Baroque Modes and the Production of Knowledge
In his Art of Painting (Fig. 1.1) Johannes Vermeer opens a curtain and lets the observer peek at the crafting of an image. The lavishly dressed painter, his back to the observer, is busy putting to paper the figure of Clio, the muse of history, draped in
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Baroque Modes and the Production of Knowledge Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris
Introduction: The Great Opposition In his Art of Painting (Fig. 1.1) Johannes Vermeer opens a curtain and lets the observer peek at the crafting of an image. The lavishly dressed painter, his back to the observer, is busy putting to paper the figure of Clio, the muse of history, draped in blue and holding the symbols of her art: the book and the trumpet. On the wall behind her is an elaborate map of the Netherlands (the west facing up), framed by miniature depictions of Dutch towns. Vermeer “juxtapose[s] two kinds of pictorial image” wrote Svetlana Alpers of this painting in her deservedly celebrated analysis: an image fraught with “meanings (art as emblem)” on the one hand, and on the other—an image which serves as a careful “description (art as mapping)” (Alpers 1984, 166). But Vermeer is not commenting on art alone. “The aim of Dutch painters was to capture on a surface a great range of knowledge and information about the world” (Alpers 1984, 122), and Vermeer is setting a contrast between two modes of knowledge: the theatrical, poetic, historical narrative represented by Clio; and the visual exactness and immediacy of the descriptio—the mathematically drawn, factual map (Alpers 1984, 119–123; 166–167). The contrast observed by Alpers is one which we have been taught to expect. It is the opposition historians draw between the two great cultural products of the seventeenth century. On one of its hands stands the style ascribed to Vermeer and his contemporary artists: Forceful and occasionally forced paradox; violent contrast; reliance on sensual detail, particularly color and touch, to indicate moral condition and religious theme; deliberate
O. Gal Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] R. Chen-Morris Science, Technology and Society Graduate Program, Bar Ilan University, Israel e-mail: [email protected] O. Gal and R. Chen-Morris (eds.), Science in the Age of Baroque, International Archives of the History of Ideas 208, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4807-1_1, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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O. Gal and R. Chen-Morris
Fig. 1.1 Vermeer’s The art of painting
distortion of regular structures to produce the asymmetric effect of baroque art; and unity of thought more dependent on imagery than on logic. (White et al. 1971, 391)1
On the other hand of the contrast stands The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude (Hall 1962), which Vermeer represents by the map, with its rigorous standards in observing and experimenting. By insisting that it deals only with material entities in nature, it excludes spirits and occult powers from its province. It distinguishes firmly between theories confirmed by multiple evidence, tentative hypotheses and unsupported speculations. It presents … a picture of nature … in which all available facts are given their logical, orderly places. (Hall 1962, xi)
The juxtaposition is striking. Seventeenth century art is supposedly
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