Download or read book Laboratories of Art written by Sven Dupré and published by Springer Science & Business. This book was released on 2014-04-25 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the interconnections and differentiations between artisanal workshops and alchemical laboratories and between the arts and alchemy from Antiquity to the eighteenth century. In particular, it scrutinizes epistemic exchanges between producers of the arts and alchemists. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the term laboratorium uniquely referred to workplaces in which ‘chemical’ operations were performed: smelting, combustion, distillation, dissolution and precipitation. Artisanal workshops equipped with furnaces and fire in which ‘chemical’ operations were performed were also known as laboratories. Transmutational alchemy (the transmutation of all base metals into more noble ones, especially gold) was only one aspect of alchemy in the early modern period. The practice of alchemy was also about the chemical production of things--medicines, porcelain, dyes and other products as well as precious metals and about the knowledge of how to produce them. This book uses examples such as the Uffizi to discuss how Renaissance courts established spaces where artisanal workshops and laboratories were brought together, thus facilitating the circulation of materials, people and knowledge between the worlds of craft (today’s decorative arts) and alchemy. Artisans became involved in alchemical pursuits beyond a shared material culture and some crafts relied on chemical expertise offered by scholars trained as alchemists. Above all, texts and books, products and symbols of scholarly culture played an increasingly important role in artisanal workshops. In these workplaces a sort of hybrid figure was at work. With one foot in artisanal and the other in scholarly culture this hybrid practitioner is impossible to categorize in the mutually exclusive categories of scholar and craftsman. By the seventeenth century the expertise of some glassmakers, silver and goldsmiths and producers of porcelain was just as based in the worlds of alchemical and bookish learning as it was grounded in hands-on work in the laboratory. This book suggests that this shift in workshop culture facilitated the epistemic exchanges between alchemists and producers of the decorative arts.

Download or read book The Mycenaeans written by Lord William Taylour and published by W W Norton & Company Incorporated. This book was released on 1990 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies the distinctive culture of the Mycenaeans, examining the architectural, engineering and artistic achievements of this civilization which dominated the pre-Classical era of Greek history.

Download or read book Greece in the Bronze Age written by Emily Vermeule and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Shaping the Netherlandish Canon written by Walter S. Melion and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A treatise on Dutch art on par with Vasari's critical history of Italian art, Karel van Mander's Schilder-Boeck (or Book on Picturing) has long been recognized for its critical and historical influence--and yet, until now, no comprehensive account of the book's conception, aims, and impact has been available. In this in-depth analysis of the content and context of Van Mander's work, Walter S. Melion reveals the Schilder-Boeck's central importance to an understanding of northern Renaissance and Baroque art. By interpreting the terminology employed in the Schilder-Boeck, Melion establishes the text's relationship to past and contemporary art theory. Van Mander is seen here developing his critical categories and then applying them to Ancient, Italian, and Netherlandish artists in order to mark changes within a culture and to characterize excellence for each region. Thus Melion demonstrates how Van Mander revised both the structure and critical language of Vasari's Lives to refute the Italian's claims for the superiority of the Tuscan style, and to clarify northern artistic traditions and the concerns of Netherlandish artists. A much needed corrective to the view that Dutch art of the period was lacking in theory, Melion's work offers a compelling account of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theoretical and critical perspective and shows how this perspective suggests a rereading of northern art.

