Artists, Scientists, and Philosophical Picturing in Galileo’s Europe investigates the role of printmaking masters, their materials and techniques, in producing new knowledge at the onset of the Scientific Revolution. The project examines intensive reciprocal collaborations between etchers, burin engravers, and woodblock cutters, and astronomers, mathematicians, and natural philosophers, in and between Southern and Northern Europe, from the late sixteenth through mid-seventeenth centuries. It explores how the material affordances, technical, chemical, and manual operations of printmaking techniques—particularly acid etching—essentially shaped and conditioned epistemic authority and emergent forms of knowledge. The project addresses a persistent scholarly tendency to efface printmakers or treat their technical intelligence as secondary to scientific authors and texts. Interweaving art history, the history of science, intellectual history, and religious history, this approach dissolves inherited hierarchies between artist and scientist.

Link: https://artun.academia.edu/RuthNoyes