UDTR — Radar mondial des droits de la Nature

Scientific Illustration in the Eighteenth Century

Identification

Clé publique

doi:10.1017/chol9780521572439.025

Auteurs

Brian J. Ford

Année déclarée

2003

Langue déclarée

en

Type source

book-chapter

Première détection

2026-11-09T19:11:46.554691+00:00

Dernière observation des métadonnées

2026-11-09T19:11:46.554691+00:00

Dernière vérification HTTP

Non effectuée

Résumé documentaire — langue originale

Illustration emerges from complex and diverse motives. The portrayal of an objective reality may seem to lie at its heart, but there may be other, subtle factors at work. Preconception, for example, guides many an illustrator’s hand. A wish to project known realities onto nascent concepts distorts reality in its own ways, and the process of transmuting the subtle realism of Nature into an engraver’s line imposes constraints and conventions of its own. There is a general principle in artwork, often unrecognized: the culture of each era dictates its own arbitrary realities. Our experience of this is largely intuitive, but it explains why we can relate a specific image (a saint from a thirteenth-century psalter or the countenance of the Statue of Liberty) more easily to the time it was produced than to the identity of the artist or the name of the subject. In just this way, a scientific illustration is a mirror of contemporaneous preoccupations and a clue to current prejudice. It is more than a didactic symbol. Some illustrations create, and then perpetuate, icons that transcend reality and provide a synthesized convention that passes from one generation of books to the next. These icons are created for textbooks, and they populate their pages as decorative features that do little to reveal reality. Early in the century, François Legaut’s Voyages et Aventures (1708) featured a rhinoceros with a second horn projecting forward from its brow. This structure is never found in life. Why should it be featured in an eighteenth-century illustrated textbook? The first published study of a rhinoceros (made by Albrecht Dürer in 1515), although powerful and otherwise realistic, boasts a small secondary horn on the shoulders, which projects forward. The image was repeatedly plagiarized and – with each generation of copying – this imaginary forward-projecting second horn increased in size. By the time it was included in Legaut’s book, the imaginary horn was equal in size to the real one.

Identifiants

OPENALEX

W2496403386

DOI

10.1017/chol9780521572439.025

Repères documentaires

Famille documentaire

Chapitre d’ouvrage

Types déclarés par les sources

book-chapter

Les mentions d’entités ne constituent pas une preuve de reconnaissance juridique. La juridiction étudiée est distincte du pays d’affiliation des auteurs.

Description bibliographique du livre

Disponibilité non établie

Sources

OpenAlex · Document 1 · Document 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.1017/chol9780521572439.025
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W2496403386

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• openalex:w1533897146 · CITES
• openalex:w581196355 · CITES

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Statut documentaire

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Bibliothèque

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