Seth Lerer examines how cross-hatching (the controlled marking of parallel lines) became the great technique through which visual artists of the early modern era discovered the representation of physical and emotional reality. With the development and perfection of the hatching technique, the two dimensions of a print or drawing could take on the three dimensions of a sculpture. Through his examination of crosshatching as an instance of the human hand making manifest what is not, Lerer explores issues of illusion and reality within the history of an emerging idiom of visual representation.

Seth Lerer is a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature, the history of the English language, and the history of the book. He is Distinguished Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, where he served as dean of arts and humanities. His books include Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, and Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.