Images and Institutions: The Visual Culture of Scientific Societies in the Age of Baroque

One of the most important developments in the history of science from the late 15th until the late 18th century was the foundation of institutions for collaborative research and the publication of knowledge, such as the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome (1603), the Academia Naturae Curiosorum (Leopoldina) in Schweinfurt (1652), the Accademia del Cimento in Florence (1657), the Royal Society in London (1660), the Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris (1666), and the Scientific Academy of St Petersburg (1725). Within these institutions, knowledge was not only acquired and disseminated orally and textually, but also visually. From drawings, which circulated in society meetings to the printed plates in their published books, images across all media were vital to the developing practices of early modern science. This volume provides the first comprehensive and comparative understanding of the function of images and visual strategies within these burgeoning institutions. The contributions deal with the visualization a manifold of early modern scientific disciplines (from natural history to medicine, from mathematics to acoustics, and from ethnography to geology and geometry) in institutions in Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain, Portugal, Russia, and the Netherlands, from the late 15th until the late 18th century. By combining a multidisciplinary perspective with a wide geographical point of view and a long temporal framework, the volume provides new insight into the critical role of visual practices within pre-modern scientific societies.