• DOI:10.7208/CHICAGO/9780226258980.001.0001
• Corpus ID: 85507968

The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery

@inproceedings{Bredekamp2015TheTI,
  title={The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery},
  author={Horst Bredekamp and Vera D{\"u}nkel and Birgit Schneider},
  year={2015}
}

• Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, B. Schneider
• Published 2015
• History

designs; the textiles were produced on so-called shaft looms. Aside from Ziegler’s notation, there existed other conventions on how to notate fabric patterns, but these did not circulate publicly until the age of the encyclopedia in the eighteenth century.7 Ziegler was thus one of the first to publish on the art and techniques of weaving, ending the guilds’ exclusive control over what had heretofore been a strictly kept secret.8 All of these forms of fabric pattern notation differed considerably from the well-known pattern drawdowns used in planning pictorial patterns (fig. 4), despite the sometimes close visual resemblance.9 The latter patterns, which could be implemented in a variety of techniques, were widely disseminated in collections as far back as the early sixteenth century, but unlike the notations discussed here, they offered no directions regarding the technical realization on the loom. The following paragraphs will therefore address the technology of weaving and the question of what technical knowledge the notations connote. FIG. 4: Three plates from early pattern books: Ein new Modelbuch (probably Zwickau, 1526); Ein new getruckt model Büchli (Augsburg, 1529); Furm oder modelbüchlein (Augsburg, ca. 1523). Margarete Abegg, Apropos Patterns for Embroidery, Lace and Woven Textiles [1978] (Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 1998), 25, figs. 14, 15, and 4. FIG. 5: Shaft loom with two shafts and two treadles (schematic illustration). Anna Döpfner, Bindungen: Flechten und Weben (Berlin: Museumspädagogischer Dienst, 1993), 11. Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, Historisches Archiv. Fig. 3: Nine notations of possible tie-ups from Ziegler’s Weber Kunst und Bild Buch (Ulm, 1677).