Preserving the Cutting Edge: Traveling Woodblocks, Material Networks, and Visualizing Plants in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

This study examines changes in the epistemic status of recycled botanical woodblocks brought about by shifts of social, economic, and intellectual purpose. Unmoored from their original intent, some woodblocks, once created, began to travel, finding their way into sites remote from their places of origin, and influencing processes of visualizing the world by fitting, with renewed purpose, into the space between the objects of nature and the imagination. As traveling objects of representation and as embodiments of plant depictions, woodblocks figure into the material culture of shared practices in the early modern era, transmitting specific images for diverse purposes while communicating the artistic and artisanal practices embedded in them as artifacts. They constitute in this way a relatively stable material source of visual imagery; physically fixed but culturally mutable objects that help revise and reshape the perception of the natural world.

An additional dimension of the study employs features of network theory to explore the “small world” of artists, draftsmen, cutters, printers and publishers that made and then reused woodblocks, focusing especially upon the conditions of woodblock use and reuse in two traditions. The first relates to the creation of woodblocks depicting plants commissioned by Leonhard Thurneisser (1531–1596) which were later reused by Thomas Panckow (1622–1665) and Batholomaeus Zorn (1639–1717). The second examines the creation of the woodblocks used by Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–1577) in sixteenth century editions of his Commentaries on Dioscorides and which continued to be reused into the eighteenth century. I argue that the reuse and repurposing of woodblocks is an obvious economic feature of shared practices among the processes of plant illustration in the early modern era. In making woodblocks, and in the practices of printing images from them, knowledge that related to scribal, print, and xylographic traditions intersected. Social roles also overlapped as artists, draftsmen, cutters, and printers joined in associations linking their labors and materials to create compelling and reuseable “working objects” as a way to envision specific parts of nature.