Sven Dupré

Kepler’s optics without hypotheses

This paper argues that Kepler considered his work in optics as part of natural philosophy and that, consequently, he aimed at change within natural philosophy. Back-to-back with John Schuster’s claim that Descartes’ optics should be considered as a natural philosophical appropriation of innovative results in the tradition of practical and mixed mathematics the central claim of my paper is that Kepler’s theory of optical imagery, developed in his Paralipomena ad Vitellionem (1604), was the result of a move similar to Descartes’ by Kepler. My argument consists of three parts. First, Kepler borrowed a geometrical model and experiment of optical imagery from the mélange of mixed and practical mathematics provided in the works of the sixteenth-century mathematicians Ettore Ausonio and Giovanni Battista Della Porta. Second, Kepler criticized the Aristotelian theory of light and he developed his own alternative metaphysics. Third, Kepler used his natural philosophical assumptions about the nature of light to re-interpret the model of image formation taken from Della Porta’s work. Taken together, I portray Kepler’s theory of optical imagery as a natural philosophical appropriation of an innovative model of image formation developed in a sixteenth-century practical and mixed mathematical tradition which was not interested in questioning philosophical assumptions on the nature of light.

The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization

cultivation and study of plants), and there are rewards in that union for the reader as well as for the writer. The Poet as Botanist also does in a very real sense what so many scholars in the early twenty-first century are constantly striving to do: it crosses disciplinary boundaries (specifically between literary criticism and the history of science), but with a clearly solid grounding on both sides of the disciplinary divide. All that said, it is difficult to imagine an audience for whom this book will be an eagerly awaited contribution. Literary scholars with narrow sub-specialties may find that individual chapters enhance their understanding of areas they might not have worked up on their own, and such new knowledge would likely enrich their teaching to some extent, if not their research (this is especially true of chapters on Clare, Ruskin, and Lawrence). However, despite passing nods in the introduction and final chapter to so-called ecocriticism, the book is finally not convincingly positioned with respect to that growing sub-field of literary and cultural studies as either a contribution or a reaction. For historians of science, Mahood’s book is perhaps less immediately useful, since one of its arguable weaknesses is that, despite an impressive grounding in botany and a keen critic’s eye and ear for prose and verse, it finally does little to situate these writings about plants within a clear overarching context, a discernible trajectory along which the poets’ views of plant life influenced those of the scientific community. The other direction of influence is much clearer, since Mahood meticulously tracks the botanical studies that were part of each writer’s development. Those accounts are interesting, despite leaning more toward commentary than analysis, but with the reciprocal half more or less missing, the other direction of influence untracked, Mahood’s book seems more or less a traditional literary critical ‘source study’ and will finally be less compelling to the historian of science or even the historical/cultural critic. Justifying a chapter on Erasmus Darwin’s poetry, Mahood pleads that ‘My final line of defence has to be simple enjoyment’ (p. 54). For the casual reader who embraces that disarming agenda and shares Mahood’s unusual blend of enthusiasms for poetry and botany, there are probably hours of pleasure and many ‘imagine that’ revelations to be had here. For the average scholarly reader of Cambridge’s esteemed catalogue of titles on the cultural history of science, however, the rewards are perhaps not as obviously forthcoming.

Art History, History of Science, and Visual Experience

In The Science of Art (1990) Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford, discussed, as the subtitle of the book announced, “optical themes in Western art from Brunelleschi to Seurat” in three separate stories: the histories of perspective, mechanical drawing aids, and color theories.1 It is hard to overestimate the book’s impact. Its authoritative treatment of how painters imported “science” made it a classic in the rapidly expanding field of studies intersecting the history of science and art history. In 1990 Kemp also announced that there would be a companion volume that would cover “the organic sciences of anatomy and natural history.” Seen Unseen, published in 2006, was originally envisioned as this companion volume. For various reasons, however, that book did not turn out to be on “themes in the natural and the human sciences from the Renaissance to about 1880” (Seen Unseen, p. vi). The most important among those reasons, Kemp tells us, is that he became convinced “that there is an exciting job to be done by a historian of the visual at the present time in the development of historical disciplines and in the light of the late twentieth-century explosion of visual imagery” (ibid., p. vii). Seen Unseen is not a history of science or a history of art—nor even about their interaction. Kemp des not want his book to be wrongly perceived as a

The value of glass and the translation of artisanal knowledge in early modern Antwerp

Sven Dupre: The value of glass and the translation of artisanal knowledge in early modern Antwerp

Colour Plates I–XIII

Marking the anniversary of the telescope’s invention, these collected essays highlight a number of significant historical episodes concerning this well-loved instrument, which has played a crucial role in Man’s thinking about his position – literally and philosophically – in the universe.

