Images of the Earth, Images of Man
73
These plates on mineralogy, then, can be seen to represent the
variety of ways in which the eighteenth century related to the natural
world. The relationship between man and nature operated within the
contexts of industry, leisure activity, and scientific endeavour, and
thus Nature was variously a resource to be managed, a spectacle to be
admired, and an object to be examined. Common to almost all of
them, however, is the awareness that although the natural world is indeed awesome it is nevertheless entirely open to mankind’s investigation and mastery. It is thus the Encyclopédie’s use of landscape and its
inclusion of humanity, rather than the ostensibly rationalistic breaking-down of machines and processes used in depictions of the mechanical arts, that offers the best visual representation of this physical,
direct experience of nature and, by extension, the recognition of mankind’s need to engage directly with not only Nature but the sources of
knowledge itself.