The tension between functional and ornamental imperatives has shaped both the practice of illustration and the scholarly study of its history. Nineteenth-century scientific illustrators, for instance, were divided: some prided themselves on purely observational precision, dismissing decorative elaboration as a corruption of scientific intent, while others drew freely on the conventions of landscape painting and ornamental engraving. This division came to organize the historiography of scientific illustration. Through most of the twentieth century, historians valorized pre-industrial illustration - celebrated for its visual richness - while treating postindustrial work as mere technical documentation devoid of aesthetic merit. Daston and Galison, however, have challenged this framing, arguing that the supposed boundary between the "artistic" and the "objective" was itself an achievement of the nineteenth century, constructed in part to distinguish the emerging professional scientist from the amateur naturalist. Prior to this construction, they contend, illustration was understood as a practice in which visual judgment and empirical accuracy were mutually constitutive, not opposed.

According to the passage, Daston and Galison would most likely argue that the historiographical tradition described was flawed because it

- A. projected onto earlier illustrators a distinction those illustrators would not have recognized
- B. underestimated the technical competence of pre-industrial scientific illustrators
- C. conflated the decorative conventions of landscape painting with genuine scientific observation
- D. ignored the role of amateur naturalists in developing standards of visual accuracy
- E. treated the nineteenth-century boundary between art and science as self-evident rather than as constructed



The passage implies that, prior to the nineteenth century, scientific illustrators most likely

- A. were evaluated primarily on the decorative quality of their work rather than its accuracy
- B. did not draw a sharp distinction between visual judgment and empirical observation
- C. were unaware of the conventions of landscape painting and ornamental engraving
- D. were considered less rigorous than their post-industrial counterparts
- E. deliberately avoided ornamental elaboration in order to preserve scientific credibility