Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book. Elizabeth Ross
authors can probably be explained by the period understanding of lines of transmission; they did not distinguish categorically between original and reworking as we do. More saliently, the fresh illustrations from life (or in some cases perhaps from unknown, unusually high-quality models) by and large represent plants either native to middle Germany or nonnative cultivars available there, as, for example, the indigenously more southern lavender depicted here. Several excuses have been proposed for this, but these literal preoccupations minimize the real achievement.64 As in the Peregrinatio, the emphasis is on the importance of Breydenbach’s own research, and the artist’s work is tied to his. Certainly, the passage implies that Reuwich was brought along to make images of exotic flora, but it does not state that outright. Breydenbach is a bit cagey here, on the one hand flourishing the prestige of pilgrimage, but on the other hand subtly hedging his claims about the result. The text reiterates the stated aim of the Peregrinatio, that the painter was brought along to create images that would entice others to pilgrimage. And while the Peregrinatio says that for the city views Reuwich “drafted from” or “drew from” (ab entwürffe, eygentlichen ab malet, eygentlichen … ab etworffen), in the sense of drawn “from” life, the Gart omits that preposition. This may seem a subtle point, but it gets to the pith of the claims of the Peregrinatio. Now that the writer, and by implication the painter, have seen the plants, they can be portrayed accurately. He is vouching for their correctness based on his personal experience and conscientious research, enabled though travel.
The Artist-Author’s View in Petrarch and Van Eyck
To watch Breydenbach position his works is to observe how an early printed book labored to establish its credibility and cohesiveness and how printed images benefited from this labor. The author bolsters his authority with the credibility of the images as authentic views; at the same time, the images gain credibility as authentic views from their association with an authoritative book, a book made authoritative through the author’s conception and presentation of the Peregrinatio project. “View” here is used in its broadest sense as an instance of physical sight, as the more general input of experience, or as learned opinion. “Authentic” means the image avers to conform to the experience of the artist, who has recorded the sight himself or verified the representation against what he himself saw.
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