In early modern Europe, discernment emerged as a key notion at the intersection of various domains in both learned and artisanal cultures. Often used synonymously with judgment, ingenuity, and taste, discernment defined the ability to perceive and understand the secrets of nature and art, and became explicitly connected with a kind of knowledge available only to experts in the respective fields. With contributions by historians of art and historians of science, and with geographic coverage focusing on the Low Countries and their multiple connections to different parts of the world, this volume reframes recent scholarship on what the editors term ’cultures of knowledge and discernment’ in the early modern period. The collection is innovative in its focus on investigating types of knowledge linked to what was then called the ’science’ (scientia) of art, to artistic expertise and connoisseurship, and to ’secrets of art and nature.’
Table of Contents
Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Hidden Artifices
Sven Dupré and Christine Göttler
Part I: Sites of Discernment
1 Transforming Nature into Art: Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562) by Pieter
Bruegel the Elder
Tine Luk Meganck
2 Vulcans Forge: The Sphere of Art in Early Modern Antwerp
Christine Göttler
Part II: Artifices and Imitation
3 Superb Craftsmanship in Antwerp: Baroque Goldsmiths Work in Competition
with the Visual Arts
Lorenz Seelig
4 The Veronica according to Zurbarán: Painting as Figura, and Image as
Vestigio
Felipe Pereda
5 The Various Natures of Middling Colours We May Learne of Painters. Sir
Kenelm Digby Looks at Rubens and Van Dyck
Karin Leonhard
Part III: Secrets and Knowledge
6 Oil Painting as a Workshop Secret: On Calumnies, Legends, and Critical
Investigations
Oskar Bätschmann
7 Peiresc in the Parisian Jewel House
Peter N. Miller 8 Germanic Antiquity in Rembrandts Circle
Thijs Weststeijn
Part IV: Mechanical Science and Technique
9 Rembrandt and Painting as a Mechanical Science in Dutch Seventeenth-Century
Art
Jan Blanc
10 From Mechanism to Technique: Diderot, Chardin, and the Practice of
Painting
Paul Taylor
Sven Dupré is Professor of History of Art, Science and Technology at the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Christine Göttler is Professor of Art History at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
