#styleless

An excerpt from "Style and Non-style in Anatomical Illustration: From Renaissance Humanism to Henry Gray" by Martin Kemp:

"We are used to the idea that ‘style’ is a key element in the study of art, even if it seems less central than it used to be. Considered in its broadest sense, style speaks not only of the maker’s mode of presentation but also about aspects of production, patronage, intended reception, visualization and visual language – in short, about every aspect of the process of communication between the originators of the image and the viewers. Style is not normally taken as one of the prime criteria when we analyze a scientific activity. In the specific field of scientific illustration, it has been seen as having some limited degree of relevance, if only in relation to the era of the illuminated manuscript and earlier phases of the printed text, when the provision of lavish picture books for noble patrons was one of the standard types of production. Considered from the standpoint of the prevailing orthodoxies in much 19th-century and subsequent science, style is at best regarded as a rather irrelevant adornment to the business of communicating information and at worst as a positive liability. However, every made image of what is seen – every representation of nature or attempt to model some aspect of the world in visual terms – unavoidably has its own style, in as much as it has a visual ‘air’ or ‘aura’ through which its origins are recognizable…

...The tendency to regard evident stylishness as an irrelevance or encumbrance in scientific illustration has arisen as the result of a concerted ambition in science and technology from about 1850 to achieve ‘style-less’ images in which there has been nothing more to the presentation than the direct communication of objective information in the most functional manner. This aspiration apparently contrasts markedly with the overt espousing of style in Renaissance and Baroque illustration, in which the production of a fine display through the visual equivalent of rhetoric was either an explicit or implicit goal. I will also be arguing that the ‘style-less’ manner is as much a style as any mode of presentation and exhibits its own kind of contrived rhetoric."