Images of the Earth, Images of Man
63
striking contrast to the better-known plates on manufacturing procedures. Instead of a vignette followed by a successive enumeration and
elaboration of the tools and machinery involved, these plates consist
mainly of single images, with few of the illustrative techniques of
breaking down and peering used in the plates on the mechanical arts.
Compared with the dynamic depiction of the processes involved in
human industry, these plates may at first glance appear static, offering
little understanding of the processes at work within Nature beyond an
aesthetic depiction of their visible effects. Certainly, much of this has
to do with the nature of the subject presented and the development of
mineralogy as a science in the mid-eighteenth century. Although an
Encyclopédie article and a plate are dedicated to the art of subterranean geometry as a means of mapping the contents of the Earth’s
crust, cross-sections of strata were as yet extremely rare. Although
some geological cross-sections are to be found in seventeenth-century
texts, these tended to illustrate cosmological or cosmogonical theories
rather than observation-based representations of a particular locale; it
was not until the mid-eighteenth century that stratographical depictions of particular regions began to be published in works on the study
of the Earth.
9 In fact, one of the earliest examples of such images is to
be found in Johann Gottlob Lehmann’s Traités de physique, d’histoire
naturelle, de minéralogie et de métallurgie, published in 1756 and
translated into French by d’Holbach himself in 1759. Similarly, the
notion of the Earth having a traceable history was still relatively new,
and the type of time-lapse images used in the Encyclopédie to show
various stages of production in the arts found their closest parallels
with the history of the Earth again in works of cosmology, such as the
frontispiece of Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra of 1689,
which depicts the history of the Earth as conceived from a Christian
perspective, with the Earth being shown in the various stages suggested by seventeenth-century theology and Biblical accounts, moving
from its initial primeval state through a paradisiacal stage without waters or mountains, followed by the Deluge and then the Earth’s current
state, to the anticipated conflagration and the subsequent creation of a
___________________________
9 Charlotte Klonk, “Science, Art, and the Representation of the Natural World”, in
The Cambridge History of Science, IV: Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. by Roy Porter
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 584-617 (pp. 612-13).
63
striking contrast to the better-known plates on manufacturing procedures. Instead of a vignette followed by a successive enumeration and
elaboration of the tools and machinery involved, these plates consist
mainly of single images, with few of the illustrative techniques of
breaking down and peering used in the plates on the mechanical arts.
Compared with the dynamic depiction of the processes involved in
human industry, these plates may at first glance appear static, offering
little understanding of the processes at work within Nature beyond an
aesthetic depiction of their visible effects. Certainly, much of this has
to do with the nature of the subject presented and the development of
mineralogy as a science in the mid-eighteenth century. Although an
Encyclopédie article and a plate are dedicated to the art of subterranean geometry as a means of mapping the contents of the Earth’s
crust, cross-sections of strata were as yet extremely rare. Although
some geological cross-sections are to be found in seventeenth-century
texts, these tended to illustrate cosmological or cosmogonical theories
rather than observation-based representations of a particular locale; it
was not until the mid-eighteenth century that stratographical depictions of particular regions began to be published in works on the study
of the Earth.
9 In fact, one of the earliest examples of such images is to
be found in Johann Gottlob Lehmann’s Traités de physique, d’histoire
naturelle, de minéralogie et de métallurgie, published in 1756 and
translated into French by d’Holbach himself in 1759. Similarly, the
notion of the Earth having a traceable history was still relatively new,
and the type of time-lapse images used in the Encyclopédie to show
various stages of production in the arts found their closest parallels
with the history of the Earth again in works of cosmology, such as the
frontispiece of Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra of 1689,
which depicts the history of the Earth as conceived from a Christian
perspective, with the Earth being shown in the various stages suggested by seventeenth-century theology and Biblical accounts, moving
from its initial primeval state through a paradisiacal stage without waters or mountains, followed by the Deluge and then the Earth’s current
state, to the anticipated conflagration and the subsequent creation of a
___________________________
9 Charlotte Klonk, “Science, Art, and the Representation of the Natural World”, in
The Cambridge History of Science, IV: Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. by Roy Porter
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 584-617 (pp. 612-13).