ABSTRACT
In addition to allowing for collaboration between scientists, the production and reproduction of images in natural historical texts, as in others, promoted the exchange of knowledge between artists and scientists. I include here not just artists who were employed by scientists and publishers to create the woodblocks for the printed texts,6 and the scientists who learned to draw to preserve observations made in the field or the anatomy theatre, but artists and scientists in general – even those who did not consciously practise the skills or consider the principles of the other discipline. There are many recognised examples of the use of scientific illustrations as sources for decorative arts, and thousands more that have yet to be pinpointed – or may never be, as
the task of tracing and documenting the movement of these images between media and genres is enormous in both material and intellectual terms.7 This research has shown that what we might call the intimacy of shared purpose between artists and scientists in the early modern period enriched their inventiveness, enhanced their skills and bolstered the professional status and collective ethos of each.8 It also shows that the images, along with the disciplinary values of both naturalistic art and empirical science, were widely dispersed in the societies in which they were produced: they became, that is, part of the general, fluid, circulation of signs, marked but not necessarily determined by their origins in theory or practice.
