Epistemic Images in Early-Modern Mixed Mathematics

Challenging Ancient textual authorities, images are ubiquitous in the early-modern regime of knowledge: from Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica to Newton’s Principia through Hooke’s Micrographia, illustrations, depictions, figures, diagrams, and schematics are legion. Drawing on the history of books, the history of art, and visual studies, recent scholarship on scientific imagery within the print culture helped to shed light on various aspects of the many early-modern visual cultures. Images of knowledge are situated and have to be contextualized with their surrounding texts and other images; they are embodied in a material medium, a book, a leaflet, a letter; they are embedded in a network of practitioners – drawers, engravers, editors, readers…. These studies highlighted the central epistemological role played by inscriptions at large in the early-modern development of natural knowledge, as well as they made more complex the interplay between art and science from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. If medicine, botany, and natural history, schematics, trees, and diagrams, statics and machine drawing, or alchemy have been studied, mixed mathematics, on the other hand, have hardly been dealt with.