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WiSe 12/13: The Material Culture of Knowledge: Objects of Art and Science in the Early Modern History of Collecting

Sven Dupré

Kommentar

This seminar deals with a diversity of objects, natural and manufactured, exotic and indigeneous, which today (but not in the early modern period) belong to the different domains of art and science: paintings and drawings, flowers and animals, jewels and goldsmith work, mathematical instruments, drawing tools and mirrors, cabinets and textiles, books and globes, ... . It investigates the meaning of these objects in their historical contexts: collections in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (from courtly Kunstkammern to merchants’ and artists’ collections to scholars’ cabinets and gardens). It also raises questions about the use of these objects, not only in the production of ‚scientific’ knowledge (such as in natural history or optics), but also in the creation of works of art. Which role did the antiquities, instruments and naturalia play in artists’ workshop practices -- in processes of invention as well as in sharing knowledge of materials? Which role did collections play in sharing knowledge of the production of objects of art and nature among artists, scholars and patrons? Which role did objects and collections play in the ‚new science’? The seminar confronts students with primary materials (the objects in the museums and the written sources such as inventories) but is equally concerned with methodological issues on how to ask questions to objects and collections. The willingness of students to engage with primary sources and material objects as well as to read the literature prior to the seminar is an essential requirement. Schließen

Literaturhinweise

Background Literature: Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology (Princeton, 1995), Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkely, 1994); Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (eds.), The Origins of Museums. The Cabinet of Curiosities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe (Oxford, 1986); Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London, 1996); Jeffrey Muller, Rubens: The Artist as Collector (Princeton, 1992); Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1350-1600 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005). Schließen