The idea that pictorial illustrations are frivolously luxurious ornaments is closely related to the idea that illustrations are redundant. That being said, the two ideas are, we find, not in all cases necessarily implied in one another, and so we list them here as separate ideas. Moreover, while it appears that the idea that illustrations are redundant in literature dates back as far as antiquity, the charge that illustrations should be avoided because they are (negatively viewed as) luxurious is, possibly, of a newer date.
In The History of the Book in East Asia (2013), Cynthia Brokaw and Peter Kornicki state in the introduction that the association between illustrations and frivolity can be found in the Qing period of China (1636 to 1912, approximately). Describing the decline in the aesthetic level of woodblock printing (that is, woodblock illustrations) in the Qing period, the authors contend that, to some degree:
decline can be traced to the changing tastes of Qing literati, who associated the fine colours and beautiful illustrations of many seventeenth-century works with the frivolity and moral fecklessness of late Ming literati, held in large part responsible for the fall of the dynasty to foreign conquerors. Colour and fine illustration were out of place in the good books and serious works of scholarship that serious-minded Qing readers embraced as guides to the moral regeneration of the empire.
Brokaw and Kornicki xxix
Unfortunately, the authors do not provide a concrete statement to support this claim.
In The History of the Illustrated Book (1981), John Harthan claims that one can already find a criticism of illustration as luxurious in the Renaissance:
The humanists disliked pictures in classical texts. Illustration was considered to be an almost vulgar indulgence; and the only decoration normally allowed was a white-vine interlace border on the first page of a manuscript with a medallion of the author or the owner’s coat-of-arms within a laurel wreath in the lower margin and a few discreetly emblazoned initials in the finely written text.
Harthan 53
Unfortunately, however, Harthan provides no examples in support of this claim.
In our research so far, we found the first instance of the view that illustrations are frivolously luxurious ornaments in the eighteenth century, in the works of Voltaire. In a letter to Claude-Philippe Fyot de la Marche, dated 8 October 1761, Voltaire writes:
Je vous avoue que, dans ces ornaments, je demande célérité plutôt que perfection; je n’ai jamais trop aimé les estampes dans les livres; que m’importe une taille-douce quand je lis le second livre de Virgile, et quel burin ajoutera quelque chose à la description de ruine de Troie? Mais les souscripteurs aiment ces pompons, et il faut les contenter.
Voltaire vol. 41, p. 472; for this and the following quote by Voltaire, see also Ionescu 31.
Voltaire appears to have held on to this view steadily over the years. In a letter to Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, dated January 12, 1778, Voltaire writes, commenting on a future edition of his (that is, Voltaire’s) works:
Si je suis en vie dans un an, je vous aiderai, autant que je pourrai, à faire une édition digne de vous. Je crois que des estampes seraient fort inutiles. Ces colifichets n’ont jamais été admis dans les éditions de Cicéron, de Virgile et d’Horace. Il faut imiter ces grands hommes dans cette simplicité, si on ne peut pas imiter leur perfections.
Voltaire vol. 50, p. 342.
Works Cited
Brokaw, Cynthia and Kornicki, Peter (Eds.). The History of the Book in East Asia. Routledge, 2013.
Harthan, John. The History of the Illustrated Book: The Western Tradition. Thames and Hudson, 1981.
Ionescu, Christina. “Introduction. Towards a Reconfiguration of the Visual Periphery of the Text in the Eighteenth-Century Illustrated Book.” Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text, edited by Christina Ionescu et al., Cambridge Scholars, 2001, pp. 1–50.
Voltaire. Oeuvres complètes: Nouvelle édition. Garnier frères, 1877–85.
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