Fellows of the Royal Society were concerned with how to ensure the accuracy of their images. This chapter investigates the ways in which the effects of accuracy derived from training in how to produce and consume visual materials, particularly drawings and engravings. By making explicit the ways in which artist's manuals and practices informed the construction of early modern visual knowledge of nature, I also aim to show the new ways that authors exerted control over the production of the images associated with their research, which was viewed as an ideal toward which scholars in the seventeenth century strove. The modes of accuracy the Fellows developed as a result of a prolonged engagement with artistic practices and habits of mind grew from several forms of control, including the training and skill required to exert physical control over image production, the intellectual control involved in deploying and refining an emergent visual vocabulary for the circulation of natural knowledge, and the shared controls involved in judging other scholars’ visual work as further contributions to a common body of knowledge.

In his book on the history of engraving, Sculptura: or the History, and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper, John Evelyn held up Johannes Hevelius (1611–1687) as the model of a scholar who created his own images.