Introduction to the Frontispiece

A Frontispiece is a decorative illustration on the opening page of a text.

The Frontispiece is viewed as an essential part of a classical reading experience in many texts but in modern literature it has fallen from popular use. Perhaps more importantly, it is an image.

"Imagery has often been believed to play a very large, even pivotal, role in both memory (Yates, 1966; Paivio, 1986) and motivation (McMahon, 1973). It is also commonly believed to be centrally involved in visuo-spatial reasoning and inventive or creative thought."

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) was a professor of rhetoric and jurisprudence at the University of Naples. After René Descartes helped revolutionize science and philosophy Vico developed an original yet largely ignored response--The First New Science. Vico, like Descartes, developed his philosophy to address concerns in the same vein as Francis Bacon. He wanted to discover a method by which people could break with the traditionally taught methods of the time period in order to make progress toward true knowledge. In his Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes begins from the cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), and later arrives at a faith in pure mathematics. He then tries to apply his mathematical method to the rest of the sciences. Vico starts epistemologically from verum esse ipsum factum (the true is what is made), and proceeds in articulating just how that is (in direct response to Descartes). Vico thinks that if something is true for us, we must have created it. We do so by ingenium, our natural creative faculty. He speaks in terms of universals--the intelligible universal, the generalizing abstract concept we use today, and the imaginative universal, the means by which early humans came to terms with the particular sensations of their world. Vico grounds everything in an idealized history, proceeding with an eye for how all forms of science are essentially productions of their time period.

As Donald Verene puts it in his Vico's Science of Imagination, we can conceive of Vico’s construction of the New Science in terms of a question: “If we as modern thinkers form concepts in terms of intelligible genera, how did the first men think such that our manner of concept formation can be understood as developing from a first form of thought?” (73) Vico’s ideal eternal history starts with brutish figures so limited to particulars that we cannot imagine them. The first men “took things one at a time, being in this respect little better than the minds of beasts, for which each new sensation cancels the last one” (703). The giants broke away from this by looking to the sky and observing the lightning and thunder of Jove: “Jove hurls his bolts and fells the giants, and every gentile nation had its Jove.” (193) They identified these natural phenomena with a figure in the sky—the first thought—and began to fear and worship it, the beyond. So this thought, entirely derived from the senses was the source of their “poetic morality” and all human institutions (502). “Thus they began to exercise that natural curiosity which is the daughter of ignorance and the mother of knowledge” (118), and the science of divination was soon developed to understand this bodily (sensory) language—eventually, all other arts and sciences followed.

In the Western world there has been a rift between science and poetry (literature) since at least Ancient Greece. The former might have images disregarded as too subjective for serious analysis, an exercise in leisure. The latter might insist upon their preservation and utilization for our ingenuity, happiness, and freedom.

http://emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/SES/

Again, I posit that the frontispiece was and still is an essential part of the classical reading experience for many texts--authors demanded that one approach their work in the proper way, very carefully and intentionally, starting with the frontispiece. It is supposed to serve both as a reminder of what the text means and as a launching-off point for readers. Bearing that in mind, what might explain the relative disappearance of the frontispiece as a book technology, and should we be okay with it?