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grant agreement no. 648718 UIDB/00729/2020 Johann Kunckel's Ars Vitraria Experimentalis (1679) is arguably the most important text on seventeenth-century glassmaking. As an augmented German translation of Italian (1612) and English (1662) editions, Kunckel presented a complex and layered text that contained a plethora of recipes, elaborate commentaries and annotations, and various appendices dealing with glass-related technologies and arts. We reworked four recipes for rosichiero glass (a transparent red glass) in Kunckel's book to discover what strategies Kunckel employed to help readers engage with the recipes and to make the recipes work in the specificity of their own workshop. We learned that Kunckel regularly neglected to test the Italian recipes, and that not all of his corrections are improvements, thereby specifying our understanding of the “codification of error” as a strategy to write down colour-making knowledge. Instead, Kunckel made the choice to educate his readers on the very mechanisms of glass colouring to allow them to intervene to influence the colour of the glass and to gain further control over the making process. He argued that the colour of glass is sensitive to the manner in which ingredients are sourced and processed, and emphasised the importance of furnace management in optimising the colour of glass. publishersversion published

Translation is an epistemic practice. Accordingly, and in the wake of the seminal work on the cultural history of translation initiated by Peter Burke, the field of the history of science and medicine has shifted towards discussing practices of translation. Instead of asking about the “fidelity” or “faithfulness” of a translation (previously thought of as a copy or replica of an original), the focus on translation has allowed historians of science and medicine to scrutinize the changes and transformations of knowledge in motion. We no longer look at these forms of translation as betrayals of the original, but as processes productive of knowledge. Paying attention to their ethics and politics highlights that translation is a process of inclusion and exclusion. The contributors to this section scrutinize the conditions under which premodern translators became visible or remain invisible. What, the papers ask, is epistemic translation? What does it encompass, and what are its limits?

Early European attempts at writing a comprehensive history of the world struggled in particular with China, whose greater antiquity was difficult to accommodate with the biblical chronology of Creation and the Flood; the Chinese might also have traveled to the Americas before the Europeans. The fulcrum of this debate was the Dutch Republic, where innovative schools of historiography and biblical criticism went hand in hand with interest in East Asian material culture, antiquities, and books. Around 1650, Jacob Golius, Georg Hornius, and Isaac Vossius quarreled about China in relation to Egypt, Israel, and the Americas. The debate flared up again fifty years later when Nicolaes Witsen and Gijsbert Cuper confronted the Republic of Letters with a rare bronze mirror from Han Dynasty China. Dutch attempts to engage with Chinese written and material sources, and even with a handful of early Chinese visitors to Europe, arguably made this exchange an early example of global history.

In Special Issue: Youthful minds and hands: Learning practical knowledge in early modern Europe

Connoisseurship, the determination of similarity and difference and assessment of quality in works of art and material culture, remains controversial. Long reviled as outmoded and elitist, subjective and intuitive, tainted by the market, and overly invested in a mystified artist and a fetishized masterpiece, connoisseurship is seeing a resurgence. It once again is understood to be an ever-evolving art historical method foundational to the study of the object. It is also a practice with a history that, especially in the early modern period, was closely tied to knowledge. This introduction considers the centrality of identification and attribution to the discipline, offers speculation as to why connoisseurship came to be so denigrated, looks briefly at how science and neuroscience are transforming connoisseurship, and summarizes the volume’s 10 essays and how each advances ‘new connoisseurships’ in dealing with issues in the history of the connoisseurship of Netherlandish art.

