Making Visible: The visual and graphic practices of the early Royal Society

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The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, was an important institution for early modern science, dedicated to the collective investigation of nature. Many of the publications it sponsored, such as Robert Hooke's Micrographia or Francis Willughby's Historia piscium, as well as its journal, Philosophical Transactions, contained extensive illustrations. The archives of the Society also include a rich variety of images. Yet, the function of images in the process of developing and communicating scientific knowledge has been under-studied in the case of the Royal Society. The first fifty years of the Society at Gresham College was a formative period during which it grappled with strategies to present a new form of knowledge and establish its own authority in scientific matters. This project will result in the first comprehensive account of the complex and ingenious ways in which visual resources were deployed for the collective investigation of nature by the early Royal Society, and how the Royal Society in turn helped define and establish a scientific visual culture in the early modern period. It will contribute more generally to the role of the visual in the history of scientific experience and observation.The project will bring to light hitherto unknown or under-researched pictorial sources from the Royal Society, and study them alongside other archival and published sources of the early Royal Society. Collaboration with historians of science, historians of art, historians of the book, conservators and curators of prints, drawings, scientific instruments and herbaria, will lead to a comprehensive account of the various visualization techniques deployed by Fellows of the Royal Society. The project will first carry out a full survey of the visual sources and materials used by the Royal Society in its first fifty years by locating surviving material and identifying identities of the graphic craftsmen involved. This will be the basis for investigating two key themes.i) Image-making.The Royal Society generated and deployed visual resources in a dynamic process involving complex procedures and numerous people in the selection of objects and instruments (scientific as well as graphic), drawing, copying, correcting and authorizing images, as well as in the decision to publish an image or not, and in what medium. The surviving materials reveal rich and heterogeneous collaborations in visualization: graphic craftsmen with a range of skills and background and Fellows of the Royal Society with virtuoso appreciation of art and collections learned to see and understand nature from each other. Such collaborations laid the foundation for a visual literacy of science.ii) Knowledge-making. Images shaped and contributed to the formation and dissemination of knowledge for the Royal Society, in communicating new discoveries, resolving conflicts, and forming and defining a community. Images played an important role alongside texts and objects in establishing the Society's authority in matters of knowledge. Understanding the Royal Society's visual and graphic practices will shed light on the emergence of a visual culture of science that shaped and sustained a community of natural philosophers.The vibrant multi-disciplinary research culture at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities is an ideal academic context for this project. It has an active post-doctoral community engaged in various projects, including visual and material cultures and the digital humanities. Its international collaboration with USC Early Modern Studies Institute and Huntington Library brings further opportunities for the cross-fertilisation of ideas and approaches. The collaboration with the Royal Society Library and its Picture Library in addition to a virtual and physical exhibition will ensure the sustained availability of the project's research results to a wider audience.