Summary Fabricius ab Aquapendente commissioned coloured paintings of the reproductive parts and foetuses of a vast spectrum of animals. His published works on generation feature corresponding engravings. In contrast, his student William Harvey questioned the accuracy and usefulness of anatomical illustrations and used alternative approaches to represent his observations. I discuss these anatomists' criteria for selecting specimens, their techniques of investigation, and how these decisions affected their observations and representations of animal generation. I consider what each medium—paintings, intaglios, written accounts—discloses (...) or highlights and also their respective limitations. My study of Fabricius's colour plates also reveals the possibility that they served as inspiration for the first colour anatomical prints: a copy of the illustrations of foetuses is bound with drafts of Aselli's plates, and I suggest a possible link between the colour images. (shrink)

In La nova scientia , Niccolò Tartaglia analyses trajectories of cannonballs by means of different forms of reasoning, including ‘physical and geometrical reasoning’, ‘demonstrative geometrical reasoning’, ‘Archimedean reasoning’, and ‘algebraic reasoning’. I consider what he understood by each of these methods and how he used them to render the quick succession of a projectile's positions into a single entity that he could explore and explain. I argue that our understanding of his methods and style is greatly enriched by considering the (...) abacus tradition in which he worked. As a maestro d'abaco in sixteenth-century Venice he had access to a great variety of mathematical and natural-philosophical works. This paper traces how Tartaglia drew elements from a vast spectrum of sources and combined them in an innovative manner. I examine his use of algebra and geometry, consider what he knew about Archimedes and suggest a reading of his enigmatic phrase ‘Archimedean reasoning’, which has eluded satisfactory interpretation. (shrink)