This chapter reiterates the book’s conclusions and proposes avenues for further research at the intersection of facial images, observational thinking, and print collecting.

This introduction lays out the justification for the book and its methods, situating the idea of observation historically. It establishes the stakes for the role of printmaking in developing visual skills and introduces the content around which the observer’s eye was trained: cosmography, physiognomy, and anamorphosis.

The compiler of the manuscript Liber Quodlibetarius lifted its content from circulating publications on cosmography and physiognomy and other how-to books. This manuscript reflects the shift in balance of deliverable knowledge away from text and toward visual learning by way of sovereign images.

Physiognomy, a genre related to cosmography, taught observers how to scrutinize profiles in order to sum up people’s characters and established benchmarks for practical skills like visual comparison and facial inspections. Printers of this content privileged the visual attachments of these texts, directing readers to use images to guide empirical activity.

Anamorphic, or distorted, images problematized the idea that viewing was a neutral act. Anamorphic images in print frequently took portraiture and topographic renderings as their subject matter, the same content around which visual acuity was being developed in printed books.

In the form of diagrams, proofs, and moving dials called volvelles that trained the eye, Peter Apian’s Cosmographicus Liber (1524) was the first cosmographic text to cultivate the observational skills of its readership. In related projects called Practica, Apian translated this content into DIY skills for an audience of weather watchers, farmers, and astrologers, encouraging observation in the field.

Introduction

The sixteenth-century press codified disciplines of knowledge by distilling available information into visual tools. By presenting data in useful and easily legible formats, printmakers rewired the emphasis of older genres such as the Book of Secrets and repackaged those secrets in printed editions of the more marketable genres of complexion literature, physiognomy, and cosmography. While scholars of early modern prints are usually eager to search for prints’ agency in the technologizing of the image, or in the prompting of the collective viewing practices that underwrote emerging scientific consensus, a look at prints’ intersection with manuscript culture proves a fruitful route to uncovering a path to early modern data development. The trajectory by which ancient knowledge domains became how-to skills can perhaps best be tracked in a manuscript likely assembled in Passau, c. 1524. The so-called Liber Quodlibetarius, which seamlessly imported images from a variety of printed genres, forms the focus of this chapter. The manuscript’s compiler merged information from books in the humanistic tradition, such as cosmography and chiromancy, with pamphlets advertising designs for bridle bits of horses, tools for field surgery, and artists’ manuals, on the strength of their visual kinship and the degree to which images were critical messengers of the books’ program. In transposing the images from these printed books, the manuscript aimed to make that data more useful to the reader by deputizing images to stand in for text-based knowledge.