This book traces the development of scientific conservation and technical art history. It takes as its starting point the final years of the nineteenth century which saw the establishment of the first museum laboratory in Berlin and groundbreaking international conferences on art history and conservation held in pre-World War I Germany. It follows the history of conservation and art history until the 1940s when, from the ruins of World War II, new institutions such as the Istituto Centrale del Restauro emerged, which would shape the post-war art and conservation world. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, conservation history, historiography, and history of science and humanities

This book explores the function of architecture in the illustrated manuscripts of the erudite Spanish Benedictine scholar, artist and preacher Juan Ricci de Guevara. Among architectural historians, Ricci has become famous for his invention of the complete architectural Salomonic order, which has been discussed by modern scholars predominantly isolated from its textual context, and from a formal, aesthetic approach. The new, comprehensive approach of Ricci’s scholarship in the manuscripts shows that he referred to architecture continuously. From this starting point the hypothesis is made that architecture for Ricci was a suitable interdisciplinary agent for his innovative ideas. With architecture, he could establish connections between various sources, methods and arguments, while coincidentally maintaining the scientific level of his scholarly work. This dissertation is the first book in which Ricci’s written oeuvre (which was never published and is now kept in Madrid, El Escorial, the Vatican and Montecassino) is assessed in-depth comprehensively. It results in a detailed insight in his formulation of a pivotal role for architecture and the architectural image in seventeenth-century scholarship, as a result of Ricci’s particular fusion of scholarly, artistic and rhetorical approaches. The recognition of this mechanism results in an updated inventory of his manuscripts, a discussion of important but hitherto unknown sections of the writings in which the position of architecture is discussed and legitimized, an adjustment of the modern formal discussion of the complete Salomonic order, a new analysis of Ricci’s presentation of his ideas to Pope Alexander VII in the 1660s, and the identification of a decoration program by Ricci for the basilica of the abbey of Montecassino.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses how major conferences from the Munich Exhibition and Congress in 1893 to the first international conference on the scientific analysis of art in Rome in 1930 shaped a research community around the study of materials and techniques and issues of conservation. It shows how scientific expertise developed in the newly established museum laboratories and how new imaging technologies, such as X-rays, were used and contested in court rooms. The book focuses on the conference and exhibition organised by the German Society for the Promotion of Rational Painting Methods in 1893 to scrutinise the fight over expertise in matters of painting materials between artists and scientists which would haunt the conflict between Alexander Eibner and Max Doerner. It focuses on the Rijksmuseum provides people with an interesting contrast.

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espanolEn su estudio fundacional, Las tecnicas del observador (1990), Jonathan Crary postula que una historia de la vision o de la percepcion “depende mucho mas que de una simple enumeracion de cambios o desplazamientos de las practicas representacionales […]. La vision y sus efectos son siempre inseparables de las posibilidades de un sujeto observador, que es a la vez un producto historico y el lugar de ciertas practicas, tecnicas, instituciones, y procedimientos de subjetivacion”. Asi, en las decadas de 1810 y 1820, Crary situa una ruptura del regimen escopico entre un modelo de vision geometrico y un modelo fisiologico. Este articulo defiende que un abordaje metodologico enfocado en la materialidad de las tecnologias visuales revela que en la modernidad temprana (es decir, antes del siglo XIX) la observacion dependia de un involucramiento y un entrecruzamiento corporeo, mas que de una division estricta entre sujeto y objeto. La palabra clave en tal aproxi-macion es movilidad, que actua sobre tres niveles: 1) la movilidad y la animacion de las imagenes; 2) la materialidad movil de los instrumentos, y 3) la movilidad en terminos de la portabilidad de las tecnologias visuales a lo largo de diferentes sitios y continentes. EnglishIn his seminal Techniques of the Observer (1990), Jonathan Crary argues hat a history of vision or perception “depends on far more than an account of shifts in representational practices […]. Vision and its effects are always inseparable from the possibilities of an observing subject who is both the historical product and the site of certain practic-es, techniques, institutions, and procedures of subjectification”. Crary identifies a rupture in the scopic regime between geometric and physiological models of vision that took place in the 1810s and 1820s. This paper argues that the adoption of a methodological approach which focuses on the materiality of visual technologies reveals that in the early modern period (i.e., prior to the early nineteenth century) observation depended upon bodily engagement rather than a strict division between the subject and the object. The keyword of such an approach is mobility which plays out on three levels: 1) the mobility and animation of images; 2) the mobile materiality of instruments, and 3) mobility in terms of the portability of visual technologies across different sites and continents.