Some studies promise much, claim more, and eventually deliver little. Sachiko Kusukawa's monograph is precisely the opposite: it clearly and modestly sets out its aims and limitations, while investigating themes that have implications for the history of visual science that go well beyond the sixteenth century. Rather than trying to cover the whole field of scientific book illustration in the sixteenth century, Kusukawa has chosen to present an in-depth study of the works of three ground-breaking scientists of this century: the naturalists Leonhart Fuchs and Conrad Gessner (on plants), and the physician Andreas Vesalius (on anatomy). Nearly all of the men involved in the study of plants, animals and human beings in this age were physicians. This is a study, therefore, of how learned physicians who were fluent in Latin and bound by university education, and who shared attitudes to knowledge and authority, created new scientific knowledge by means of word and image. The key issue in her study is not an art-historical evaluation of their illustrations, although she does address themes such as naturalism, contemporary notions of ad vivum representation, and Renaissance (hyper-)realism that belong as much to art history as to cultural history. Her focus is rather on the use of images in relation to text, how particular kinds of image reflect what these scientists regarded as valid knowledge of plants or human bodies, and how images helped to construct an authoritative interpretation of such living beings.

One of the great qualities of this study is that Kusukawa places each of these men, their ideas and their works in a finely sketched and meticulously researched context; compares them with contemporaries; and thus vastly extends the range of this book, without ever stooping to facile generalization or downplaying the great differences between these scientists. Indeed, it is one of her important conclusions that heterogeneity (concerning the use and validity of scientific illustrations, notions of authoritativeness and types of representation) is the norm in the sixteenth century. That situation changed in the seventeenth century, when the more homogeneous format of scientific atlases and the ‘true-to-nature’ paradigm (shorthand for generalizing beyond the particular) became established.

The use of printed illustrations in the works of these scientists was by no means self-evident, as is amply demonstrated by the first section of this study, which is devoted to book printing and the making of illustrated books in this age. Nor was it a ‘simple’ reflection of observational practices, as is too often assumed when equating naturalistic representation with detailed observation. Fuchs's illustrations are no ‘counterfeit’ images: they do not depict individual plants, but generalize, unite characteristics from various stages of a plant's growth and even from different varieties of a species. They represent a whole plant species in the form of an absolutissima plant. Gessner, too, generalized in his images. His watercolours intended to represent the complete plant, which was often composed of highly naturalistic drawings of parts of different individual plants from the same species. Vesalius, finally, was in search of the canonical body. His illustrations do not represent a particular body, but are teleological, ignoring both unusual variations and completely normal body parts if they were ‘non-functional’ according to Vesalius's point of view. The methods followed by Fuchs, Gessner and Vesalius differed, but shared the common aim of demonstrating something essential about plants or human bodies.

Kusukawa argues that these attempts at visual generalizing should be seen as an integral part of the efforts of Vesalius, Fuchs and Gessner to elevate the status of their knowledge from what was called historia at the time (knowledge that was mainly descriptive in character) to scientia. That point is a crucial one, which hopefully will trigger further research and discussion, not least because some of the visual techniques developed for the first time by these scientists are still used in modern scientific illustration. But, as Kusukawa points out in detail, not all sixteenth-century naturalists and physicians shared either the desire to generalize or the positive attitude to the use of images shown by Vesalius, Fuchs and Gessner. Some took a stand against the use of illustrations in scientific books, while others experimented with different forms and formats of visual representation. Even the three protagonists of this study did not always use pictures in the same way in their works.

Gessner's plant drawings were never published. They functioned as a research instrument but, Kusukawa argues, their form was influenced from the start by his intention to use them as models for book illustrations. The innovative illustration strategies of Fuchs and Vesalius in particular ranged from combinations of tabellae and text to the insertion of numbers and letters in images in order to guide the reader's eye, and to layered images that helped the reader delve ever deeper into the human body. Indeed, for these learned physicians printed books were a key to thinking about nature and human anatomy, to divulging knowledge, settling disputes, and testing the opinions of colleagues. However true this may be, occasionally it is still good to remember that books were not the exclusive means available to them for understanding nature, that practice, face-to-face interaction and correspondence played their part, and that images did exist and circulate without ever being printed in a book.

All of the authors discussed here gave much thought to how their particular use of illustrations in combination with the text would influence the reader's reading practice. We can say the same of Sachiko Kusukawa and her publisher, since this is one of the most beautifully produced and richly illustrated volumes in this field to have appeared for a long time. This thoughtful and thought-provoking study deserves to become a point of reference for research on relations between text and image, the role of illustrations and that of visual evidence in the history of science. Hopefully it will lead to new debate on the plurality and inventiveness of sixteenth-century textual and visual science.