Picturing Life in the Early Modern World

You have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations Share ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Mantovani Mattia and Rebohm Simon 2025Picturing Life in the Early Modern WorldNotes Rec.http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2025.0030SectionYou have accessIntroductionPicturing Life in the Early Modern World Mattia Mantovani Mattia Mantovani De Wulf–Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium email protected Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author and Simon Rebohm Simon Rebohm Centre for Science Studies, German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Halle, Germany email protected Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Mattia Mantovani Mattia Mantovani De Wulf–Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium email protected Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed and Simon Rebohm Simon Rebohm Centre for Science Studies, German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Halle, Germany email protected Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Published:24 September 2025https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2025.0030The life of imagesIn recent years, investigations into visual culture have reshaped our understanding of the early modern period. Scholars such as Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, Eric Jorink, Sachiko Kusukawa, and Anna Marie Roos, among others, have opened up a new field of research that combines insights from the history of art and technology, the history of philosophy, science, and cultural transmission. This scholarship has unequivocally established that, in order to understand early modern science, images are no less significant than words—and, indeed, sometimes even more so.This is especially true in the case of imagery depicting living beings and life processes. Indeed, historical actors themselves recognized the challenge of representing the hidden workings of their minutest organs solely through words. One of the most celebrated anatomists of the time—Nicolaus Steno (1638−1686)—remarked that 'those who have drawn the muscles often have been more accurate than those who described them',1 concluding that 'a good drawer is as necessary as a good anatomist'.2 But also the most visible features of animals and their bewildering variety as well as the variability of their local names demanded means other than words in order to overcome the considerable difficulties in identifying species across different regions and time periods—the case of fish is exemplary, particularly due to the challenges of specimen preservation. For most early modern individuals interested in life matters, images were not therefore intended to embellish a self-contained text, but rather to support and complement verbal arguments—if not to replace them altogether. Often, images were extracted from their original context and adapted to the most different genres. These new contexts, in turn, allowed the images to enrich, reshape, and even challenge the doctrines of their original authors. Over the course of the early modern period, images of living beings came to acquire a life of their own.The early modern period witnessed dramatic advancements in the understanding of living beings. New anatomical structures and physiological processes were discovered decade after decade—consider, for instance, the circulation of blood, identified by William Harvey in the 1620s—while living beings from the most remote habitats became known around the world. By the seventeenth century, the advent of the microscope opened new fields of enquiry. This Special Issue demonstrates that images were vital to these pursuits and served as a major driving force behind many discoveries and the development of new theories. Its five case studies have been carefully selected to present readers with the rich variety of visual strategies adopted at the time, the challenges they faced, and the new problems they generated. Through an integrated methodology, the Special Issue explores the complex role of early modern life images—both as vehicles of knowledge and as material objects—in their own right and in their often-problematic relationship to accompanying texts.The Special Issue examines a wide range of images, from true-to-life drawings of animals observed in their natural habitats to carefully conceived schematics designed to reveal the most hidden workings of the body by dint of geometry and mechanics. Early modern image-makers employed diverse techniques in their efforts to depict life: pen and watercolour, woodcut and copperplate engraving, working with parchment, paper, and wax, and even organic materials. This technical variety reflects the different concerns of the image-makers and the varying expectations of their intended users.Thus, for example, in view of species recognition and systematic taxonomy, it was crucial to convey the distinctive details of each animal, with colour often proving to be as important as shape. Comparative anatomy greatly benefited from side-by-side depictions of animals, which required the development of visual clues to guide readers and draw attention to key features. Microscopists struggled to reproduce the most delicate layers of nature with accurate proportions—often disregarding hues—and to convey a sense of scale. Meanwhile, scholars interested in physiology were at pains to render on page the most fleeting life processes, and they developed alternative visual strategies to depict motion and the passage of time.These challenges prompted significant changes in iconography and image-making. This trajectory ultimately continued with