Picturing Collections in Early Modern Europe

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ Notable studies include R. A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); P. Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994); The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, edited by A. Bermingham and J. Brewer (New York and London: Routledge, 1995); The Material Renaissance, edited by M. O'Malley and E. Welch (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007). The work that best exemplifies the intersections between commerce, collecting, art and science addressed in this issue is Merchants & Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe, edited by P. H. Smith and P. Findlen (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).

² See D. Bruster, ‘The New Materialism in Renaissance Studies’, in Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by C. Perry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 225–38. The literature on elite collecting is large. For an overview, see my ‘Introduction’, in Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, edited by R. J. W. Evans and A. Marr (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 1–20.

³ For a wide‐ranging account of the various issues at stake in picturing collections in this period, see U. D. Ganz, Neugier und Sammelbild. Rezeptionsästhetische Studien zu gemalten Sammlungen in der niederländischen Malerei ca. 1550–1650 (Weimar: VDG‐Verlag, 2006). For the ‘pictures of collections’ genre, see my overview in this issue.

⁴ S. Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). It is worth noting that Alpers consciously did not take up ‘the interesting problem of the nature and role of illustration in the work of the Dutch naturalists’ (84). As Wragge‐Morley suggests in his contribution to this issue, this renders Alpers's text insufficient from the perspective of the history of science, and much work remains to be done in this area, although excellent recent studies by Claudia Swan have begun to address the issues. See, e.g., C. Swan, ‘Ad vivum, naer het leven, from the life: Defining a Model of Representation’, Word & Image, 11:4 (1995), 353–72; Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–1629) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

⁵ I use the word ‘disinterestedness’ rather than ‘objectivity’ mindful of Daston and Gallison's warnings about the latter term prior to the nineteenth century. I am, though, sympathetic to Cook's suggestion that, despite certain anachronisms, ‘objectivity’ remains a useful term of reference for the cluster of Early Modern practices concerned with observing, recording and analysing nature. See L. Daston and P. Gallison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), Chapter 1 (esp. 18, 35); H. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).

⁶ D. Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 35 and passim.

⁷ L. Fuchs, De historia stirpium (1542), quoted in B. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 195. See, also, similar comments by Johannes Faber on the mistakes made by painters, quoted in Freedberg, Eye of the Lynx, 357. Ogilvie's work is an excellent guide to the bookish aspects of the period's natural history, but for the role of pictures in Early Modern natural history, the work of Sachiko Kusukawa is most useful. See, e.g., S. Kusukawa, ‘Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 58 (1997), 403–27; ‘The Uses of Pictures in the Formation of Learned Knowledge: The Case of Leonhard Fuchs and Andreas Vesalius’, in Transmitting Knowledge: Words, Images, and Instruments in Early Modern Europe, edited by S. Kusukawa and I. Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 73–96; ‘Image, Text, and Observatio: The Codex Kentmanus’, Early Science and Medicine, 14 (2009), 445–75; Picturing the Book of Nature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

⁸ For which, see my overview in this issue. As Fabio Colonna noted in the period, ‘Someone who is entirely ignorant of the art of painting cannot make true images of things whose descriptions and differentiae are clear in his mind.’ Quoted in Ogilvie, Science of Describing, 198.

⁹ On this theme, see, e.g., T. Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

¹⁰ On which, see, e.g., R. W. Serjeantson, ‘Proof and Persuasion’, in The Cambridge History of Early Modern Science, Volume 3: Early Modern Science, edited by K. Park and L. Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 132–75.