints of plants, animals, maps, city plans, architecture, and bronze vessels appear in works on such topics as medicine, agronomy, and local history. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Chinese book illustration and printmaking flourished; in this era, woodcuts came to be integrated into works of fiction and drama, handbooks, and manuals for artists.

Woodblock printing arrived in Japan during the eighth century via China or Korea. Intaglio printing came into use there only during the twentieth century. Until the late sixteenth century, the clergy and the aristocracy patronized Japanese printmaking, barring the period from the late eighth to the eleventh century when the practice of printmaking briefly stopped. Movable type entered Japan in the last decade of the sixteenth century from Europe, through Catholic missionaries, and from Korea, where the technology had existed for some time. Although movable type was initially used in Japan, by the mid-seventeenth century, it was abandoned as printmakers opted to cut all the elements of a page onto a single block. Secular woodblock printing thrived in the Edo period (1600–1868) with its shifting sociopolitical conditions. The *genre of ukiyo-e or “pictures of the floating world,” for instance, presented the enjoyments of food, theater, brothels, and other entertainment sites in Japanese towns. According to Elizabeth Mary Berry, a sense of national community arose among readers in Japan between 1590 and 1700 thanks to the proliferation of printed genres that produced a wide-ranging “library of public information” pertaining to public and private life. Other historians, by contrast, have not tied this shift to printed visuals and have argued instead that this sense of national cultural identity emerged only in the late nineteenth century.

The earliest likely handling of woodblocks in Europe occurred in the thirteenth century, when they were adopted to impress patterns on fabrics. The first paper prints in Europe were probably produced in the second half of the fourteenth century. Woodcuts came to be made in sizable quantities in central Europe and southern Germany at the latest by 1425. Engravings probably started to be fabricated in Germany in the following decade, and etchings were likely invented around the turn of the sixteenth century in Germany.

Initially, woodcuts produced in Europe visualized devotional subjects, such as Christ, the Virgin and Child, and saints. Engravings likewise showed devotional themes, but in addition engravers manufactured secular representations, including ornamental designs, grotesque alphabets, and satires. In the years between 1470 and the mid-sixteenth century, an understanding of prints as independent artworks developed. Two important prints that functioned as artworks in their own right were Martin Schongauer’s (1448–91) Large Procession to Cavalry and Andrea Mantegna’s (1431–1506) Entombment. The technical achievements of both these artists were developed in subsequent years by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and Marcantonio Raimondi (1480–1534).

European missionaries and colonial forces brought techniques of mechanically printed texts and images into South Asia, although Chinese block printing was already employed in Tibetan regions prior to European interventions. In Goa, for instance, printing was introduced in 1556 and became an important tool in the dissemination of Christianity. In addition, the influx of European prints into South Asia from at least 1556 onward made it possible for artists to examine and to absorb visual information concerning European artistic practices. In 1580, *Jesuit priests, for example, gave a copy of the Royal Polyglot Bible printed by Christoph Plantin in Antwerp between 1568 and 1573 to Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605); the book’s eight volumes contained multiple engravings that imperial artists examined closely.

As printed visual representations were produced in ever growing numbers throughout early modern Europe and other parts of the globe, critics and historians, eager to understand their benefits and drawbacks, began to theorize and analyze them. In a chapter entitled “De l’utilité des Estampes, & de leur usage” (On the usefulness and use of prints) in the treatise L’idée du peintre parfait (The idea of the perfect painter, 1699), the French art critic Roger de Piles (1635–1709) comments on the multiple functions of prints. Among their benefits he lists their capacities to instruct, to persuade, and to strengthen the memory. Other theorists, from Peter Ramus (1515–72) to Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) to the Abbé Michel de Marolles (1600–1681), champion these and other advantages in the ways that prints categorize and convey information. Indeed, printed visuals accumulated and conveyed myriad units of data and ideas to European viewers, from quotations of ancient texts to the forms and colors of plants to definitions of concepts to physiognomies.

Siegmund Jacob Apin (1693–1732), rector of the Aegidienschule (in Braunschweig, Germany), composed an especially helpful synoptic overview of diverse kinds of pedagogical and mnemonic printed visuals produced in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. This work, entitled Dissertatio de variis discendi methodis memoriae causa inventis earumque usu et abusu (Dissertation on various methods of learning, invented for the sake of memory, and on their use and abuse), was published first in 1725 and in a revised and augmented edition in 1731. In his first chapter, Apin presents accounts of more than one hundred engravings, woodcuts, and illustrated books that he organizes into twenty different subjects that range from philosophy, to history, to geography, to astronomy. Apin’s treatise displays the enthusiasm that early modern scholars and educators shared for the ability of prints to order and disseminate information. But he is also conscious of the shortcomings of visualization. In this vein, the second chapter of Dissertatio outlines some of the dangers inherent in the prints discussed in chapter 1. Apin argues, for instance, that mnemonic images cause confusion and augment the labor of students when they do not resemble the things that they are meant to denote. In addition, he contends that when teaching abstract notions, visual representations can never capture conceptual theories fully. He is concerned that such prints will cause students to confuse particulars for universals.

