Due to the particularly velvety modelling, the art of mezzotint was a suitable technique for scientific illustrations. For his unfinished project of a moon globe, Tobias Mayer had his drawings of the surface of the celestial body carried out in individual segments as mezzotint because the craters and hills are particularly well accentuated in this way.

PRINT OF A SEGMENT FROM TOBIAS MAYERS’ UNFINISHED MOON GLOBE PROJECT, Georg Martin Preissler and predecessor, date unknown (around 1750), mezzotint, State and University Library of Göttingen