Iconographic Encyclopaedia of Science, Literature, and Art. / Division V. Military Sciences. Fifty-one plates,.. By J. G. Heck.

  • Translation

Article ID B0279

Title

Iconographic Encyclopaedia of Science, Literature, and Art. / Division V. Military Sciences. Fifty-one plates,.. By J. G. Heck.

Description

Encyclopaedia on Military Science with 51 plates (plate 8 tear restored), Naval Science with 32 plates, Architecture with 60 plates, Mythology and Religion with 30 plates, The Fine Arts with 26 plates and Technologies with 35 plates (plate 35 tear restored). Author J. G. Heck. It was engraved by Henri Winkles and published by Appleton in New York. Heck's encyclopedia, first published in 1849, was based on the pictorial atlas of Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, one of the best encyclopedias of its time. The educated of the 19th century aspired to the ideal of the "Renaissance man," a well-educated person familiar with all areas of culture, history, and science. Heck conceived his encyclopedia with this in mind, compiling detailed engravings on every aspect of human inquiry. This work contained steel engraved plates with great detail. Winkler was an architectural painter and steel engraver. He worked in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1824.

Year

c. 1851

Artist

Heck (1795-1857)

Johann Georg Heck ( 1795- 1857 in Leipzig) was a German publishing merchant, lithographer, cartographer, geographer and author. He became known for his work Bilder-Atlas zum Conversations-Lexikon. Ikonographische Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, which, along with Meyer's Universum, is one of the most comprehensive German-language works on views of the 19th century. His works include numerous engravings and illustrations on a variety of subjects including architecture, everyday life, fine arts, geography, history, mathematics, mythology, natural sciences, and technology. Heck is best known for his Iconographic Encyclopaedia of Science, Literature and Art (English translation, 1851). The copyright-free illustrations in this book are frequently used in photocopied works of art.The work Atlas géographique, astronomique et historique servant à l'intelligence de l'histoire ancienne, du moyen âge et moderne et à la lecture des voyages les plus recens appeared in 1830, and in 1838 he and Léon Plée published Atlas des familles. La France géographique, industrielle et historique. In 1844 he began his ten-part work Bilder-Atlas zum Conversations-Lexikon. Ikonographische Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, which was published between 1849 and 1851 by the Leipzig branch of the publishing house F. A. Brockhaus as a supplement to the Conversations-Lexicon or encyclopedic hand dictionary for educated classes. The 500 plates were made in steel engraving, the work contains a total of over 12000 illustrations. The first part dealt with mathematics and natural sciences, the second with geography, the third with history and ethnology, the fourth with contemporary ethnology, the fifth with warfare, the sixth with shipbuilding and seafaring, the seventh with the history of architecture, the eighth with religion and cultus, the ninth with fine arts, and the tenth with industrial science (technology). In 1851, Spencer Fullerton Baird published an English-language edition in four volumes in the United States under the title Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature and Art.

Historical Description

Although the word is traced back to the ancient Greek enkyklios paideia, precursors of encyclopedias did not emerge until Roman civilization. The term encyclopedia appeared in the title of printed representations of knowledge at the beginning of the 16th century. The first known classification of the sciences to be titled an encyclopedia was Johannes Aventinus' Encyclopedia, which appeared in print in Ingolstadt in 1517. At the end of the 16th century, Francis Bacon began a methodological-systematic reclassification of the sciences. Increasing secularization, Reformation and Enlightenment significantly influenced the development of the encyclopedia, and vice versa. Finally, Denis Diderot built his Encyclopédie on a tree of knowledge. From the 18th century, national language works appeared, replacing the Latin language. Also, the first encyclopedias were published, which lemmatized the material and presented it in alphabetical order. As early as 1728, Ephraim Chambers introduced the concatenation of articles by cross-references in his alphabetically arranged Cyclopaedia. This combination of two principles of order was groundbreaking and became the standard of encyclopedic and other reference works from the 19th century onward. In the crisis of the encyclopedia, the form of the conversation encyclopedia emerged from the beginning of the 19th century, which combined rapid appearance with sufficient depth. In view of the failure of the large encyclopedias - the work of Ersch/Gruber was discontinued in 1889 - the conversational encyclopedias steadily increased their depth of presentation, so that by the end of the 19th century encyclopedias were once again available. Around the 1980s, English established itself as the new universal language in the natural sciences.

Place of Publication New York
Dimensions (cm)24,5 x 32 cm
ConditionBinding in hardcover with leather embossed in gold, front and back loose
Coloringblack/white
TechniqueSteel engraving

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