Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe

by Smith,Pamela; Smith,Pamela

• ISBN13: 9780415928168
• ISBN10: 0415928168
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-10-12
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The beginning of global commerce in the early modern period had an enormous impact on European culture, changing the very way people perceived the world around them. Merchants and Marvels assembles essays by leading scholars of cultural history, art history, and the history of science and technology to show how ideas about the representation of nature, in both art and science, underwent a profound transformation between the age of the Renaissance and the early 1700s. The essays address intriguing topics like the Dutch tulipmania of 1637, the relationship between alchemy and commercial exchange in the Holy Roman Empire, the traffic in "curiosities" in Italy, and how Spanish sea charts reflected territorial claims in the 1500s.Merchants and Marvelsis a intriguing work lining the borders feast for intellectually curious readers who enjoy works like Lawrence Weschl cultural, social and economic history, material culture and art history within this rarest of creatures: a tightly coherent andhighly readable volume. The sixer'sMr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonderor Dava Sobel'sLongitude.

Author Biography

Pamela H. Smith is Hahn Professor of the Social Sciences in History at Pomona College and the Claremont Graduate University. She is the author of The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire, which won the 1995 Pfizer Prize in the History of Science Paula Findlen is Professor of History and Director of the Science, Technology and Society Program at Stanford University. She is the author of Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, which won the 1995 Marraro Prize in Italian History and the 1996 Pfizer Prize in the History of Science

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Commerce and the Representation of Nature in Art and Science	p. 1
Struggling with Reality: Visualizing Nature and Producing Knowledge
Splendor in the Grass: The Powers of Nature and Art in the Age of Durer	p. 29
Objects of Art/Objects of Nature: Visual Representation and the Investigation of Nature	p. 63
Mirroring the World: Sea Charts, Navigation, and Territorial Claims in Sixteenth-Century Spain	p. 83
From Blowfish to Flower Still Life Paintings: Classification and Its Images, circa 1600	p. 109
"Strange" Ideas and "English" Knowledge: Natural Science Exchange in Elizabethan London	p. 137
Networks of Knowledge: Commerce and the Representation of Nature
Local Herbs, Global Medicines: Commerce, Knowledge, and Commodities in Spanish America	p. 163
Merchants and Marvels: Hans Jacob Fugger and the Origins of the Wunderkammer	p. 182
Practical Alchemy and Commercial Exchange in the Holy Roman Empire	p. 201
Time's Bodies: Crafting the Preparation and Preservation of Naturalia	p. 223
Cartography, Entrepreneurialism, and Power in the Reign of Louis XIV: The Case of the Canal du Midi	p. 248
'Cornelius Meijer inventor et fecit': On the Representation of Science in Late Seventeenth-Century Rome	p. 277
Consumption, Art, and Science
Inventing Nature: Commerce, Art, and Science in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities	p. 297
Nature as Art: The Case of the Tulip	p. 324
Inventing Exoticism: The Project of Dutch Geography and the Marketing of the World, circa 1700	p. 347
Shopping for Instruments in Paris and London	p. 370
Epilogues
A World of Wonders, A World of One	p. 399
Questions of Representation	p. 412
Contributors	p. 423
Index	p. 427
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