The Crosshatching

Fludd says hyle is homogeneous, because it can't contain varying intensities of heterogeneous difference. But he also says it has no qualities or pattern, and homogeneity seems like a kind of pattern.

Fludd himself sketched the other diagrams in his book, and Matthäus Merian translated his sketches into etchings. Fludd says he painted the hyle diagram, but there is no extant record. What would he have painted? Whatever Fludd's original painting looked like (if there even was one), it was up to Merian to translate Fludd's painting, or his written instructions, into a copperplate etching.

Merian used crosshatching, but the hyle diagram is thicker and less symmetrical than other crosshatched shadows in Merian's other more standard etchings. What drove Merian's formal decision to crosshatch the hyle diagram so asymmetrically?

Such questions foreground the agency of the subcontracted craftsman, and the international chain of production: author Robert Fludd [England] hired publisher Johann Theodor de Bry [Germany] who hired engraver Matthäus Merian the Elder [Switzerland].

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Matthäus Merian's Street in a Village with Cow in the Left Foreground. 1620.
(note the symmetrical crosshatched shadows)

 

Matthäus Merian etchings from
pp. 49 and 37 of The Macrocosm. 1617.
(note the symmetrical/directional hatchings of the formed hyle)