Download or read book Promethean Ambitions written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age when the nature of reality is complicated daily by advances in bioengineering, cloning, and artificial intelligence, it is easy to forget that the ever-evolving boundary between nature and technology has long been a source of ethical and scientific concern: modern anxieties about the possibility of artificial life and the dangers of tinkering with nature more generally were shared by opponents of alchemy long before genetic science delivered us a cloned sheep named Dolly. In Promethean Ambitions, William R. Newman ambitiously uses alchemy to investigate the thinning boundary between the natural and the artificial. Focusing primarily on the period between 1200 and 1700, Newman examines the labors of pioneering alchemists and the impassioned—and often negative—responses to their efforts. By the thirteenth century, Newman argues, alchemy had become a benchmark for determining the abilities of both men and demons, representing the epitome of creative power in the natural world. Newman frames the art-nature debate by contrasting the supposed transmutational power of alchemy with the merely representational abilities of the pictorial and plastic arts—a dispute which found artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy attacking alchemy as an irreligious fraud. The later assertion by the Paracelsian school that one could make an artificial human being—the homunculus—led to further disparagement of alchemy, but as Newman shows, the immense power over nature promised by the field contributed directly to the technological apologetics of Francis Bacon and his followers. By the mid-seventeenth century, the famous "father of modern chemistry," Robert Boyle, was employing the arguments of medieval alchemists to support the identity of naturally occurring substances with those manufactured by "chymical" means. In using history to highlight the art-nature debate, Newman here shows that alchemy was not an unformed and capricious precursor to chemistry; it was an art founded on coherent philosophical and empirical principles, with vocal supporters and even louder critics, that attracted individuals of first-rate intellect. The historical relationship that Newman charts between human creation and nature has innumerable implications today, and he ably links contemporary issues to alchemical debates on the natural versus the artificial.

Download or read book Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire written by Tara Nummedal and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What distinguished the true alchemist from the fraud? This question animated the lives and labors of the common men—and occasionally women—who made a living as alchemists in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As purveyors of practical techniques, inventions, and cures, these entrepreneurs were prized by princely patrons, who relied upon alchemists to bolster their political fortunes. At the same time, satirists, artists, and other commentators used the figure of the alchemist as a symbol for Europe’s social and economic ills. Drawing on criminal trial records, contracts, laboratory inventories, satires, and vernacular alchemical treatises, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire situates the everyday alchemists, largely invisible to modern scholars until now, at the center of the development of early modern science and commerce. Reconstructing the workaday world of entrepreneurial alchemists, Tara Nummedal shows how allegations of fraud shaped their practices and prospects. These debates not only reveal enormously diverse understandings of what the “real” alchemy was and who could practice it; they also connect a set of little-known practitioners to the largest questions about commerce, trust, and intellectual authority in early modern Europe.

Download or read book The Scientific Revolution A Very Short Introduction written by Lawrence Principe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-28 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawrence M. Principe takes a fresh approach to the story of the scientific revolution, emphasising the historical context of the society and its world view at the time. From astronomy to alchemy and medicine to geology, he tells this fascinating story from the perspective of the historical characters involved.

Download or read book The Alchemical World of the German Court written by Bruce T. Moran and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Fireworks written by Simon Werrett and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fireworks are synonymous with celebration in the twenty-first century. But pyrotechnics—in the form of rockets, crackers, wheels, and bombs—have exploded in sparks and noise to delight audiences in Europe ever since the Renaissance. Here, Simon Werrett shows that, far from being only a means of entertainment, fireworks helped foster advances in natural philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, and many other branches of the sciences. Fireworks brings to vibrant life the many artful practices of pyrotechnicians, as well as the elegant compositions of the architects, poets, painters, and musicians they inspired. At the same time, it uncovers the dynamic relationships that developed between the many artists and scientists who produced pyrotechnics. In so doing, the book demonstrates the critical role that pyrotechnics played in the development of physics, astronomy, chemistry and physiology, meteorology, and electrical science. Richly illustrated and drawing on a wide range of new sources, Fireworks takes readers back to a world where pyrotechnics were both divine and magical and reveals for the first time their vital contribution to the modernization of European ideas.