Trading Luxury Glass, Picturing Collections and Consuming Objects of Knowledge in Early Seventeenth‐Century Antwerp

In this assessment of the intersection of trade, picturing collections and knowledge‐making in Early Modern Antwerp, the focus is on the role of luxury glass, mirror and lens technology and the science of optics. Emphasizing the social ties that facilitated these intersections, it is argued that newly invented luxury goods such as the pictures of collections and the art cabinets allowed Antwerp craftsmen, artists and art dealers to export the message that the material objects in which they traded were objects of knowledge: not to everyone, however, but to those who desired membership of a select community.

Introduction: Science and Practices of Translation

Historically speaking, scientists have lived and worked in a multilingual world. Given that, in such a world, translation is simply part of (scientific) life, it is all the more remarkable that practices of translation in science have received less attention from historians of science than one might expect. A focus on translation allows historians of science to scrutinize the changes and transformations of scientific knowledge in motion. Instead of presuming that processes of translation are betrayals of the original, and thus asking about the “fidelity” of a translator or the “faithfulness” of a translation, the contributions to this Focus section see those processes as productive of knowledge, part and parcel of the history of science. This Focus section brings together a wide variety of languages and practices of translation in different places and times, from the Ottoman Empire to Japan and from antiquity to the nineteenth century.

Doing It Wrong: The Translation of Artisanal Knowledge and the Codification of Error

An important aspect of structuring practical knowledge is the codification of error. Rather than writing down how to proceed, authors write down what not to do. Writing down how to do something right, is probably as old as mankind’s writing abilities. Recipes on Babylonian clay tablets suggest as much. However, I suggest that writing about doing it wrong seems to first emerge in the early modern period. Before the seventeenth century the recipe literature shows evidence of silent changes. During processes of transmission authors changed recipes without explicit notification to adapt them to new local and material conditions. Tried in new contexts, recipes seemed to no longer work, or the results were considered unsuccessful. Occasionally, readers of recipes even jotted down that a procedure did not work in the margin of a recipe book. Equally common in the recipe literature is the listing of variations on recipes offering the reader many different ways to do something right. However, seemingly new in the seventeenth century is the process of writing how-to, as found in earlier named or anonymous sources, followed by the explicit signal that a recipe does not work and suggestions for ways to change it to make it work. This is what is called ‘the codification of error’ in this essay. Faced with the flood of practical knowledge in the early modern period, it seems to be an equally powerful means to reorganize practical knowledge than bringing it together under a limited number of postulates. This essay explores the problem of the limits of language inherent to the codification of practical knowledge, and the codification of error as a strategy to overcome the problem.

The Making of Practical Optics: Mathematical Practitioners’ Appropriation of Optical Knowledge Between Theory and Practice

The discussion of the differing practices of mathematical practitioners’ appropriation of the optical tradition in this essay brings out a variety among mathematical practitioners and within the tradition of practical mathematics. This diversity is difficult to grasp in accounts of practical mathematics which oppose theory and practice as mutually exclusive categories. Comparing the optical projects of two geographically and socially differentiated mathematicians, the Venetian physician and mathematician Ettore Ausonio and the English town councilman and volunteer gunner, William Bourne , this essay argues that mathematical practitioners’ appropriation of optical knowledge depended upon the complexities of personal and local contexts, such as the perception of patronage opportunities. Notwithstanding the cognitive similarities of their optical projects, the balance of theory and practice is different in the presentation of their shared knowledge. Ausonio’ s practical optics, which aimed at the design of an instrument by offering a theoric, is contrasted with Bourne’ s project for the making of a telescope, which lacked any attempt at a theoric. The essay shows that, rather than as an established category, practical optics should be understood as the result of a construction by Renaissance mathematical practitioners’ appropriations of the perspectivist optical tradition.

Materials and Techniques between the Humanities and Science: Introduction

Collaborations and conflicts between the sciences and the humanities are central to disciplines from digital humanities to archaeology. The exploration of these tensions and synergies in the newly emerging field of technical art history is the focus of this forum. This is also a first step toward the writing of the history of conservation. The disciplinary conflict between science and the humanities in the study of materials and techniques relies on hierarchies of the material and the intellectual and of the hand and the mind. These same epistemic hierarchies are still at work in shaping processes of collaboration between conservators, conservation scientists, and art historians. The forum marks a few signposts that will help us to complete our picture of the long-term development of the study of materials and techniques in art from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.