Johannes Stradanus [Jan van der Straet]

Nova Reperta [New Discoveries] (c.1580)

This series of 24 engravings http://www.ulg.ac.be/wittert/fr/flori/opera/vanderstraet/vanderstraet_reperta.html celebrated the new discoveries—both technological and geographical—that made the Renaissance world modern and distinguished it from that of the ancients. Stradanus devoted no less than 9 images to the ‘discovery’ of the New World, and his encyclopedic frontispiece contained most of the other inventions depicted in the remaining plates, including gunpowder, the printing press, the compass, the clock, stirrups, (al)chemical distillation, the cultivation of silkworms, and the treatment of syphilis with the tropical wood guaiacum.

The Nova Reperta was part of a long tradition of cataloging inventions. Perhaps the fullest list is found in Polydore Vergil’s De Inventoribus Rerum (1499), while the shortest and most influential is the often-quoted aphorism in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), observing that ‘the arts of printing, gunpowder and the compass...have changed the whole face and condition of things throughout the world, in literature, in warfare and in navigation’ (Book I, Aphorism 129). In 1999 the book artists Johanna Drucker and Brad Freeman produced a Nova Reperta for the twenty-first century, a far more ambivalent catalogue of modern inventions, including railway terminals, airports, assembly lines, fast food restaurants, and battleships.