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

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.

The project will ensure its impact beyond academic circles in the following ways:
1) Website - the principal means for reaching out to the general public will be the project's website. It will carry regular picture-blogs, gallery of images and podcasts based on on-going research. Users of this website will be able to record their reactions using the 'comment' function of the website. The contents of the website will be of interest to:
-Museum curators, librarians, and archivists who will be encouraged to introduce similar material in their collections using our interpretive strategies and methods;
-Graphic designers, illustrators, printing instructors, who will be informed about their profession's past integral role in aiding science; they will find new ways to make their skills available to the public, and will be inspired to create work that intersects between nature and art;
-Members of the public with a general interest in early science, art and printing will be introduced to hitherto unknown images and graphic-craftsmen and their historical significance.


2) 'Drawing and Knowing' - this will be an experimental meeting in which we will engage members of the public with our research questions. Interested members of the public will be invited to draw a couple of scientific objects, first, without any instruction; then a curator will explain the scientific significance of the objects and an art instructor will explain how best to draw the objects in question; the participants will then be asked to draw the objects again; finally they will be asked to comment on how their drawings have changed after the lectures by the curator and the artist. The aim of this event is to highlight the complex relationship between seeing, drawing and understanding. In turn, it also aims to gain insight from the public's experience of this 'Drawing and Knowing' experiment, which, if not directly applicable to the past, would highlight the differences between past and present visual cultures of science. If possible, we will try to make this meeting coincide with the annual 'Big Draw' event (http://www.campaignfordrawing.org/home/index.aspx). This event will be filmed and made available as podcasts on the project's website for a wider audience.

3) Outreach talks -The PDRAs will offer talks at the University of Cambridge's own outreach programs in both the sciences (Science Festival) and the arts (Festival of Ideas). The audience for these festivals varies from precocious school children to retired members of the public. Our project will highlight the important symbiosis between art and science among this audience, and point out how scientific investigation does not exclude contribution from artists, and how artistic creativity can be extended to science.

4) Exhibition - there will be an exhibition on 'Art and Science in the Early Royal Society' at the Royal Society, and curated by the PDRAs. The PDRAs will also offer public talks on the exhibited items. The Royal Society has a well-established set of public engagement programs drawing a wide range of members of the public. The exhibition will introduced hitherto unknown or underused material to highlight the connection between art and science in the past. There will also be an on-line gallery to accompany this exhibition which will reach a wider audience. The exhibition catalogue will be of interest to academic historians as well as to museum curators and members of the public.

5) Royal Society Picture Library
The project's research on images found in the Royal Society will be available free on-line to members of the public through the Royal Society's Picture Library. Through the project's activities outlined above, the images from the early Royal Society will become better known to members of the general public, some of whom may wish to use the images for other projects, and thus generate commercial demand for those images.