An extraordinarily rich and variegated visual culture of science, particularly in natural history and anatomy, emerged in the Dutch Golden Age. We must all have caught a glimpse, at one time or another, of Alfred Seba’s (1665–1736) beautifully monumental Thesaurus of his naturalia collection, Frederik Ruysch’s (1638–1731) spectacular lacelike preparations, Govard Bidloo’s (1649–1713) haunting engravings of dissected bodies with clamps intact, and Jacob Christoffel Le Blon’s (1667–1741) exquisite color mezzotints of anatomical specimens. These men lived around the same time in Amsterdam, the pulsing heart of a global network of trade, and are the subject of Margócsy’s fine study.

Historians of science will remember that Hal Cook, in his Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (2008), saw mercantile consensus and trust in the empirical facts of their commodifiable objects as the origins of scientific objectivity. Margócsy’s study complements and complicates this account: he argues that commercial competition motivated and affected the form of visual representation, and in turn gave rise to debates about the status of knowledge — controversy rather than consensus is what Margócsy finds. The checkered publication history of Seba’s Thesaurus suggests just how much printers saw the engraved copperplates as something to capitalize on financially, even when the ghost-written text lacked scientific accuracy. It was not just the medium of representation that became commodified: Le Blon felt the need to protect his technique of color mezzotint because it was based on Newtonian laws and thus communicable to others, just as Ruysch refused to divulge the composition of his injections, except at a very high price. While Ruysch and Bidloo used both anatomical preparations and publications to promote their understanding of the human body, they held completely different views about the relative merits of anatomical preparations and pictorial albums. For Ruysch, wax injections were tantamount to an auto-inscribing method that eliminated the author’s reasoning or the illustrator’s hand. To Bidloo, Ruysch’s preparations were artificial, and although he too used anatomical preparations for his study, he believed that only depictions on paper could do justice to nature’s whimsical particularities. Indeed, Bidloo argued that “the illustrator’s hand could never lie because imaginative, playful nature would produce at least one corresponding original” (153). It is not surprising, then, that Ruysch’s preparations fetched a much higher price than Bidloo’s.

Claims to secrecy and different standards and expectations of visual representations meant that these men were less successful in garnering support from their fellow practitioners; indeed, this confirms that their target audience was the customers — in particular those at the upper end of the market like Peter the Great — who were prepared to pay good money for their scientific products and secrets. This was imperative for scientific practitioners trying to eke out a living in the Dutch Republic, given the limited possibilities of royal or aristocratic patronage. Furthermore, the bewildering array of visual facts was never resolved into an agreement about which scientific object should be the most valuable to trade with, because there was no institution in the Dutch Republic that was comparable to the Royal Society in London or the Royal Academy in Paris to adjudicate on such matters.

Margócsy has a clear style that is easy to follow, and deploys striking and effective examples that are well illustrated. He deftly deals with the correlation between text, image, and object, and navigates skillfully through heterogeneous materials such as albums, pamphlets, prints, and preparations. This book successfully situates early modern science within the new analytical trends of commercial, visual, and material cultures. It would be of interest not only to historians of the Dutch Golden Age, but also to historians of visual and material cultures in general. It is, of course, requisite reading for historians of early modern science.