From Vesalius through Ivins to Latour: imitation, emulation and exactly repeatable pictorial statements in the Fabrica.

This article reconstructs the reception history of the illustrations of Andreas Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica (1543) by tracing how they were copied, pirated, and plagiarized from the sixteenth century to today. Curiously, Early Modern printers never reused the original woodblocks, even though they were available for sale. Instead, publishers commissioned new, smaller, and corrected illustrations that imitated, but did not exactly replicate, the original woodcuts. As I argue, Early Modern medical publishers engaged with images by continually trying to emulate and improve upon them. It was only in the eighteenth century, when the Fabrica ceased to become a textbook for practicing physicians, that its images became cult objects that needed to be replicated exactly. It was in this era that the original woodblocks were rediscovered and then used to print new editions of the Fabrica. Curiously, William Ivins, Jr., the renowned print scholar, came up with his theory of exactly repeatable pictorial statements when he became engaged with the 1934 re-edition of the Fabrica's images, the last edition to rely on these woodblocks. It is claimed here that his theory of pictorial statements is a reflection of how modern publishers engaged with the Fabrica's images, but misrepresented how those images were used in the Early Modern period. Bruno Latour's work on immutable mobiles drew its inspiration from the work of Ivins. Consequently, a reassessment of Ivins's claims about the history of printing is also a reassessment of Latour's claims about the role of inscriptions in the emergence of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]