| The Margarita philosophica is
a compendium of universal knowledge and contains sections on astronomy,
astrology, grammar, music, rhetoric, and many other topics. It is an
important text for students both of early modern scientific knowledge
generally and of pre-Vesalian anatomy and dissection specifically. One
illustration presents a view of the thoracic and abdominal viscera. Another
offers one of the oldest known schematic representations of the eye (an
image that has been traced to a fifteenth-century Leipzig manuscript),
and a third depicts Zodiac Man. This representation of a human figure
indicates the astrological signs which contemporary physicians thought
governed each part of the body. Crude and misleading as these plates
may be, both from modern esthetic and scientific points of view, they
show the value graphic as well as textual information could possess once
new print technologies enabled its reproduction and circulation in multiple
copies. The Margarita was reprinted almost
immediately (1504), a sign of the importance contemporaries assigned
it. |
