Victorian Science and Imagery: Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture
The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories—such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and sexual selection—deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges.

Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science, and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences. Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.
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Victorian Science and Imagery: Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture
The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories—such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and sexual selection—deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges.

Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science, and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences. Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.
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Victorian Science and Imagery: Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture

Victorian Science and Imagery: Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture

by Nancy Rose Marshall (Editor)
Victorian Science and Imagery: Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture

Victorian Science and Imagery: Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture

by Nancy Rose Marshall (Editor)

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Overview

The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories—such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and sexual selection—deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges.

Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science, and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences. Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780822987994
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date: 07/27/2021
Series: Sci & Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 373
File size: 25 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Nancy Rose Marshall is a professor in the Art History Department of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. Victorian Science and Imagery | Nancy Rose Marshall Chapter 1. Measuring Native America: Early American Archaeology and the Politics of Time | Rachael Z. DeLue Chapter 2. “All That Is Solid Melts into Air”: Burne-Jones, Glaciation, and the Matter of History | Alison Syme Chapter 3. Grasping the Elusive: Victorian Weather Forecasting and Arthur Hughes’s Illustrations for George Macdonald’s At the Back of the North Wind | Carey Gibbons Color Gallery Chapter 4. A Haunting Picture, in Light of Victorian Science: John Everett Millais’s Speak! Speak! | Nancy Rose Marshall Chapter 5. Photographing Ether, Documenting Pain: Representing the Chemical Invisible in the Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes | Naomi Slipp Chapter 6. Drawing Racial Comparisons in Nineteenth-Century British and American Anatomical Atlases | Keren Rosa Hammerschlag Chapter 7. The Post-Darwinian Eye, Physiological Aesthetics, and the Early Years of Aestheticism, 1860–1876 | Barbara Larson Chapter 8. Darwinian Aesthetics and Aestheticism in James McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room | Caitlin Silberman Notes Bibliography List of Contributors Index
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