This article examines the reception history of Jan van der Straet (Stradanus)’ Nova reperta, the iconic visual account of the modern inventions of the scientific revolution. It reconstructs how contemporary publics responded to Stradanus’ prints within Europe and across the globe. As I argue, the Nova reperta had a rather limited reception compared to the rest of Stradanus’ oeuvre; modern inventions seem not to have been popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Interest in Stradanus was limited to the circles of the Medici in Florence, who used his prints to invent a tradition of supporting learnings and craftsmanship, and to a few humanists and antiquarians who used the Nova reperta within a highly religious framework. The talk focuses on two case studies: the French engraver Melchior Tavernier, who relied on the prints of the Nova reperta in a court case agains the booksellers’ guild in the Paris of the 1620s, and the Oxford antiquarian Thomas Hearne, who used the Nova reperta to learn more about the the early history of printing in order to criticize the 18th-century book trade in the wake of the Copyright Act of 1710. As these two cases reveal, the Nova reperta’s images were used for highly political purposes in this period, and were not taken to be as unproblematic accounts of artisanal or scientific work.

In one of the six perspectival projections in The Practice of Painting and Perspective Made Easy (1756), Thomas Bardwell includes an ancient sculpture of an elaborately curved pair of ram’s horns. His long study of the rules of perspective and “puzzling after this mathematical Truth” notwithstanding, Bardwell was unable to render the form of the horns mathematically and determined that “whenever the Rules . . . should fail, and grow tedious, . . . I design immediately to settle the Affair at Sight of the Object.” Mathematicians who wrote on perspective acknowledged the complexities of perspectival rendering and described mechanical devices to aid in avoiding the difficulties for those who were not “willing to take the pains to open the Compass, nor to take the Rule for to draw a line,” as Jean Du Breuil put it in 1642. Such devices were ingenious alternative responses to the challenge of rendering two-dimensional objects on a three-dimensional surface and themselves reached considerable levels of complexity, but the extent to which they were actually used by practicing artists remains unclear. This paper examines the tipping point between perspectival theory and practice, focusing on renderings of curved objects, especially musical instruments, from Albrecht Dürer’s famous woodcut of two artists using a device to depict a foreshortened lute in his Underweysung der Messung (1525) to the elaborate still lifes by Evaristo Baschenis and Bartolomeo Bettera in the next century.

This paper explores the intersection of ideas about nature, ingenuity (“ingenio”) and invention in seventeenth-century Spanish thought through an examination of the natural historical and natural philosophical writings of the Jesuit scholar Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595-1658), the first holder of the Chair of Natural History at Reales Estudios of the Jesuit Colegio Imperial in Madrid (founded in 1629). The paper places particular emphasis on instances of human and animal inventive and ingenious behaviour in the early modern American context: from the unique comportment of certain creatures to various cunning practices involving artefacts and materials. Through a number of books written and published between the late 1620s and the early 1630s, Nieremberg’s writings offer a rich corpus of information on European and American natural history, including a substantial portion of the materials gathered during the so-called ‘Francisco Hernández expedition’ to New Spain (1570-1577). The paper’s aim is to situate Nieremberg’s take on invention and ingenuity within a larger debate on issues like the fabric of the natural world, the nature of God’s craftsmanship, the moral and cultural dimensions of human and animal behaviour, and their natural philosophical and theological implications.

In 1773, visitors crowded one of London’s preeminent exhibition venues in order to see two recent paintings by George Stubbs. Portraying a dingo and a kangaroo, these images were among the first to depict recently-discovered Pacific flora and fauna for a European audience. Yet Stubbs – whose paintings of animals were valued for their anatomical precision rooted in direct observation – had never actually seen these creatures. The evidentiary authority of the images rested, instead, on their relation to the work of a rarely discussed but crucially important figure: the Scottish natural history illustrator Sydney Parkinson, who had died while serving as an artist on Captain Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific. This paper examines the tension between observation and invention in the visual culture of scientific discovery from Cook’s first expedition. The paintings and prints that circulated in Britain following Cook’s return deployed a number of competing – and at times even contradictory – pictorial strategies to shore up their scientific credibility and to enhance their popular appeal. Situated between specimen and spectacle, this paper will show, these images created a framework for visualising Pacific exploration that shaped not only how British audiences imagined the remote region but also how scientific knowledge about it was disseminated to a wider public.