Educational Power of Images. Visual Narrativity and Iconicity in Scientific Dissemination

Since the age of Enlightenment and its goal of making knowledge accessible to everyone, thanks to that paramount work of dissemination represented by the Encyclopédie, the use of images as a means of education and transmission of knowledge has been established which, over time, it has been extensively explored and improved. With Positivism and the affirmation of the taxonomic principle as an ordering element within the various branches of knowledge, the latter have progressively developed their own iconographic codes, which are still the ones characterizing the visual communication language in their respective knowledge spreading tools, from anatomy atlases and natural sciences treatises to architectural manuals and technical handbooks. In fact, the visual language, in its different scales of iconicity, is helpful and influential in conveying, explaining and make understandable complex concepts and processes, contextualise them culturally, historically and temporally and make relations and connections visible, both in quantitative and qualitative terms to wide audiences. Furthermore pictures – real, realistic as well as abstract or hypothetical – have been at the basis of many inventions and discoveries and play a fundamental role in conceiving, conceptualising and coding the scientific discourse. The paper proposes, discusses and illustrates the narrative power of images in knowledge dissemination in engaging the public at educational and lifelong learning level.