Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe

In these 12 essays by a distinguished group of art historians, Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe explores the relationship between artistic and technological advances from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. Together the essays provide a broad definition of technology for this period and address the influence of technological shifts on the history of early modern art. The essays span c.1420 to 1820, a time period bursting with visual technological developments between the advent of the printed image and that of the photographically produced image. The contributors discuss a wide range of early modern artists tools, instruments, skills, crafts, devices, machines, materials, and techniques and their historical applications. From mirrors and modeling to telescopic views and telegraphic images, these essays highlight a frequently overlooked aspect of research within art history that yields substantial insights into the analysis of the making and viewing of art.

After Prometheus: Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe (Genevieve Warwick and Richard Taws) Historians in the Laboratory: Reconstruction of Renaissance Art and Technology in the Making and Knowing Project (Pamela H. Smith and The Making and Knowing Project) Works in Progress: Painting and Modelling in Seventeenth–Century Holland (Jan Blanc) Looking in the Mirror of Renaissance Art (Genevieve Warwick) Squaring the Circle: The Telescopic View in Early Modern Landscapes (Amy Knight Powell) After Galileo: The Image of Science in Niccolò Tornioli s Astronomers (Giulia Martina Weston) The Monument to Louis XIV at the Place Vendôme (1699) as a Technical Achievement: A Question of Interest (Etienne Jollet) A Clock Picture as a Philosophical Experiment: The Tableau Mécanique in the Physics Cabinet of Bonnier de la Mosson (Hanneke Grootenboer) Of Air Pumps and Teapots: Joseph Wright of Derby, John Singleton Copley and the Technology of Seeing (Bryan J. Wolf) Technologies of Illusion: De Loutherbourg s Eidophusikon in Eighteenth–Century London (Ann Bermingham) Telegraphic Images in Post–Revolutionary France (Richard Taws) Seizing Attention: Devices and Desires (Barbara Maria Stafford)           Index

Richard Taws is Reader in the History of Art Department at University College London, UK. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Getty, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the Bard Graduate Center, New York, and was recently awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. He is the author of The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (2013) and is currently writing a book about art and technology in post–revolutionary France.

Genevieve Warwick is Editor of Art History and author of The Arts of Collecting (2000 and 2012), Bernini: Art as Theatre (2012), and Picturing Venus in the Renaissance Print (2014), as well as collections of essays on Poussin, prints and drawings and Caravaggio, and numerous articles on art collections, art and science, and architecture and urbanism. Her research has received awards from the Kress Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Getty Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, and the Renaissance Society of America.