Download or read book Transmutations alchemy in Art written by Lawrence Principe and published by Chemical Heritage Foundation. This book was released on 2002 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alchemy is one of the most evocative subjects in the history of science. Alchemy made important contributions to the development of modern science while firing popular imagination so strongly that portrayals of the alchemist at work pervaded the arts. The more celebrated goals of alchemy, like transmutation of base metals into gold, still tease and tantalize. Transmutations offers a thoughtful look at the role of the alchemist in the 17th and 18th centuries, as depicted in a selection of paintings from the Eddleman and Fisher Collections housed at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. This beautiful full-color book reveals much about the beginnings of chemistry as a profession.

Download or read book Artisan practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences 1400 1600 written by Pamela O. Long and published by OSU Press Horning Visiting Sch. This book was released on 2011 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artisan/Practitioners offers an introduction to the history of science through new discussion of an influential thesis in the discipline. The "Zilsel thesis" argues that artisans, craftsmen, and other practitioners exerted an important influence on the development of empirical methodologies in the Scientific Revolution, the "new sciences" of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Download or read book Art and Alchemy written by Sven Dupré and published by Hirmer Verlag GmbH. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a comprehensive overview of the relationship between alchemy and art, bringing together key artworks that take alchemy as their inspiration: from the enigmatic paintings of Jan Brueghel the Elder to contemporary works by Anish Kapoor. It includes recent studies by internationally renowned scientists.

Download or read book Translating Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries written by Harold John Cook and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2012 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge of nature may be common to all of humanity, yet it is written in many tongues. The story of the Tower of Babel is not only an etiology of the multitude of languages, it also suggests that a "confusion of tongues" confounds communication. However, as the contributors to this volume show, translation is always a transformation. This book examines how such transformations generate new knowledge and how translations helped to establish a new science. Situated at the border of the Germanic and Romance languages, home to a highly educated population, the Low Countries fostered multilingualism and became one of the chief sites for translation. (Series: Low Countries Studies on the Circulation of Natural Knowledge - Vol. 3)

Download or read book The Architecture of Science written by Peter Galison and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of Contents The Architecture of Science by Galison, Peter L. (Editor); Edelman, Shimon (Editor); Thompson, Emily (Editor) Terms of Use Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors 1 Buildings and the Subject of Science Peter Galison 1 Of Secrecy and Openness: Science and Architecture in Early Modern Europe 2 Masculine Prerogatives: Gender, Space, and Knowledge in the Early Modern Museum Paula Findlen 3 Alchemical Symbolism and Concealment: The Chemical House of Libavius William R. Newman 4 Openness and Empiricism: Values and Meaning in Early Architectural Writings and in Seventeenth-Century Experimental Philosophy Pamela O. Long II Displaying and Concealing Technics in the Nineteenth Century 5 Architecture for Steam M. Norton Wise 6 Illuminating the Opacity of Achromatic Lens Production: Joseph von Fraunhofer's Use of Monastic Architecture and Space as a Laboratory Myles W. Jackson 7 The Spaces of Cultural Representation, circa 1887 and 1969: Reflections on Museum Arrangement and Anthropological Theory in the Boasian and Evolutionary Traditions George W. Stocking Jr. 8 Bricks and Bones: Architecture and Science in Victorian Britian Sophie Forgan III Modern Space 9 "Spatial Mechanics": Scientific Metaphors in Architecture Adrian Forty 10 Diagramming the New World, or Hannes Meyer's "Scientization" of Architecture K. Michael Hays 11 Listening to/for Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Development of Modern Spaces in America Emily Thompson 12 Of Beds and Benches: Building the Modern American Hospital Allan M. Brandt and David C. Sloane IV Is Architecture Science? 13 Architecture, Science, and Technology Antoine Picon 14 Architecture as Science: Analogy or Disjunction? Alberto Perez-Gomez 15 The Mutual Limits of Architecture and Science Kenneth Frampton 16 The Hounding of the Snark Denise Scott Brown V Princeton After Modernism: the Lewis Thomas Laboratory for Molecular Biology 17 Thoughts on the Architecture of the Scientific Workplace: Community, Change, and Continuity Robert Venturi 18 The Design Process for the Human Workplace James Collins Jr. 19 Life in the Lewis Thomas Laboratory Arnold J. Levine 20 Two Faces on Science: Building Identities for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology Thomas F. Gieryn VI Centers, Cities, and Colliders 21 Architecture at Fermilab Robert R. Wilson 22 The Architecture of Science: From D'Arcy Thompson to the SSC Moshe Safdie 23 Factory, Laboratory, Studio: Dispersing Sites of Production Peter Galison and Caroline A. Jones Index Descriptive content provided by Syndetics"! a Bowker service

