Enfilade

From the Royal Society’s website:

Curiously Drawn: Early Modern Science as a Visual Pursuit
Royal Society, London, 21-22 June 2012

Science produces some of the most intriguing and arresting images in modern culture, from wildlife photographs to scanning electron microscope images. Yet the historical links between scientific research and visual representation are not always apparent. This conference brings together historians of science and art in order to examine the relationship between science and visual culture in the first hundred years of the Royal Society. We hope that the meeting will demonstrate how art, artists, and print-makers enabled creativity and innovation in science, and the extent to which naturalists and natural philosophers, in turn, transformed visual resources and strategies into something of their own.

This meeting is supported by the AHRC as part of an international network on ‘Origins of science as a visual pursuit: the case of the early Royal Society’. Relevant printed books and manuscripts from the Royal Society’s collections will be on display during the meeting.

Registration details are available here»

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Thursday, 21 June

10:00  Registration and coffee
10:30  Sachiko Kusukawa (University of Cambridge), Welcome and Introduction
11:00  Paula Findlen (Stanford University), The Specimen and the Image: John Woodward, Agostino Scilla, and the Depiction of Fossils
12:00  Kim Sloan (The British Museum), Sir Hans Sloane’s Pictures: The Science of Connoisseurship or the Art of Collecting?
1:00  Lunch
2:00  Domenico Bertoloni-Meli (Indiana University, Bloomington), Disease in the Philosophical Transactions
3:00  Urs B. Leu (Zentralbibliothek Zürich), Swiss Mountains and English Scholars: Johann Jacob Scheuchzer’s Contributions to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
4:00 Tea
4:30  Scott Mandelbrote (University of Cambridge), Illustrating the History of the Earth
5:30  Opportunity to view the exhibition
6:00  Public lecture by John Barrow (FRS), Pictures, Images, and Visualization in Science

Friday June 22

9:30  Nathan Flis (Oxford University), Barlow’s Pursuits: Pictures of Birds and Beasts before the Era of Modern Scientific Illustration
10:30  Coffee
11:00  Lorraine Daston (Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Super-Vision: Weather Watching across Space and through Time at the Early Royal Society and Académie Royale des Sciences
12:00  Matthew Hunter (McGill University), Joshua Reynolds, the Royal Society, and the Temporally-Evolving Chemical Object in the British Enlightenment
1:00  Lunch
2:00  Michael Hunter (Birkbeck, University of London, Emeritus), Commentary
3:00  Further avenues of research

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Correction: An earlier version of this posting, following a preliminary programme, did not include the title for John Barrow’s talk, and Matthew Hunter’s presentation was described as ‘Commentary’.