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Through the history of the book and the image at the time of the invention of the printing press, this study seeks to clarify the ambiguous situation of the scientific illustration, the reasons for the difficulty in recognizing it as an internal element of scientific discourse as language that is autonomous, competitive and in certain cases stronger than verbal language. This study also investigates an iconoclastic current within scientific inquiry. This tradition permits the identification of a common historical misunderstanding: the false equating of observation and experimentation, on the one hand, and the collocation of research to graphic representation on the other. Finally, the article proposes the application of the interpretation proposed by Panofsky in the past thirty years to the study of the scientific illustration.