Prints & Ways of Knowing

Catalog description

How did the visual arts and sciences interact in the Early Modern period? In what ways have these interactions defined and ruptured boundaries between empirical investigation and artistic practice? This new seminar on the rise of printmaking c. 1500-1800 investigates print as a new technology and artistic medium. Printmaking allowed for changes not only in art production, but in intellectual inquiry. What new representational techniques emerged? What is the rhetoric of the illustrations themselves? Topics include the study and representation of anatomy, botany, and the celestial spheres in print, and how their artistic representation fundamentally changed our understanding of the natural world. In tandem with these new technologies, optical instruments such as microscopes and telescopes opened previously invisible worlds to scrutiny. We will discuss the intellectual, social worlds such devices and images inhabited.