the development of novel iconographic solutions and media. The use of movable flaps is particularly noteworthy in this regard, as it allowed readers to perform a sort of 'dissection' on paper. Other practitioners, however, believed that a faithful representation of living beings required moving into the third dimension. To do justice to this complementary trend and to address the issue of dimensionality, the Special Issue includes a contribution devoted entirely to models. This will enable readers to better appreciate the constraints and challenges posed by different media, and to critically examine the very notion of 'representation' as well as the divide between nature and art. Indeed, the making of images and models led to a rethinking of the very constitution of living beings.Furthermore, the visual strategies developed to represent life and living beings became effective in depicting non-organic phenomena, whose processes lie beyond the reach of direct human experience, albeit for the opposite reason. For example, an instantaneous event such as muscular contraction could serve as a model for visualizing the formation of geological strata over millennia. The challenge of picturing life thus encouraged—and in some cases compelled—natural historians to 'read' nature afresh through novel visual frameworks.Ultimately, this Special Issue demonstrates that the early modern 'period eye' for life merits an anatomy of its own.Themes and figuresThis Special Issue focuses on both human and non-human animals and is intended to be read in dialogue with the articles and Special Issues on plants recently published by this journal.3 The distinction between these two classes of beings became a matter of increasing debate in the early modern period, as more and more thinkers came to regard non-human animals as automata with no 'mind' and therefore, on their account, incapable of sense-perception, an ability that Aristotelian philosophers had for centuries regarded as the essential and defining feature of animals vis-à-vis plants. As a result, 'animal machines' and plants exhibiting conspicuously 'automatic' reactions—such as the sunflower and the Mimosa pudica—began to serve as comparative models for one another, particularly in terms of their respective iconographies.Indeed, it was the very concept of 'life' that came into question during this period. For centuries, Aristotelians had conceptualized life in terms of the 'soul', especially the 'vegetative' soul, which was thought to perform functions such as nutrition, growth, and reproduction.4 Over the course of the early modern era, however, radically alternative views came to the fore. These are clearly exemplified by some of the most extreme positions under debate. Indeed, some of the 'vitalists'—as they were later called—went so far as to argue that some form of life pervades all beings, no matter how inert they may appear. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Cartesians refused any substantial distinction between 'natural' and 'artificial' beings, and pretended to account for all life processes through the shapes and motions of chunks of matter—'corpuscules', sometimes reinterpreted in atomistic fashion.5These 'mechanisms'—in contrast to the powers of the souls and living forces—could be represented through images.6 And these images, in turn, became tools for testing theories. Arguably, one of the principal reasons for the success of the mechanical model was its pictoriality, which enabled it to capture both the mind and the eye.7 As this Special Issue demonstrates, an unassuming diagram of intersecting parallelograms could serve to refute one of the most entrenched concepts in premodern medicine: that of the 'spirits'. Images functioned as arguments—arguments that must be understood on their own terms, however difficult they may be to articulate in words. As the Special Issue illustrates, in a sense, historical research without images is blind.Chronologically, the Special Issue spans the entire early modern period, from the mid-sixteenth to the late-eighteenth century. It begins with an album of fish drawings created around the mid-sixteenth century by the Venetian humanist Daniele Barbaro (1513−1570) and his personal artist Maestro Plinio, and concludes with René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur's Memoirs towards a history of insects (1734−1742) and New systematic conchylia cabinet (1769−1795) by Friedrich Heinrich Wilhelm Martini and Johann Hieronymus Chemnitz. Along the way, it considers works such as Nicolaus Steno's Specimen of the elements of myology and Giovan Battista Verle's Artificial anatomy of the human eye, both published in Florence during the 1660s and 1670s.8In terms of geographic scope, the Special Issue includes material from across the European continent—from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean—and extends its perspective globally by examining sophisticated debates on how to depict and classify the most diverse living beings encountered through trade and colonization. These include chameleons and dromedaries, the insects of Suriname, and the molluscs of Southeast Asia. Indeed, comparative anatomy and the constant engagement with previously unseen animals arriving from around the globe played decisive roles in shaping early modern cultures. Representing the lives of others enabled—and compelled—human beings to question their own image and self-understanding.This diversity is reflected in the historical actors involved. The Special Issue seeks to do justice to this full range of contributors, across gender, social class, and professional background. For this reason, alongside renowned figures such as Conrad Gessner (1516−1565), Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522−1605), Thomas Bartholin (1616−1680), and Maria Sibylla Merian (1647−1717), it also highlights lesser-known, if not nearly forgotten, individuals such as Luigi Anguillara (ca 1512−1570), Wilhelm Fabry von Hilden (1560−1634), and Hélène Dumoustier (1700−1799), as well as numerous unnamed artisans and craftspeople. The depiction of the most extraordinary animals and their most intricate organs demanded a level of skill and technical expertise that exceeded the capacities of many authors, who thus relied on professional image-makers. While the relationships between these various actors often reflected the social and gender hierarchies of the time, there are also notable examples of meaningful collaboration and exchange.The Special Issue further demonstrates the diversity of early modern visual culture in terms of the sites and contexts in which these images were produced. These ranged from university classrooms to professors' private residences, from aristocratic Wunderkammern to newly founded scientific academies such as the Royal Society and the Academia Caesarea Leopoldino–Carolina naturae curiosorum. Correspondingly, images circulated across a variety of literary genres—university disputations, treatises dedicated to prestigious patrons, journal articles, and encyclopedias—each with its own textual logic, iconographic conventions, and communicative aims. Notably, title pages and frontispieces emerged as among the most innovative instruments of early modern visual culture, particularly in the realms of public recognition and promotion.This diversity-sensitive approach is intended to enable readers to appreciate the broader contexts in which these depictions of living beings and life processes were produced and employed, as well as the various epistemological and practical functions they served. In the early modern period, as today, representing life was a vital and urgent affair. At stake were not only theoretical debates but also pathology and therapeutics—and business. Thus, in the Special Issue we will see that Venetian merchants used sketches for identifying and appraising drugs, while anatomical tables instructed military surgeons on where precisely to make incisions. In a quite literal sense, picturing life was a matter of life and death.ContentsThis Special Issue comprises five contributions.The first essay, by Florike Egmond, reconstructs a lost album of fish drawings created before 1551 by the Venetian humanist Daniele Barbaro and his personal painter, Maestro Plinio. Egmond's broader aim is to shed light on the process of image-making and collecting prior to the advent of print. She argues that the revolutionary visual turn that occurred before the mid-sixteenth century was only partially driven by printing technologies. According to her interpretation, Barbaro's project of compiling an encyclopaedic image collection of aquatilia was likely inspired by contemporary innovations in botany. Fish specimens, being difficult to preserve and collect, could only be examined thoroughly by means of detailed images.The second article, authored by Nuno Castel Branco and the late Troels Kardel, offers further evidence that representing life visually necessitated the invention of novel strategies. They demonstrate that Steno's diagrams of the muscles are intimately connected to his development of a new technique of dissection. Here, lancet and pen function in unison. Castel Branco and Kardel also show that Steno's representation and physiological understanding of muscles was shaped by geometry, specifically through the application of diagrams and theorems from Euclid's Elements. As such, Steno's anatomical illustrations represent a remarkable synthesis of diverse visual strategies. This iconography also proved applicable in other domains and enabled Steno to interpret the formation of geological strata in mountains and, more broadly, of the Earth itself.As noted earlier, some early modern thinkers lamented that even the most lifelike images fell short of adequately representing the human body. The third article in the Special Issue, by Wenrui Zhao, examines seventeenth-century anatomical models of the eye, focusing on two case studies: the German surgeon Wilhelm Fabry von Hilden and the Venetian craftsman Giovan Battista Verle. Zhao argues that these models functioned simultaneously as displays of artisanal mastery and as pedagogical tools designed to re-enact the process of dissection. They sought to replicate the textures of various anatomical parts in order to train both touch and sight—and, indeed, the intellect. According to Zhao, these models were intended to serve as 'artefactual arguments', challenging the conceptual divide between nature and artifice.One of the central challenges prompting new visual strategies in the seventeenth century was the taxonomic classification of animal species. In the fourth article, Silke Förschler demonstrates that leading naturalists such as Claude Perrault, Maria Sibylla Merian, and René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur developed their visual languages in close collaboration with artists and image-makers, who must therefore be credited as co-inventors. This collaboration was particularly crucial given that Merian and Réaumur aimed to visualize insect metamorphosis—a process that was exceptionally difficult to observe, let alone to depict on paper. Their iconographic strategies, though varied, all aimed to direct the viewer's attention to the most distinctive features of each animal species, allowing them to be differentiated while maintaining aesthetic appeal.The use of images for taxonomic purposes continued into the eighteenth century