ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

How to Visualize the Previously Unknown – A Multidisciplinary Approach

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

What did Marcello Malpighi, Robert Hooke, and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek see, when they looked through their microscopes in the seventeenth century? Today, we only see the published works with beautiful images of small creatures and plants and their descriptions hailing about discovering new worlds, as if these were obvious. However, these representations are the attempts to communicate what they observed. What could they have seen upon the first viewing experiences through the lenses? And how did they find the most agreeable strategies to communicate the newly observed details? In this panel we address these problems with a multidisciplinary approach. Through reenacting seventeenth-century microscopic experiments we re-assess the value and impact of the new instrument, the microscope, and the media used for distributing the observations: drawings, textual descriptions, and printed images. Through a close study of the instrument, the visualization strategies, and the translation between two- and threedimensionality, we show how contested historiographical views should be re-assessed to give new perspectives on the history of microscopy.
It is difficult for anyone after this first generation of microscopists to forget the images (think of Hooke’s flee or louse) and metaphors (the descriptions of cells and little animals) used by these men to describe what they thought they were seeing. We are conditioned by their first visualizations and descriptions. By returning to and redoing the experiments with a multidisciplinary team including museum curators, art historians, artists, photographers, biologists, and historians of science, the research project Visualizing the Unknown – funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) – has come as close as possible to these new seventeenth-century experiences and observations. This panel will present several outcomes of this research.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Christoffer Basse Eriksen, Aarhus University

Individual Presentations

• The Seventeenth-Century Microscope and Observation Practices - Tiemen Cocquyt, Rijksmuseum Boerhaave

• Clarification through Representation – Images in Early Modern Microscopy - Sietske Fransen, Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History

• Picturing the “Round Globules”: Visualizing Microscopic Observations of Ferns in Early Modern Europe - Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen, Huygens Institute/Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

Session Organizers

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

• Eric Jorink, Huygens Institute/Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences