Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe ed. by Payne, Alina (review)

This is a very beautiful book with a generous array of images in both colour and black and white. It includes pictures by significant early modern artists such as Albrecht Dürer as well as familiar and no less spectacular scientific illustrations such as that of the fly in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia. The book is on a subject that will engage those interested in the early modern period and the links between science and art.

The introduction begins with a very vivid example of this mix, recounting an experiment by Galileo in Siena in 1633. Described by Teofilo Gallaccini, it allowed Galileo to demonstrate his telescope upon the night sky over a period of six nights. Gallaccini recorded these events not just in words but also in vivid sketches that described the geography of the moon over time. The sketches are vivid, but they also record a moment of crisis when, as Payne recounts, suddenly the testimony of sight is propelled to the centre of scientific discourse. As she writes, ‘sight was objectified, was made visible as an act, and it was made thus by an instrument: the telescope’. The links between art, science and technology are at the heart of this book.

The book resulted from the granting of the Max Planck and Alexander von Humboldt Prize to Alina Payne from Harvard University, and two workshops organized at the Max Planck Institute in Florence and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. This brought together a group of art historians and historians of science, philosophy, and literature, who were invited to discuss vision in the arts and sciences across objects and instruments. The twelve resulting essays were edited into this collection. Payne herself has published in these areas, including studies on Teofilo Gallaccini (The Telescope and the Compass: Teofilo Gallaccini and the Dialogue between Architecture and Science in the Age of Galileo, Olschki, 2012; and Teofilo Gallaccini: Selected Writings and Library, Olschki, 2012).

The period under exploration was one where considerable scientific and artistic theoretical and practical experiments were developed. In the visual arts, perspective was explored and expanded. This together with Galileo’s telescope and other scientific innovations changed the way the world was perceived. There was a new emphasis placed on sight, and illustration had an important role to play.

The collection is divided into four parts: ‘Epistemic Images’; ‘Seeing the Unseeable’; ‘The Painter’s Brush and the Mind’s Eye’; and ‘Looking Back from Photography and Film to Alberti’. The range of images is wide, as well as that of the approaches taken. In the first section, much of the attention is on scientific botanical images. In Lorraine Daston’s essay, she argues that eighteenth-century botanists would correct images to prevent artists representing exactly what they saw. Sachiko Kusukawa examines the case of Conrad Gessner and the integral role line sketches with watercolours played in his investigations of the physical world. He was primarily interested in the medical role of plants and wanted to be comprehensive. He used his network of correspondents to send him not just the most common examples but also the rare or the as yet un-reproduced plants. These fragments were then used to build up a universal history of plants.

Ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to the architecture of Gallaccini or Dante’s Divina Commedia, writers explore the limitations and the challenges of the visible, with scientists pushing the visual to its limits. In the third section, Karin Leonhard discusses Italian Baroque still life paintings to argue that painters used colour to communicate and enhance unseen qualities, while also pointing out that scientists at the time were arguing that colour could be sensed without being seen. The final two essays also examine more modern instruments of vision, the photo lens and the camera, and the...