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

My article reconstructs the reception history of the illustrations of Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543) by tracing they were copied, pirated, and plagiarized from the sixteenth century to today. Curiously, early modern printers never re-used 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 used to print new editions of the Fabrica. Curiously, William Ivins Jr., the renowned print scholar, came up with his theory of pictorially repeatable statements when he became engaged with the 1934 re-edition of the Fabrica’s images, the last edition to rely on these woodblocks. I claim that his theory of pictorially repeatable statements is a reflection of how modern publishers engaged with the Fabrica’s images, but misrepresents 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’ claims about the history of printing is also a reassessment of Latour’s claims about the role of inscriptions in the emergence of modernity