Abstract

This paper aims to understand what role images play in the (scientific) knowledge of nature. This knowledge, particularly with regard to the world invisible to the naked eye, depends on the autonomous activity of images. The use and the technological developments of instruments such as the microscope, the techniques of preparing and displaying natural objects for its use, and the iconographic tradition of the reproductions of its images, are the evidence for this activity. Finally, the principle of disjunction is proposed to understand such an activity in the (scientific) knowledge of nature: the more natural the thing represented appears, the more artificial it has been made into the image of the thing itself.