Images of the Earth, Images of Man
59
clandestinely prepared for publication.
2 And although they seemed
less openly subversive than the work’s text volumes, the plates nevertheless contributed to the Encyclopédie’s aim of presenting the reader
with a clear and detailed account of all branches of human knowledge.
The most well-known of the Encyclopédie plates are those depicting
the practical arts. Headed by a vignette of the workshop or shop front,
and followed by exploded diagrams of machinery and equipment, successive plates display the processes, equipment and products of each
art in ever-increasing detail, with the aim of enabling the reader to
comprehend even the most complex of procedures. Thus in the series
of plates dedicated to the refinement of gold, we find vignettes taking
the reader from the extractions of the ore from the mine through to its
calcinations at the forge, each accompanied by an orderly presentation
of the equipment involved (figs 1&2). Each individual item, each human figure, is labelled and explained in the accompanying notes.
Nothing is mysterious or haphazard: all is rational, ordered and comprehensible, laid out before the reader’s inquisitive gaze.
The mineral kingdom too finds representation in the Encyclopédie’s pictorial account of human knowledge, namely in the sixth
plate volume, published in 1768 and dedicated to natural history in
general; the section on mineralogy itself was overseen by the baron
Paul Thiry d’Holbach following a disagreement between Diderot and
Pierre Daubenton, older brother of the naturalist Louis-Jean-Marie
Daubenton, and who had originally been assigned the editorship of the
natural history plate volume.
3 Anonymously introduced to the Encyclopédie readership as “une Personne, dont l’Allemand est la
___________________________
2 “Prospectus de l’Encyclopédie”, in Diderot: Œuvres Complètes, V, Encyclopédie, I,
ed. by John Lough and Jacques Proust (Paris: Hermann, 1976), 83-130 (pp. 101-3).
3 Mineralogy is used here in its eighteenth-century sense, that is, the study of the
Earth’s composition and history, and the study of individual elements of the Earth’s
crust such as minerals, rocks, fossils etc. Diderot: Correspondance, ed. by Georges
Roth and Jean Varloot, 16 vols (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955-70), IX (1963), pp.
29, 31, to Le Breton (4 March 1769); John Lough, Essays on the “Encyclopédie” of
Diderot and d’Alembert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 116-17. For information about both Daubenton brothers, especially Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton,
renowned naturalist and the main contributor on natural history to the Encyclopédie,
see Frank A. Kafker and Serena L. Kafker, The Encyclopedists as Individuals: A Biographical Dictionary of the Authors of the “Encyclopédie” (Studies on Voltaire and
the Eighteenth Century, 257 (1988)), pp. 92-93.
59
clandestinely prepared for publication.
2 And although they seemed
less openly subversive than the work’s text volumes, the plates nevertheless contributed to the Encyclopédie’s aim of presenting the reader
with a clear and detailed account of all branches of human knowledge.
The most well-known of the Encyclopédie plates are those depicting
the practical arts. Headed by a vignette of the workshop or shop front,
and followed by exploded diagrams of machinery and equipment, successive plates display the processes, equipment and products of each
art in ever-increasing detail, with the aim of enabling the reader to
comprehend even the most complex of procedures. Thus in the series
of plates dedicated to the refinement of gold, we find vignettes taking
the reader from the extractions of the ore from the mine through to its
calcinations at the forge, each accompanied by an orderly presentation
of the equipment involved (figs 1&2). Each individual item, each human figure, is labelled and explained in the accompanying notes.
Nothing is mysterious or haphazard: all is rational, ordered and comprehensible, laid out before the reader’s inquisitive gaze.
The mineral kingdom too finds representation in the Encyclopédie’s pictorial account of human knowledge, namely in the sixth
plate volume, published in 1768 and dedicated to natural history in
general; the section on mineralogy itself was overseen by the baron
Paul Thiry d’Holbach following a disagreement between Diderot and
Pierre Daubenton, older brother of the naturalist Louis-Jean-Marie
Daubenton, and who had originally been assigned the editorship of the
natural history plate volume.
3 Anonymously introduced to the Encyclopédie readership as “une Personne, dont l’Allemand est la
___________________________
2 “Prospectus de l’Encyclopédie”, in Diderot: Œuvres Complètes, V, Encyclopédie, I,
ed. by John Lough and Jacques Proust (Paris: Hermann, 1976), 83-130 (pp. 101-3).
3 Mineralogy is used here in its eighteenth-century sense, that is, the study of the
Earth’s composition and history, and the study of individual elements of the Earth’s
crust such as minerals, rocks, fossils etc. Diderot: Correspondance, ed. by Georges
Roth and Jean Varloot, 16 vols (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955-70), IX (1963), pp.
29, 31, to Le Breton (4 March 1769); John Lough, Essays on the “Encyclopédie” of
Diderot and d’Alembert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 116-17. For information about both Daubenton brothers, especially Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton,
renowned naturalist and the main contributor on natural history to the Encyclopédie,
see Frank A. Kafker and Serena L. Kafker, The Encyclopedists as Individuals: A Biographical Dictionary of the Authors of the “Encyclopédie” (Studies on Voltaire and
the Eighteenth Century, 257 (1988)), pp. 92-93.