Engraving Accuracy in Early Modern England: Visual Communication and the Royal Society. By Meghan C. Doherty

IN THIS GROUND-BREAKING BOOK Meghan C. Doherty examines the truth-claims of image-making in the culture of the early Royal Society of London (founded in 1660), the institution often seen as establishing the protocols of modern science. Doherty frames her argument in terms of image-making, not only the illustration as it appears on the printed page, but the establishment of agreed standards of accuracy inherent in drawing and print-making. Doherty asks us to consider the engraver’s burin as a scientific instrument, like the air pump and the microscope, productive of scientific knowledge. This complements Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s exploration of trust in scientific experiment (Leviathan and the Air Pump, 1985), and Adrian Johns’s work on the truth-claims of the book itself (The Nature of the Book, 1998). In this new analysis, image-making creates the conditions for illustrations to be accepted as accurate. The importance of this is that, Doherty writes, ‘I take accuracy to be one of the wellsprings of modern science’ (p. 32).

A wide-ranging Introduction is followed by four chapters presented as freestanding essays based on case studies. In the Introduction Doherty compares William Faithorne’s engraved portrait of the court beauty Barbara Villiers with the same artist’s engraving of a very dead looking female cadaver in Samuel Collins’s A Systeme of Anatomy (1685). Well known as a portrait engraver, Faithorne is credited by Collins as ‘an Excellent Artificier (if not the Best in the World of this kind)’. These startlingly different images ‘both derive authority from the illusion that they are close to their referents, which in both cases have been altered to conform to standards of representation, the conventions of beauty in one case and those of anatomical dissection on the other’ (p. 26).

This illusionism begins with the syntax of engraving (in the general sense, combining etching with acid and engraving with the burin), the vocabulary of lines, dots, flicks, and cross-hatching that allows the engraver to represent three dimensional structures and surface textures. In Chapter 1, Doherty shows how gentlemen could develop skills in drawing and the connoisseurship of engravings by reading key published manuals: the anonymous A Book of Drawing (1647: Doherty uses the 1652 edition), and John Evelyn’s Sculptura of 1662. She further argues that an understanding of the techniques of engraving would have been known to natural philosophers through William Faithorne’s translation of Abraham Bosse’s 1645 manual published as The Art of Graveing and Etching in 1662, the same year as Evelyn’s work. Doherty finds a parallel in Faithorne’s prose with Robert Boyle’s literary strategy for describing the setting up of apparatus to achieve accurate results.

In the compelling second chapter on Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) and the development of ‘a visual vocabulary for the Microscope’, Doherty uses another Faithorne portrait, that of Charles II, to show how the established conventions of engraving conjured up the textures of the King’s lustrous curls, the polished steel armour, and the soft delicacy of his lace collar. Familiarity with these conventions made it possible for the engravers of the Micrographia plates to visualize the structures and surface textures that Hooke deduced from multiple observations, under different lighting conditions, and with imperfect lenses. Viewed alongside Hooke’s text, readers could trust the accuracy of images of objects of which they had no prior knowledge.

In Chapter 3, Doherty examines the source materials consulted for the engravings of birds in Francis Willughby and John Ray’s Ornithologia (1676). This provides a novel way of exploring the vexed question of what it meant for images to be drawn and engraved ‘from life’, or as Ray puts it, ‘the best and truest, that is, most like live Birds’ (from the preface to the English edition, 1678, A4v). Willughby and Ray assembled a collection of hundreds of drawings of birds but in the event half the engravings in the Ornithologiae, completed by Ray after Willughby’s early death in 1672, were copied from printed sources, primarily woodcuts in the work of Ulisse Aldrovandi. In the case of the golden eagle, Ray had a drawing from a live bird (possibly held in captivity) but chose Aldrovandi’s woodcut, a more recognizable image, for the engravers to work from. Ray’s working method was to collate a range of textual descriptions and printed and hand-drawn images. His choice of which image to use then depended on how well it matched the most authoritative descriptions and his first-hand experience. It turns out that ‘most like live Birds’ meant for Ray corresponding most closely to his definition of the species, not, as we might think, the most lifelike.

In the final chapter Doherty changes register again to describe the use of images in the first volumes of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published from 1665. Here she describes how in successive issues engraved figures of the planet Saturn were used to debate and refine Christian Huygens’s interpretation of the outline of the planet as seen through the telescope. Here accuracy is the result of an accumulation of images in a textual context as part of an exchange between an international group of observers, rather than, as in the Micrographia, the first announcement of discoveries.

Taken as a whole this book is a significant and original contribution to the growing literature on scientific illustration, showing the importance of attending to process and materiality; it should be read by all those interested in the development of early modern science.

Each chapter has its own DOI number and will no doubt be read independently. This disjointed effect is accentuated by inconsistent editing between the chapters but relieved by a consolidated bibliography and index. The hardback is only available as a digital impression, poorly produced and with low quality images in the case of the review copy. Separately downloaded PDF files from library servers, as many readers will encounter the book, also have low resolution images which do not show the details of the engraved lines discussed in the text. An ‘ebook PDF’ for use with the Adobe Digital Editions app is available, but the publishers have not responded to requests to review this.