and culminated in a highly detailed representational mode in conchological treatises. In the fifth and final article of the Special Issue, Simon Rebohm argues that images of shells were devised as a response to the rarity of specimens and the taxonomic challenges faced by researchers. Accordingly, visual representation shifted from typical to characteristic modes: rather than combining features from multiple examples to depict an idealized type, illustrators aimed to capture all the details of a single specimen considered representative of the species. The illuminated engravings preferred in this period required collaborative efforts by groups of artists, each highly specialized in different techniques. The combination of detailed images and references to specific objects in collections enabled naturalists to perform much of their taxonomic work using pictures as stand-ins for physical specimens. Moreover, the classification of shells required comparison across large numbers of specimens—beyond the capacity of even the most extensive collections of the time. The article shows that depictions of animals concerned not merely individual species but also larger taxonomic frameworks, and with them, the order of nature itself.* * * * *The five articles in this Special Issue leave no doubt as to the richness, sophistication, and the beauty of early modern imagery related to living beings and life processes. No single collection can do full justice to this visual culture, nor can it provide final answers to the many pressing questions raised in this introduction. We are only beginning to understand the role that images played in the development of early modern science, particularly in the life sciences. This Special Issue is therefore also intended as a call to further inquiry. We hope it will pave the way for future studies and new lines of research in this field.AcknowledgementsThis Special Issue is the outcome of a workshop held at the Leopoldina Centre for Science Studies. The conference was originally scheduled to take place on campus in March 2020 in Halle (Saale), Germany, but had to be moved online due to the pandemic. We extend our sincere thanks to the institution for their generous funding and support, and to all speakers and attendees for their invaluable contributions.The research for this introduction was made possible through the generous support of the Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek—Vlaanderen, for the project Animal minds and the puzzle of perception. A seventeenth-century debate (FWO 1204925N, Mattia Mantovani, KU Leuven).Data accessibilityThis article has no additional data.Declaration of AI useWe have not used AI-assisted technologies in creating this article.Footnotes1 Nicolaus Steno, Elementorum myologiæ specimen (Stella, Florence, 1667), p. 65: 'miror tamen, qui musculos delinearunt, sæpius iis, qui eosdem descripserunt, exactiores fuisse'. The translation is taken from Steno on muscles. Introduction, text, translations (ed. Troels Kardel), p. 219 (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1994).2 Nicolaus Steno, Discours sur l'anatomie du cerveau (Ninville, Paris, 1669), p. 52: 'C'est pourquoy il faut employer tous les moyens possibles, pour en avoir d'exactes, à quoy un bon dessignateur, est aussi necessair, qu'un bon Anatomist.'3 See especially Fabrizio Baldassarri, 'Green laboratories: plant studies in the early modern period. Introduction', Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. (online), doi:10.1098/rsnr.2023.0030.4 Indeed, 'life' features in Aristotle's very definition of the 'soul'; De anima II 1, 412a27: 'The soul (ψυχή) is the first actuality of a natural body that has life (ζωή) potentially'; cf. ibid. 412a14: 'by life we mean self-nutrition and growth and decay'; in The complete works of Aristotle (ed. Jonathan Barnes), vol. 1, p. 21 (Princeton University Press, 1984). On these late scholastic developments of this theory, see Dennis Des Chene, Life's forms. Late Aristotelian conceptions of the soul (Cornell University Press, 2000).5 As is well known, most historical actors positioned themselves somewhere in between these extremes, and reworked these positions in the most creative ways, also in response to new readings of Aristotelian philosophy—think of the philosophia novantiqua—and to the heated debates about bêtes machines and the mind–body union, for instance. See the references quoted in this Introduction and throughout the Special Issue for orientation in the literature on the topic.6 See Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism. A visual, lexical, and conceptual history (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).7 On the role of images in the making and early-modern reception of Descartes' philosophy and science—for example by Steno, to refer to a figure discussed in this Special Issue—see Mattia Mantovani and Davide Cellamare (eds), Cartesian imagery. Picturing philosophy in the early modern age (Leiden, Brill, 2025).8 Steno, op. cit. (note 1). Giovan Battista Verle, Anatomia artifiziale dell'occhio umano (Stamp. Arcivescovale, Firenze, 1679).© 2025 The Author(s).Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved. Next Article VIEW FULL TEXTDOWNLOAD PDF FiguresRelatedReferencesDetails Latest articlesView latest articles... Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2025.0030Published by:Royal SocietyOnline ISSN:1743-0178History: Manuscript received10/06/2025Manuscript accepted13/08/2025Published online24/09/2025 License:© 2025 The Author(s).Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved. Citations and impact Keywordsvisual culturescientific imageslifemedicine Subjectshistory of biologyhistory of medical sciences