Illustrations
One of the more immediately noticeable features of the cookbook are its many fold-out illustrations. Most of them, like the one pictured which depicts the proper way to carve a hare, appear in the “Ecuyer-Tranchant” section. La Varenne and the book’s publisher, Pierre Mortier, display a wonderful drive to fully activate the physical materiality of the book format as a technology for culinary education. Though an early iteration of the form, Le Cuisinier François contains the same sort of visual and textual hybridization that we’ve come to expect in our modern cookbooks.
Behind all of the book’s creative decisions lies an impulse towards utility. The imperative style which La Varenne uses to efficiently map the steps in his recipes is mirrored here in the physical elements of the book. The fold-out page allows the diagram to be viewed as one continuous image, providing enough room for the chef to see where each incision ought to made on the hare. It’s important to note that most of these illustrations appear in the three sections appended to the original Cuisinier françois text—there is a progression and process of revision implied in this history. Between the publication of La Varenne’s initial book and the succession of complementary texts, its author and publisher were actively considering the features which a cookbook ought to have. The decisions made in the creation of this book can be viewed as small first steps for the standardization of the cookbook conventions we so easily recognize today.
In this copy of Margarita, this twelve head wind map foldout can be found on the very last page of the book. The twelve winds were labeled by Aristotle and were supposed to be used for direction finding. The winds are named Zephirus, Chorus, Circius, Septentrio, Aquilo, Caecias, Subsolanus, Eurus, Euroauster, Notus, Austroafricus, and Africus Lips. This map is often missing in surviving copies, or is at least in very poor condition. Dr. John Ferguson at the University of Glasgow also owns an edition of the text from 1504, and he writes in an article that the foldout in the copy he has is torn and illegible. [The map in this copy is a facsimile]
One of the most important and famous woodcuts in Margarita Philosophica is this illustration of a human head showing the “central connections of sense organs.” Reisch was by no means the only person at the time to try to represent these connections in print, but his attempt is perhaps the most significant due to its surprising correctness. This particular diagram went on to have lasting importance in the medical world and was still in print as late as 1840. The illustration outlines the gustatory and olfactory organs connected to the orbitofrontal cortex. This type of connection had not been put into print until Reisch’s publication, so after it was published in the Margarita, it remained the standard diagram in medicine for many years. Interestingly, all of the illustrations in Reisch’s work were made by unknown artists, so he receives all of the credit for his contribution to medical knowledge even though these artists are a major reason for the lasting legacy of Margarita. Without these woodcuts, Margarita Philosophica may not have had such a profound impact on the spread of knowledge throughout university and public life.
In “Weigels Ständebuch” (1966) half of each leaf dedicated to a single trade is a reprinted copperplate etching. There are 211 trades depicted in the unbound book, making it almost twice the size of its predecessor “True Description of all the Trades of the Earth” (1568), whose illustrations are supposedly the work of a single artist, Jost Amman. If it were possible for Weigel’s workshop to illustrate that number and variety of trades, they chose not to. All of the etchings in “Weigels Ständebuch” were made from drawings based on observations of actual craftsmen and women, but not all of these trades were made by Weigel. There are no sea trades in Augsburg or Nuremberg where Weigel engraved and published books, and also dealt art. Instead of moving his workshop to the sea to depict nautical trades Weigel used the book trade to bring the sea to him. He purchased images out of a book of trades previously published in Amsterdam, called "Het Menselyk Bedryf” by the Dutch artists Jan and Casper Luyken. Jan created the drawings while he or his son or both of them together engraved the plates. Weigel, Jan, and Casper all had a similar type of training but create markedly different depictions of figures in space. Weigel’s workshop tended to produce trades in interior settings while Jan and Casper yielded traditional Dutch outdoor public views. In “Weigels Ständebuch” (1966) there is no direct mention of who specifically created which illustrations. The fine backgrounds and the long, slender figures were typical of Jan while Casper loved wider characters that stand in contrast to the bright background. This item’s photos include Der Ziegler by both Jan and Casper Luyken, as published in Weigel’s “True Description of all the Trades of the Earth” (1568) as a single digital photograph on the website Deutsche Fotothek, and the same engraving reprinted in 1966 for “Weigels Ständebuch”. There are also two digital photos, from the same sources and editions, of Der Zapfenmacher, which was illustrated by Weigel. There is a great deal of visual information missing from the 1966 print editions, which have cleaner paper and are on the whole brighter. This could be due to marks on the copper engravings being filled with dirt or dry ink over the years, or pressure from the printing press has smoothed and degraded the copper plate. Though the 1966 editions seem to be consistently missing ink in all the right places. It is possible that certain parts of the engraving plates were strategically filled with wax or a similar substance at some point before the 1966 printing. This is a common erasure process in etching and may have been used in this case to edit the ancient etchings. Comparing the clouds in both editions of Der Ziegler makes apparent the possible erasure.