We owe more to the printed picture than to the printed word. That, paraphrased, is the thesis of a wonderful book, Prints and Visual Communication, by William M Ivins, Jr., first published in 1953. Ivins was for many years curator of prints at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the title and cover, you might expect an art-historical survey of works by Durer, Hokusai, Escher, Warhol, et.al. But the book is nothing like that.
By “print” Ivins means what he calls “the exactly repeatable pictorial statement.” You have only to recall how you learned Cartesian coordinates, Newtonian mechanics, the periodic table and the double helix to see that exactly repeatable pictorial statements are essential for learning and passing on practical, scientific knowlege. It seems quite obvious, but it’s not something that I had thought of before reading Ivins.
Starting the modern era off with a bang
There were prints before there were printing presses, but their primary purpose was edification, amusement, moral or religious uplift, not information. The same could be said of most of what was printed by Gutenberg and his immediate successors.
The first printed book identified by Ivins as using pictures for informational purposes, is Valturius’s De re militarii (Verona 1472). It contains this wholly unedifying picture of a machine gun.
There soon followed books of anatomy, botany, geometry, and other more ‘humanistic’ pursuits. Ivins’s book is much more about engineering than about art, as he follows the proliferation of printed visuals through the development of lithography and photography.
Historical polemics
A gifted polemicist trained as a lawyer, Ivins makes good company for people who enjoy watching conventional wisdom stood on its ear. Here he is on the notion that the Renaissance was all about the revival of ancient Greek thought:
In the first place, what is called Greek thought is not a homgeneous body of doctrine and knowledge reflecting a reasoned and unified attitude towards life and the world. What remains of it is a highly accidental heap of notions and odds and ends of the most violently contradictory kinds. If you care to look for it you can find a phrase in it that can be twisted to the purpose of almost anything you want to argue on any side of any problem. The Greeks never agreed about anything; they actually knew very little; it was quite customary for them to be intellectually dishonest; their arguments were designed, not to bring out the truth, but to down the other fellow in a forensic victory; and they had very loose and careless tongues.
Looking at technology
The point here (other than recommending a very good book), is that if you’re trying to sell or explain something, especially to technical people, think about how they’re used to learning: from charts, tables, diagrams, and other visualizations. It makes sense to use pictorial statements in your sales messages. Show, don’t tell.