Download or read book The Aspiring Adept written by Lawrence Principe and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Aspiring Adept presents a provocative new view of Robert Boyle (1627-1691), one of the leading figures of the Scientific Revolution, by revealing for the first time his avid and lifelong pursuit of alchemy. Boyle has traditionally been considered, along with Newton, a founder of modern science because of his mechanical philosophy and his experimentation with the air-pump and other early scientific apparatus. However, Lawrence Principe shows that his alchemical quest--hidden first by Boyle's own codes and secrecy, and later suppressed or ignored--positions him more accurately in the intellectual and cultural crossroads of the seventeenth century. Principe radically reinterprets Boyle's most famous work, The Sceptical Chymist, to show that it criticizes not alchemists, as has been thought, but "unphilosophical" pharmacists and textbook writers. He then shows Boyle's unambiguous enthusiasm for alchemy in his "lost" Dialogue on the Transmutation and Melioration of Metals, now reconstructed from scattered fragments and presented here in full for the first time. Intriguingly, Boyle believed that the goal of his quest, the Philosopher's Stone, could not only transmute base metals into gold, but could also attract angels. Alchemy could thus act both as a source of knowledge and as a defense against the growing tide of atheism that tormented him. In seeking to integrate the seemingly contradictory facets of Boyle's work, Principe also illuminates how alchemy and other "unscientific" pursuits had a far greater impact on early modern science than has previously been thought.

Download or read book The Business of Alchemy written by Pamela H. Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Business of Alchemy, Pamela Smith explores the relationships among alchemy, the court, and commerce in order to illuminate the cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In showing how an overriding concern with religious salvation was transformed into a concentration on material increase and economic policies, Smith depicts the rise of modern science and early capitalism. In pursuing this narrative, she focuses on that ideal prey of the cultural historian, an intellectual of the second rank whose career and ideas typify those of a generation. Smith follows the career of Johann Joachim Becher (1635-1682) from university to court, his projects from New World colonies to an old-world Pansophic Panopticon, and his ideas from alchemy to economics. Teasing out the many meanings of alchemy for Becher and his contemporaries, she argues that it provided Becher with not only a direct key to power over nature but also a language by which he could convince his princely patrons that their power too must rest on liquid wealth. Agrarian society regarded merchants with suspicion as the nonproductive exploiters of others' labor; however, territorial princes turned to commerce for revenue as the cost of maintaining the state increased. Placing Becher’s career in its social and intellectual context, Smith shows how he attempted to help his patrons assimilate commercial values into noble court culture and to understand the production of surplus capital as natural and legitimate. With emphasis on the practices of natural philosophy and extensive use of archival materials, Smith brings alive the moment of cultural transformation in which science and the modern state emerged.

Download or read book The Mindful Hand written by Lissa Roberts and published by Edita-The Publishing House of the Royal. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although manual labour and theoretical invention might now seem separate ventures, history teaches us that they are closely linked processes. The Mindful Hand explores innovative areas of European society between the late Renaissance and the period of early industrialisation where the enterprise of knowledge and production relied on the most intimate connexions of thought and toil. This volume explains how philosophers and labourers collaborated in an environment where artisans and instrument-makers, administrators and entrepreneurs simultaneously pioneered technical change alongside knowledge formation. The essays gathered here help show how these projects were pursued together, yet why, in retrospect, the very categories of science and technology emerged as seemingly distinct endeavors.