17th century
A01=Matthew C. Hunter
academy
architecture
artists
artwork
Author_Matthew C. Hunter
Category=AGA
Category=PDX
cathedral
christopher wren
communication studies
creation
england
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
experience
experimental
imagery
imperial
imperialism
improving natural knowledge
interpretation
london
organization
painting
philosophical
philosophy
representation
robert hooke
royal society
science
scientific illustration
scientists
st paul
united kingdom
visual art
visualization
Product details
- ISBN 9780226017297
- Weight: 822g
- Dimensions: 18 x 26mm
- Publication Date: 15 Oct 2013
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In late seventeenth-century London, the most provocative images were produced not by artists, but by scientists. Magnified fly-eyes drawn with the aid of microscopes, apparitions cast on laboratory walls by projection machines, cut-paper figures revealing the "exact proportions" of sea monsters - all were created by members of the Royal Society of London, the leading institutional platform of the early Scientific Revolution. Wicked Intelligence reveals that these natural philosophers shaped Restoration London's emergent artistic cultures by forging collaborations with court painters, penning art theory, and designing triumphs of baroque architecture such as St Paul's Cathedral. Offering an innovative approach to the scientific image-making of the time, Matthew C. Hunter demonstrates how the Restoration project of synthesizing experimental images into scientific knowledge, as practiced by Royal Society leaders Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren, might be called "wicked intelligence."
Hunter uses episodes involving specific visual practices-for instance, concocting a lethal amalgam of wax, steel, and sulfuric acid to produce an active model of a comet-to explore how Hooke, Wren, and their colleagues devised representational modes that aided their experiments. Ultimately, Hunter argues, the craft and craftiness of experimental visual practice both promoted and menaced the artistic traditions on which they drew, turning the Royal Society projects into objects of suspicion in Enlightenment England. The first book to use the physical evidence of Royal Society experiments to produce forensic evaluations of how scientific knowledge was generated, Wicked Intelligence rethinks the parameters of visual art, experimental philosophy, and architecture at the cusp of Britain's imperial power and artistic efflorescence.
Matthew C. Hunter is assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is coeditor of Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science and The Clever Object and an editor of Grey Room.
