Illustrating the Book of Nature in the Renaissance: Drawing, painting, and printing geometric diagrams and scientific figures

This dissertation investigates the role of illustrations and diagrams in scientific books of the fifteenth century. It illuminates the crucial role of diagrammatic representation within Renaissance approaches to the study of nature. In doing so, it elucidates the incunabular origins of Galileo's dictum that the Book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics. It demonstrates the importance of scientific illustration in the development of printed visual culture during the early stages of the Scientific Revolution.; Classical texts were canonized, but their figures were not. In medieval manuscripts, illustrations were consigned to the margins, if and when they were present. Image-filled codices brought to Italy by Byzantine emigres inspired humanists to recreate the diagrams of ancient scientific texts. Assisted by mathematically-minded artists and printers, humanists issued editions that stabilized scientific illustrations. By integrating these images into the reasoning skills they taught, humanists instituted visual and geometric thinking as an essential tool in natural philosophy.; The opening chapter presents a historiographic analysis of the role of images in early modern science. Chapter 2 reinterprets Jacopo de' Barbari's painting of Luca Pacioli and Disciple (1495). Its iconography displays the achievements of mathematical humanists while demonstrating the power of geometric diagrams as analytic tools. Chapter 3 describes the significance of the figures in scientific incunables in the development of book illustration. Chapter 4 considers the woodcuts of Valturio's De re militari (1472) to outline the differences between the visuality of the printed page and that of manuscripts. Chapters 5 and 6 examine two kinds of early printed scientific images: the engravings of the maps of Ptolemy's Cosmographia (1477 and 1478 editions), and the metal imprints of the first astronomy works, published by Regiomontanus. The novelty of their printing methods underscored both the achievements of the editors of these texts and the importance of graphic precision in scientific illustration. Finally, Chapter 7 analyzes the geometric diagrams of the first edition of Euclid's Elements (1482), its printer's claims about them, and their innovative printing techniques. The Conclusion places these typographic artifacts within the intellectual culture of late fifteenth-century Venice which produced them.