ABSTRACT
My essay is about certain problems with the metaphor of books as early modern computers, as ways of storing, accessing and processing information. I focus on a particular kind of evidence, illustrations, and ask what kind of information they contribute to or encode in books, and what is revealed when we turn our early modern search engines on them. Illustrations in early modern books serve a wide variety of functions, and none of these are simple. Sometimes, as in scientific texts, they are essential explanatory devices; but even in these cases the pictures are rarely merely explanatory. They share with the imagery of narrative and discursive works a dimension that ranges from the decorative to the dramatic and symbolic-they are one way of making the Renaissance computer appear user-friendly. The practice of book illustration has been most fruitfully treated in the context of the history of printing, but it is an aspect of the history of reading too, and that is what I will be considering here. I am concerned not with cases in which pictures and text complement and elucidate each other-these have been frequently discussed-but with a number of counter-examples, which strike me as equally characteristic: a group of cases in which the pictures are clearly designed to constitute an address to the purchaser and reader, an attraction, whether as embellishment or elucidation, but in which they seem, nevertheless, entirely disfunctional-illogical, inappropriate, or simply wrong. Early modern book illustration is rarely straightforward. Even the early iconologies – Cartari, Ripa, Pierio Valeriano, the Hieroglyphs of Horapollo-were in their earliest editions, not illustrated. Here
pictures would seem to be of the essence; but printed iconology was initially conceived as an ekphrastic enterprise. On the other hand, in the history of printing, the illustrated book is as old as the book itself. Woodblock books, such as the Biblia Pauperum, employed pictures to epitomize, recall and even control the interpretation of the scriptural histories. In this context, the image is not an adjunct to anything; but neither is it the primary mode of communication. In a characteristic example, the Crucifixion will be flanked by the betrayal of Joseph by his brothers and Jonah being thrown overboard in the storm. The disposition and juxtaposition of imagery provide a critical commentary on the matter of sacred history, but the pictures will make no sense to a viewer unfamiliar with the biblical stories, and even for that reader the relation of the images to each other must be explained-the pictures, that is, depend on narration and explication. It has been claimed that block books were designed for illiterate or unsophisticated readers, but exactly the opposite must be true: they require the most detailed knowledge not only of the scriptures, but of the principles of biblical exegesis.
