http:\/\/cofk.history.ox.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/egmond_edited.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\nDr Florike Egmond<\/strong> (Leiden University) describes her recent discovery of two albums of original watercolour drawings created for the sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner (1551-1558) within the Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam.\u00a0Crafted in Basel by the anatomist and natural historian (and Gessner\u2019s friend) Felix Platter (1536-1614), the images \u2013 of a menagerie of marine life, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians \u2013 formed the basis of many of the illustrations within Gessner\u2019s zoological masterwork, the Historiae Animalium<\/em> (1551-1558).\u00a0Renaissance correspondence networks, argue Egmond, played a key role in sharing and disseminating (although not, curiously, in facilitating discussion of) manuscript images, as both Gessner, Clusius, and other naturalists solicited hand-drawn illustrations of animals to serve as the basis of woodcuts in their publications from colleagues and agents around the world. These exchanges, in turn, formed the basis of what Florike termed (with caveats) a kind of visual \u2018canon formation\u2019 within natural history, as elements of various portrayals were adapted, reworked, and reappropriated across different contexts and between media; as representational norms stabilized; and as the repertoire of animals deemed suitable for inclusion in zoological texts (whose wide remit originally encompassed familiar creatures such as cats and goats) was narrowed and standardized.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Webs of Clusius and Gessner: Correspondence, Images, and Collecting in Sixteenth-Century Natural History 2012 Seminar Series \/ Thursday 3 May, 2012 Dr Florike Egmond (Leiden University) describes her recent discovery of two albums of original watercolour drawings created for the sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner (1551-1558) within the Special Collections of the University […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":187,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-655","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=655"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11966,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/655\/revisions\/11966"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}