Apin singles out one engraving for its misleading imagery: Clara totius physiologiae synopsis (Clear synopsis of physics in its entirety, 1615), designed by Martin Meurisse (1584–1644), a Franciscan professor of philosophy at the Grand Couvent des Cordeliers in Paris, in collaboration with the engraver Léonard Gaultier (1560/61–35) (figure 1); the broadside was published by Jean Messager (1572–1649), and an anonymous engraver of lettering inscribed its texts. Apin was likely upset by such details as Synopsis’s representation of prime matter, through the partially formed woman at the bottom of the broadside, who acts out the process of substantial change: whereas her head, neck, and hands are formed, the rest of her is not yet. The detail uses lines to show prime matter, even though it should not have any form at all; consequently, Meurisse and Gaultier fail to capture this philosophical concept accurately and risk misleading or confusing observers.

In conveying and organizing information through printed representations, scholars and artists often relied on two especially crucial mechanisms that aided visual thinking. First, they used the space of the page to exhibit and to map out theoretical relationships. Artificiosa totius logices descriptio (Artificial description of logic in its entirety, 1614) of Meurisse, Gaultier, Messager, and an anonymous engraver of lettering exemplifies how early modern authors ordered concepts across the space of the page to visualize connections (figure 2). This broadside, which shows and comments on Aristotelian scholastic logic, allows viewers to understand at a glance how the discipline of logic can be divided into its parts and how the parts pertain to each other and the whole. The lowest area shows Meurisse, his students, and various personifications of logical concepts approaching a walled garden. The inside of this garden represents the realm of proper logic. The text and images within the garden space summarize the activity of the first operation of the mind, through which the conception of an object or term is brought to the mind. Above is another garden that explicates the activity of the second operation of the mind, through which terms are combined and divided to form propositions. The uppermost area pertains to propositions that are organized into syllogisms or arguments, through the activity of the third operation of the mind. The print’s particular sections cannot be understood completely when seen in isolation; rather, they obtain their meanings from their place within the broadside’s spatial order.

Second, designers of early modern printed representations often thought through the mechanism of visual commentary, whereby their text and imagery not only illustrated concepts that already existed, but also presented enriching interpretations of preexisting ideas. Consider, for instance, the two flute players to the right of the garden hedge in Descriptio (see figure 2). This visual representation and its inscription produce an analogy between the deceptive arguments of Sophists and musical performance that draws on the ancient suspicion of flutes, which deform the face and obstruct the mouth, the organ required for rational discussions. The observer’s understanding of sophistry is enhanced and augmented through this comparison between Sophists and performers who are both focused on how things appear rather than on how they are.

`Figure 1. Meurisse and Gaultier,` `Clara totius physiologiae synopsis` `(Clear synopsis of physics in its entirety), 1615. Engraving printed on paper, 25.5` × `18.5 in. (64.8` × `47 cm). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes, Paris [AA4].`

`Figure 2. Meurisse and Gaultier,` `Artificiosa totius logices descriptio` `(Artificial description of logic in its entirety), 1614. Engraving printed on paper, 22.4` × `14.4 in. (57` × `36.5 cm). Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, Brussels [S. IV 86231].`

If Meurisse and Gaultier’s interpretations of abstract philosophical principles make use of visual thinking through spatial constructs and visual commentaries, printed representations belonging to a genre known as the imago contrafacta (counterfeit image) deploy a rhetoric of visual persuasion instead. As Peter Parshall has shown, this image type developed in the sixteenth century in northern Europe and aimed at convincing observers of the credibility of visual information by capturing the truth of particulars. Counterfeit images tended to be works of portraiture, topographies, representations of particular events, and images of natural and supernatural occurrences; they were understood to have been derived either from direct observation or from an image taken from direct observation. Insofar as they claimed to be based on immediate acts of witnessing, counterfeit images were designed to persuade observers that they conveyed trustworthy information.

