Especially in the context of the paragone debates about the primacy of painting or sculpture, the question of views and, related to this, the question of which medium could convey a more complete and ‘correct’ representation of an object became increasingly important. However, the print reproduction of an object in multiple views in a book or in a coherently conceived sequence of engravings posed an additional and novel challenge, since the production of the artwork was already much more costly.

A survey of the print representations of sculptures and other artefacts in books of the 16th and 17th centuries leads to three startling insights:

Even though the first prints after ancient sculptures were produced in Italy toward the end of the 15th century, the first illustrations showing objects from two sides were published as woodcuts in Petrus Apian’s and Bartholomäus Amantius’s Inscriptiones sacrosanctae vetustatis non illae quidem Romanae, sed totius fere orbis (fig. 2) in Augsburg in 1534. [4] The decisive factor, as an accompanying text explains, was that apparently unknown and unfamiliar details of these sculptures did not seem to be conveyable in any other way. And another important principle, which had also been tried out in earlier drawings, was first used in print north of the Alps: roll-outs (‘Abrollung’). Probably the earliest examples of this can be found in two publications by Stephanus Winandus Pighius published in the Netherlands in 1559 and 1568 (fig. 3). Modern sculptures, on the other hand, do not seem to have been presented from several points of view until 1583. Printed books showing multiple views of the same sculpture were thus first realized north of the Alps, rather than in Italy. And the impulse for this came from antiquarian, not artistic interests.

Unknown and unfamiliar modes of design subsequently led to even more extensive graphic documentation – and not so much of statues of ‘classical’ antiquity or contemporary Mannerism as of enigmatic objects of everyday use and of non-European figures. Here once more the references to examples such as contemporary natural history and medical illustrations showing bodies from different perspectives are particularly obvious. They remind us that modes of representation and use of illustration can always be analysed in the larger context, not just within the confines of a particular group of objects. In any case, in an expanded new edition of Vincenzo Cartari’s highly successful mythological handbook, illustrated since 1571 – the Seconda novissima editione delle Imagini de gli Dei delli Antichi (Padua 1626) ­– Lorenzo Pignoria is probably the first to have an unfamiliar “idol” on a Balinese Kris illustrated from four sides (fig. 4a–b). [5]

Elaborate publications, which depict sculptures in larger numbers from several viewpoints, depended on higher sales. Such compilations are found only in the second half of the 17th century in works that were intended less for antiquarians than for art lovers, artists, and collectors, and which usually included little text. Even the emerging body of works which provided precise dimensions and measurements for some outstanding antique sculptures were aimed primarily at this audience (fig. 5). Only at this point do artistic interests once again become a decisive factor for new forms of sculpture visualisation.