Illustration from Plinius' Naturgeschichte by J. Heyden, plate 49 from Woodcuts from Books of the XVI Century c. 1571 - 1937

This is a woodcut illustration by Jost Amman, made around 1564. It's a plate from an edition of Pliny’s "Natural History." Pliny was a Roman author, and this book was an attempt to catalogue all the known natural phenomena of the world, so Amman's images served to illustrate and make accessible these classical texts to a 16th-century audience. Woodcuts like this were a relatively inexpensive method of illustration, so this book could be distributed fairly widely. But what does it mean to picture classical knowledge in a new medium? Here, we see figures in classical dress, but also a kind of stark plainness in the rendering that reflects the visual culture of the German Renaissance, where Amman was working. As historians, we look at the book as an artifact, and the print as an image, to better understand the circulation of knowledge in early modern Europe.