The Renaissance Development of the Scientific Illustration - Winthrop
The Renaissance Development of the Scientific Illustration - Winthrop The Renaissance Development of the Scientific Illustration - Winthrop
Development of ScientiFc Illustration 189missionaries serving in China and J a~an.~ The purpose was to furnish themissionaries with field propaganda. The engravings were to be used as tools ofthe faith just as the machine and anatomical illustrations we have been examiningwere tools of science.In the Christian religion, all Gospel stories are related and, of course, divinelyforetold. The Nativity ofJesus, as depicted above, was announced to theshepherds by an angel and to the Magi by a star. Since early Christian times ithad been commonplace in art to have these associated holy events all representedin a single picture even though they occurred at different places andtimes. This tradition continued even after the advent of linear perspective.Renaissance viewers became as accustomed as their medieval ancestors to suspendtime unity in these religious pictures, just as they could suspend theirsense of space unity in contemporaneous scientific illustrations. Religious art,like scientific art, shared a common didactic enterprise, and both came to relyon the same pictorial conventions. In the Nadal Nativity, we see, behind and tothe right of the Holy Family in a cave manger, a little angel marked K hoveringover the shepherds in the middle ground overlooking the city of Bethlehem, inwhose open square we see the census takers, B. At the upper right, we noteanother little angel in the far distance, setting out the star, M. At the bottomright, there is a 'cutaway viewn in the ground beside the manger, exposing yetanother little angel, L, this time announcing to Limbo the coming of the Savior.All these details and their accompanying letters are identified in alphabeticalorder in the text below the picture.It is a relevant fact that not only was Nadal's book and all its engravingstaken to China by the Jesuits but so also was Agostino Ramelli's. Furthermore,both of the illustrations we have just examined were copied by native Chineseartists during the early seventeenth century. One of the first acts of the Jesuitmissionaries after they established themselves in Peking in 1601 was to found alibrary for the latest European books on religion and science, as tools forproselytizing among the Chinese." The Europeans also encouraged their convertsto translate and publish these books in the Chinese vernacular. Thesewoodcut prints copied by Chinese artists after Nadal's Nativity and Ramelli'swindlass pump respectively. The first appeared in a Chinese manual on theRosary published about 1620. The second was included in a book entitled Ji QiTu Shuo, printed in 1627 by a Chinese convert named Wang Cheng. The latterwas a scholar and,admirer of the many European machine treatises like Ramelli'sin the Jesuit Library. With the aid of Johannes Schreck, one of the mostlearned Jesuits of the period, Wang Cheng selected some fifty pictures from thevarious 'theater of machines" books and had them copied and printed alongwith a digest of the texts. His title translated means 'Diagrams and Explanationsof Wonderful Machines (from the Far West). ""One immediately notices in these printed copies how completely the Chineseartists 'orientalized" the scenes, substituting not only Chinese physiognomicaltypes for the principal figures but also Chinese parallel for Renaissance convergingperspective. Chinese artists were also unfamiliar with chiaroscuro, the
--Woodcut of the Nativity from a Chinese edition of Joio da Rocha, Metodo deRosatio, Lisbon, 1619/20. Institutum Historicum S.I., Rome.rendering of uniform light and shade. Thus, both prints here illustrated havenone of the relief quality which always distinguishes European art of the Renaissance.In the Chinese Nativity copy, the artist not only failed to appreciatethe dramatic lighting effect of the manger cave with the Christ Child as symbolicsource of illumination, but he also misunderstood the meaning of thedarkened convex exterior of the cave underneath the wooden shed roof. Heapparently thought the dark cross-hatching of the engraver's burin indicatedWoodcut from ~ ansome sort of reed matting, such as one frequently finds in the Orient. Thus he Library, Cambridge, 1misconstrued the cave altogether, rendering its mysterious darks as so many
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--Woodcut <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> Nativity from a Chinese edition <strong>of</strong> Joio da Rocha, Metodo deRosatio, Lisbon, 1619/20. Institutum Historicum S.I., Rome.rendering <strong>of</strong> uniform light and shade. Thus, both prints here illustrated havenone <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> relief quality which always distinguishes European art <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> <strong>Renaissance</strong>.In <strong>the</strong> Chinese Nativity copy, <strong>the</strong> artist not only failed to appreciate<strong>the</strong> dramatic lighting effect <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> manger cave with <strong>the</strong> Christ Child as symbolicsource <strong>of</strong> illumination, but he also misunderstood <strong>the</strong> meaning <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong>darkened convex exterior <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> cave underneath <strong>the</strong> wooden shed ro<strong>of</strong>. Heapparently thought <strong>the</strong> dark cross-hatching <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> engraver's burin indicatedWoodcut from ~ ansome sort <strong>of</strong> reed matting, such as one frequently finds in <strong>the</strong> Orient. Thus he Library, Cambridge, 1misconstrued <strong>the</strong> cave altoge<strong>the</strong>r, rendering its mysterious darks as so many
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