Picturing Words: The Power of Book Illustration

Through historic illustrations, viewers of the exhibit are able to see what inspires and drives graphic art. Andreas Vesalius, an early physician and progressive scientist, wrote the book "De Humani Corporis Fabrica" (1543) with illustrations of the human body showing muscles pulled back to see what was underneath. The illustrations of Vesalius changed the way people looked at the human form and helped develop modern medicine. Letters have been shown to be inspiration for some writers, as seen through the graphic images from children's alphabet books; and pictures drawn with a calligraphic style add a degree of artistry to poems about birds in Armand Monjo's "Tu l'as vu l'oiseau?" (1993)