Art History Professor Stephanie Leitch published Early Modern Print Media and the Art of Observation: Training the Literate Eye this summer with Cambridge University Press.
Leitch’s research examines the vital ancestors of today’s farmers’ almanacs: visually driven vernacular publications that show us how early modern viewers both learned to look and trust their own eyes. These skills taught readers how to track the moon’s phases, measure the height of stars, and identify comets. Such visual skills were also critical ones for making sense of genres popular in the printed press of the sixteenth century, such as portraiture and anamorphic images.
Early Modern Print Media and the Art of Observation argues that books of diverse content printed in the early sixteenth century shared the common directive to sharpen the visual skills of their readers. Among these were manuals of judicial astrology that coached how to read palms and profiles, as well as works of popular science that drew practical conclusions from celestial observations. These trendy volumes centered graphic design in developing a literate eye that empowered reading publics to understand the world via their own visual judgments.
Leitch writes:
“After many summers leafing through early modern illustrated books, I became curious about the work of images that appeared alongside and in many cases, upstaged, the text. Wondering what characteristics were shared by this visual data, I noticed that images were agitating to turn readers into active observers by both prompting and cuing viewing practices. These images promised to help readers understand physical phenomenon, both celestial and earth-bound. My book examines these genres as vital ancestors of today’s how-to books: visually driven vernacular publications that taught early moderns to look systematically and to trust their own eyes. Such books enlisted themselves as helpful guides for readers wanting to get an handle on moon phases and lunar eclipses, and those interested in tracking the trail of a comet. They also promised to come to the rescue of readers needing to treat battle wounds, diagnose their neighbors, or choose the right bridle bit for an intractable horse.
As a group, these images shaped areas of visual interest that coalesced into book genres and eventually articulated scientific pursuits. My research questions are informed by those active in visual epistemology, the history of science, as well as the history of the book. My study treats images that have not been interrogated for their didactic work, or for their agency in formalizing disciplinary practices. For instance, such emphasis on visual learning allowed fields such as cosmography to develop around images, but also organized more specious pursuits such as profile and palm reading, skill-sets largely retired from science today but wildly popular then. Such visual acuity, however, was critical for making sense of other genres popular in the printed press of the sixteenth century, such as Kunstbücher (how-to manuals) and anamorphic images that queried the fixity of identity that painted portraiture seemed to promise.
Because images of the early modern press trained the eye, they reflect the major intervention that art supplied in shaping early modern science. Early Modern Print Media and the Art of Observation considers the wealth of practical knowledge that emerged from vernacular and pictorialized sixteenth-century texts. These books gave rise to a class of amateur weather watchers, astrologers, bloodletters, cosmographers, and physiognomers. Such visual learners formed an enterprising readership for publishers encouraging them to undertake empirical examinations difficult to imagine without these books. In so far as this promoted images’ sovereignty, today’s art historians might find the roots of epistemic shifts in their own research fields lurking in such early modern texts. This study also hopes to attract scholars tracking how cognition is routed through the visual field.”