The Anatomai, a lost work written by Aristotle, must have contained a collection of various drawings and figures of species as well as their organs. In his texts (mainly the Historia animalium), Aristotle is often referring to the drawings after the description of species. Our study applies the method of the comparative view (‘Vergleichendes Sehen’) to provide an access to and reconstruction of Aristotle’s lost illustrations based on his textual descriptions. As an example, we chose the treatment of the European lobster (Homarus gammarus L., 1758) in the Aristotelian corpus as a case study. First, we analyse the etymology of the Greek term astakós referring to the lobster and provide an overview on the putative synonyms. Second, we confront the textual basis of the description with several questions concerning the degree of abstraction, the relation between text and image, and the spatial orientation of the image. Finally, we present a step-by-step reconstruction of Aristotle’s illustrations of the lobster based on the various passages dealing with its anatomy in the text of the Historia animalium. The problems which arise by a confrontation of the textual basis with hypothetical images are discussed at a more general level. We conclude that this kind of a text-based image reconstruction is only possible if the object described by Aristotle is unambiguously identifiable and still visually accessible.

亚里士多德的失落作品《解剖学》肯定包含了各种物种及其器官的图画和人物的集合。在他的文本（主要是动物史）中，亚里士多德经常在描述物种之后参考图画。我们的研究应用比较观点 ('Vergleichendes Sehen') 的方法来提供对亚里士多德基于文本描述的丢失插图的访问和重建。例如，我们选择了对亚里士多德语料库中的欧洲龙虾 ( Homarus gammarus L., 1758) 的处理作为案例研究。首先，我们分析希腊词astakós的词源指的是龙虾，并提供对假定同义词的概述。其次，我们面对描述的文本基础与抽象程度、文本与图像之间的关系以及图像的空间取向等几个问题。最后，我们根据《动物史》文本中处理龙虾解剖结构的各个段落，逐步重建亚里士多德的龙虾插图。在更一般的层面上讨论了文本基础与假设图像的对抗所引起的问题。我们得出的结论是，这种基于文本的图像重建只有在亚里士多德描述的对象是明确可识别的并且仍然可以在视觉上访问时才有可能。