ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From Sketch to Knowledge: Visual Mediation in Early Modern Natural History

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Drawings have operated as surrogates for natural specimens since the early modern period. These visual representations serve as instruments to validate, mediate, and communicate knowledge about nature. Yet philosophers, historians of science, and art historians have long questioned accuracy, reliability and objectivity of such representations. What understanding of nature do images convey? Whose perspective do they reproduce? In the practice of image-making and dissemination, different gazes—those of naturalists, artists, publishers, and publics—meet or come into conflict. Images thus become sites of negotiation among diverse actors and disciplines, visual regimes and vocabularies. Sponsored by Nuncius. Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, this panel investigates the chain of negotiations that shapes the visual agenda of the naturalists. It explores the relationships between naturalists and the (in)visible hands that collaborate on the making of images, as well as the ways lay publics engage with these images. Collectively, the papers examine the material processes involved in producing drawings of natural specimens and the role of these images in communicating knowledge about natural phenomena.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Elena Canadelli, University of Padova

Individual Presentations

• Collecting, Reusing and Remaking Nature Drawings: Felix Platter’s (1536-1614) Investigation of Stones - Alexandre Claude, European University Institute, Florence; Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome

• Seeing and Knowing Iridescence through Watercolor Drawings of Northern Lapwings - Giulia Simonini, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome

• Drawing, Engraving, Copying: Visual Mediation and the Making of the Hortus Malabaricus (1678-1693) - Trude Dijkstra, University of Amsterdam

• “A Clever Woman Can Put Drawing and Painting to Use in a Thousand Ways”: Natural History Illustration and Gendered Material Practices in Early Modern Europe - Stephanie Reitzig, Columbia University

Session Organizers

• Luca Tonetti, University of Padua

• Sietske Fransen, Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History

• Elena Rizzi, University of Padua