Another type of printed visual involved the representation of nature by printing drawings made from life. An early such example is a work by the German theologian and botanist Otto Brunfels (1488–1534), Vivae eicones herbarum (Images of herbs made from life, 1530–36), featuring woodcuts designed and cut by Hans Weiditz (1495–1537). Its German translation of 1532 bore the title Contrafrayt Kreütterbuch (Counterfeit herbal). The noun contrafactum and the verb contrafacere do not appear in classical language. The term counterfeit is derived from the medieval Latin verb contrafacere, which could mean “to imitate” either as an accurate likeness or in the more negative sense of a forgery or an intended deception, akin to the meaning of the word counterfeit today. Both neutral and negative connotations of the term existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The peculiar visual rhetoric of Brunfels’s counterfeit images includes the wormholes, bent stems, and shriveled leaves of the representations of such plants as the lappa major (burdock plant) (figure 3). These blemishes were meant to convince observers that they were viewing a representation based on firsthand experience of this particular plant.

Whereas the creators of counterfeit prints aimed to convey persuasive information concerning particular objects of study, other artists and scholars produced printed visuals that juxtaposed text and image to generate visual arguments that attempted to capture information on their objects of study completely and in general terms. As Sachiko Kusukawa has explained, this category of printed visual representation, characterized as an icon absoluta (absolute image), offered an ideal account of an entity based on numerous firsthand experiences. Both Leonhart Fuchs’s (1501–66) De historia stirpium (On the history of plants, 1542) and Andreas Vesalius’s (1514–64) De humani corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human body, 1543) feature woodcuts that are not representations of individual specimens with eccentricities, such as those found in Brunfels’s Vivae eicones herbarum; rather, they depict objects of study in an ideal and general form. Vesalius and Fuchs aimed to elevate the knowledge generated by medical botany and anatomy to the realm of scientia, or theoretical knowledge, from that of historia, a descriptive kind of knowledge; it is for this reason that they include “absolute” images in their works, that is, images that capture plants and bodies in ideal and general terms, seeking to embody something essential about their objects of study.

`Figure 3. Brunfels, “Burdock plant,” in` `Vivae eicones herbarum` `(Images of herbs made from life), 1532. Woodcut printed on paper. 7.5` × `12.38 in. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.`

Not only did printed visuals enable observers to instruct, remember, think, persuade, and make arguments, but their technologies also acted as important metaphors to explain the processes of cognition. The association between thinking and printing technologies goes back to antiquity: in his treatise On Memory (450a31–450b25), for instance, Aristotle likens mental images to wax impressions. By the early modern era, the Aristotelian printing metaphor was often updated with more recent technologies, as scholars, such as the French Jesuit Louis Richeome (1544–1625), described thoughts as being “engraved” onto the memory.

The metaphorical association between technologies of printed visuals and cognition continues into the present, as evinced by such phrases as “photographic memory” or “flashback,” which derive from photographic technologies. During the nineteenth century, novel reproductive techniques came to replace or supplement standard graphic technologies such as engraving, mezzotint, and etching. Photography (invented and developed in the mid-nineteenth century) and lithography (invented in 1798–99), as well as technologies that enabled illustrated books and the illustrated press to reach large numbers of people at a low cost, contributed to a massive increase in the dissemination of printed visuals. During this period of enormous transformation, photography soon developed into a popular metaphor for cognition and memory. For example, early in the 1880s, Adolf Kussmaul (1822–1902), a German physician and clinician, likened sensations to “the invisible images, which the sun makes on a prepared silver surface.” Moreover, as Kate Flint has shown, the metaphors of the flash and the flashback were developed as well to capture the kinds of memory that offer an often unexpected and undeliberate incursion of a past time into the present moment.

Beyond building on preexisting metaphors of cognition and memory, the advent of novel technologies that enabled the mass reproduction of visuals for the first time in history further contributed to the often-vexed relationship between visuals and knowledge. On the one hand, posters, photographs, illustrated news, and other printed visuals made it possible for massive numbers of individuals to gain access to unprecedented amounts of information. On the other hand, the dramatic shift in the scale of possible communication brought worries about the dangers of widespread manipulation. Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), for instance, carefully doctored photographs to advance his political interests and delete representations of his adversaries. Much like the technology of movable type, and much like the *digital information technology today, the printing of visuals was simultaneously progressive and regressive. The printing of visuals ably facilitated the transmission of information, but it encouraged the spread of disinformation as well.

Susanna Berger

`FURTHER READING`

Elizabeth Mary Berry, Japan in Print, 2006; Kate Flint, Flash!, 2018; E. H. Gombrich, “Review of William M. Ivins, Jr., ‘Prints and Visual Communication,’ ” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 6 (1954–55): 168–69; William Ivins Jr., Prints and Visual Communication, 1953; Sachiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, 2012; David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1996; Chia Lucille, “Text and Tu in Context: Reading the Illustrated Page in Chinese Blockprinted Books,” Bulletin de L’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient 89 (2002): 241–76; Peter Parshall, “Imago contrafacta: Image and Facts in the Northern Renaissance,” Art History 16, no. 4 (1993): 554–79.