The workshop spans the arc between art, object, and theory in the Renaissance and Early Modern eras. A group of invited historians of art, science, and material culture will present research on specific cases drawn from various traditions such as astronomy, falconry, natural history, cartography, and landscape painting. 

Through gathering and discussing together, they aim to arrive at broader questions about the treatment of different sources in historical analysis and the different agencies of people, materials, images, and objects in forming our view of the past: 

• How can we use prints, paintings, sculpture and other visual arts as sources in the history of science?
  
• What do the incidental details in artworks tell us about the natural philosophical views of their authors?
  
• Where does agency lie in the complex of images, objects, materials, and people?
  
• How do we determine the appropriate historical analytical tools for interpreting each image, and what separates the canon of art from that of non-art?
  

Schedule

Friday, 16 November

10:00 AM        Introduction and Welcome Coffee

The View on Nature
10:30 AM         Geoff Lehman | Leonardo, Van Eyck, and the Epistemology of
                          Landscape
11:30 AM         Jaya Remond | Aestheticizing Knowledge: Pictures, Plants,
                         and Artistic Authority in Early Modern Northern Europe

12:30 PM         Lunch break

The Image Culture of the Astral Sciences
1:30 PM           Anna Jerratsch | The Role and Functions of Visuals in Early
                         Modern Cometary Tracts
2:30 PM          Aníbal Szapiro | The Role of Perspective in Galileo‘s
                         Reinterpretation of Astronomical Data

3:30 PM           Coffee break

4:00 PM          Stefan Zieme | Adam Elsheimer and the Renaissance Night Sky
5:00 PM          Sonja Brentjes | Astral imagery between the "Ottoman Empire
                         and Ming China"


Saturday, 17 November

Material Culture and Art
10:30 AM        Carla Lois | Terra Australis or the Quinta Pars: Technique and
                         Aesthetics in Mapping an Inexistant
Continent
11:30 AM         Ian Lawson | Pigments, Natural History, and Primary Qualities:
                         How Orange became a Colour

12:30 PM         Lunch break

Emblems, Icons, and Epistemes
1:30 PM            Maria Avxentevskaya | The Physician’s album amicorum:
                          Emblematic Cultures of Knowledge Networking
2:30 PM           Yannis Hadjinicolaou | Image Vehicle. Towards a Political
                          Iconology of Falconry

3:30 PM           Coffee break

4:00 PM          All Speakers | Round table Discussion
5:00 PM          End of the Workshop


Organizers: Ian Lawson (ian.r.lawson@gmail.com) and Stefan Zieme (stefan.zieme@hu-berlin.de)