Reading Between the Lines: Ornament Prints as Technical Literature

Abstract This study situates 16th-century ornament prints within the contexts of print culture, entrepreneurial publishing, textual and visual rhetorics, and the practical knowledge encoded in technical texts. It suggests that it is worth taking seriously the explicit claims on the title pages to ornament-print series that the designs are “useful” for particular categories of artists. Comparisons with theaters of machines show that ornament prints participated in a broader instructional genre that aimed to convey as much about design and making strategies as it did about objects and artworks. The reconstruction of historical making processes by which ornament designs could have been translated into their destination media offers promise for understanding how, exactly, ornament prints might have been useful, particularly as “recipes” for early modern art. Considering ornament prints as analogs of technical literature and how-to texts offers art historians a much-needed materialist perspective to augment their formalist and iconographic approaches, while it offers historians of science a new corpus of non-verbal technical sources to better understand early modern design thinking and making processes. The understanding of what counts as a “how-to” text can be refined or reformulated to make space for a genre of art—ornament prints—that has hitherto been valued predominantly for its imaginative, fantasy forms rather than its utility for artisanal practice.