The early Royal Academy of Sciences relied on images in the process of their natural philosophical work. Drawings and prints helped communicate new ideas, inventions, and observations, and they circulated both within Academy meetings and to wider audiences. While many members of the Academy made drawings in the process of their investigations, they relied on professional artists to create engravings for their published works. Some of these images, such as the large engraved plates by Sébastien Le Clerc (1637-1714) were celebrated for their artistic skill as well as scientific accuracy. Yet despite the fame of these images, surprisingly little is known about the how the Academy negotiated their relationship with the artists who created them. Still further, the background and training of these artists have been neglected by scholars, nor has their work outside the Academy been taken into consideration. This paper will explore the relationship between the Academy and the artists they employed in the larger context of their artistic and graphic practices. Le Clerc, as well as Abraham Bosse (1604-1676), Louis de Châtillon (1639-1734), and Nicholas Robert (1614-1685) all created prints for the Academy’s earliest folio volumes in the 1670s. But if Le Clerc’s images were celebrated, ones by the others ran into problems, with the artists and Academicians disagreeing on the best means of representation. This paper will examine how these artists balanced artistic convention and tradition on the one hand, and the patronage demands and expectations on the other – to varying degrees of success.

Sébastien Le Clerc (1637-1714), one of the most successful engravers of Louis XIV’s France, was born to a family of goldsmiths in Lorraine, and received classical artisanal training. Yet over the course of a highly successful career as an engraver, he also became a widely published scientific author. His publications ranged from topics commensurate with artists’ interest, such as perspective and optics, to publications on cosmology, far removed from the workshop. This paper argues that mathematical skills played a key role in the dual development of Le Clerc’s career, who simultaneously became an engraver and strove to recognition as a man of letters and natural philosopher. Yet these mathematical skills only came fruition in the context of household service, in particular as an education to the children of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the powerful minister who spearheaded the transformation of the French cultural sphere in the 1660s. By tracing Le Clerc’s dual career arch, and showing how mathematical skills served to integrate Le Clerc into several contexts, from the Colbert’s household, through the world of publishing and the royal manufactures at the Gobelins, this paper seeks to revisit the thorny question of the relations between scholars and artisans during the Scientific Revolution. Rather than relying on hands-on, bodily experience, it was Le Clerc’s skill in mathematics that lend support to his aspiring scholarly career. These skills were published and advertised though his connections to powerful houses, which connected the developing state bureaucracy and manufactures with the market for scientific books.

My paper explores the role played by the king’s first physician (Premier médecin du roi) in organizing and evaluating a particular form of medical experimentation, namely, clinical trials of novel therapeutic substances. Although the primary responsibility of the first physician was supervising the health of the royal body, he also had a customary role in passing judgment on whether or not a given drug was safe or useful for the king’s subjects. This extended into the realm of state venality through the granting of royally-sponsored drug monopolies. As a case study, I examine the career of Louis XIV’s final first physician, Guy-Crescent Fagon (1638-1718), who organized patient trials and granted monopolies for dozens of drugs. Fagon was a graduate of the Paris Faculty of Medicine, superintendent of the Jardin du roi, and a member of the Académie des sciences, but the trials he organized were personally (rather than institutionally) assessed and occurred outside of the auspices of these bodies. I argue that Fagon’s testing practices testify to the importance of embodied expertise, personal judgment, and authoritative witnessing by trusted practitioners. They also suggest a coherent research programme, one aimed at cheap, “useful” drugs that could be used indiscriminately by large populations in order to further the goals of the French state—particularly in military contexts—but they occurred outside of the institutional spheres that historians usually associate with state-sponsored science in this period.

The flourishing practice of natural history collecting, which characterized the second half of the 18th century, was supported by a major theoretical effort to define how samples should be collected, preserved and displayed. This specialized literature was mainly produced within the French academic world to educate the non-specialized readership and to provide naturalists with the right methods to set up their cabinets. As a consequence, texts theorized two opposite views on collecting, reflecting two different approaches to nature. On the one hand, the scientific collection, aimed at the most faithful reproduction of nature and its laws through a rigorous and methodical display of the specimens; on the other hand, the amateur cabinet, conceived a space for visual pleasure where to contemplate natural beauty and inside which aesthetic choices offset the difficulty of making natural order visible. This paper will question this theoretic dichotomy. I will argue that the scholarly French élite referred to the “taste vs. method” opposition as a strategy to discredit non-professional collectors in order to legitimize the practice of scientific collecting as the only one able to formulate a valid scientific content. As a matter of fact, was the opposition between amateurs and scientists truly operational? Was it really possible to exhibit nature in a cabinet without using any decorative artificialities which, according to scientists, prevented the visitors of natural history cabinets from experiencing and understanding the natural order?