Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature in Early Modern Science (original) (raw)

Three features of Northern European visual art of the early 17 th century stand out as historically distinctive. One is naturalism, the interest in the faithful depiction of plants and animals. Flowers, crustaceans, game birds, and domestic animals are drawn and painted with affection and care. A second, related feature is ordinariness and intimacy. In Dutch painting of the period, ordinary folk are shown calmly engaged in the activities of daily life, preparing their meals, minding their children, employing their brooms and scales, absorbed in their reading, or practicing their musical instruments. They replace the saints and mythological figures portrayed in earlier genres in dramatic or highly emotional states, connected to supersensible reality. A third feature is the virtuostic rendering of materials, reflexy-const as the technical manuals of the period called it; the transparency of glass and the sheen of metal, but also the minute detailing of the products of human fabrication, such as cloth, carpets, figured porcelain, and silver. Earlier, painters of the English School had abandoned the classical interest in folded monochromatic drapery to depict their aloof subjects in spectacular outfits of figured tapestry, or embroidered with geometrical designs, and with jewellery and trim tending to the fantastic— webs of gems, lace ruffs and cuffs. The interest in repeated patterns and geometrical forms such as floor tiles and brocades extends to the " mathematical engagement" of still life composition, and in these pictures, both defamiliarization and an intimacy suggestive of Platonic reminiscence seem to remove them to a higher order of experience. A style of presentation implies a set of choices—what to depict and how to depict it-and choice implies a need for justification, for both the production and the consumption of art objects requires investment, of training, time, and effort on one hand, of money on the other. The objects depicted must therefore reveal ―a dimension of value capable of justifying their representation.‖ 1 and historians have long sought to explain the values of the above-mentioned