Daily History Picture: Early Modern Swimming April 25, 2018
Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures , trackback
Swimming looks here like a bar-code… Presumably a problem with printing?
Leif writes, 29 Mar 2018: The image is an illustration from Everard Digby’s De Arte Natandi (The Art of Swimming) published in 1587, considered the first English treatise on the practice. The work includes forty woodcuts, which are really brilliant. The attached image gives you a more complete look at the graphic design. In a central rectangle, a swimmer is inset into a stylized background frame; five frames are reused through the series. This background shows a river running from top to bottom of the diagram, trees, one swimmer removing clothes and another about to jump into the river. The central rectangle pictures a specific stroke (this one looks like breaststroke). Vertical lines represent flowing water, with hatching showing the parts underwater. Ernest Montaut (1878–1909) is usually credited with the invention of speed lines, but Digby predates him by more than three centuries.PS> I suspect those are fish traps at the top of the page.
