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This chapter examines Max Weber's views on science and world culture by focusing on his lecture at the Congress of Arts and Science held in September 1904 in St. Louis, Missouri. The St. Louis Congress featured hundreds of papers assessing the state of knowledge in the human, biological, and physical sciences; medicine; law; the humanities; religion; and education. Weber spoke in a social science panel concerned with rural communities. The discussions centered on the methodological unity of the sciences. The chapter first considers Weber's insistence on science as an experimental inquiry into the phenomena and actualities of the world, which also assumed that scientific knowledge was a product of culture, before discussing his views on “rural society,” European capitalism and American equality of legal rights, and his implicit questioning of American “exceptionalism.” It also analyzes Weber's thoughts about art, gender, education, and authority.

The chapter examines changing modes of support for scientific research and science education. The X-men were deeply committed to the expansion of science education but, contrary to historiographical opinion, were not leading lobbyists for state aid to science. Their activism in education was sustained by the belief that science would change “ways of thinking.” They lobbied, sat on committees, examined, and wrote textbooks. Most notably, Huxley and Lubbock were members of the Devonshire Royal Commission on the advancement of science. They failed to persuade elite public schools and the well-endowed ancient universities that science was essential to a liberal education, but were successful at lower levels, through the burgeoning examination system of the Science and Art Department, which met the aspirations of middling sorts of people. Thus, the School of Science at South Kensington, a school for training teachers, became the chief institution of science education in England and the School of Mines, from which it was carved, diminished in status. Finally, the chapter focuses on Hirst, whose career in science education provides vignettes of the social life of the X Club and of gender issues– including the roles of the Club wives and contemporary controversies on education for women.

Scottish-born banker James Coutts sat for a portrait with painter Joshua Reynolds in the early 1770s. Painted on a panel of unprimed mahogany, the resulting picture is now a wreck. Flakes tear through the forehead, eye, and cheeks; they pierce Coutts’s visible ear and tatter his throat. So problematic was the panel that it was given in the 1850s to Scotland’s national art gallery as a means for teaching a moral lesson to aspiring artists about the dangers of Reynolds’s risky painting techniques. That conception of the first president of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts is difficult to square with familiar assessments. Yet, Reynolds’s chemical experiments were intensively discussed and collected by his votaries. By the mid-nineteenth century, they were seen to bear on painting and photography alike. This introduction argues that the force of Reynolds’s chemical experiments is reducible to neither painting nor photography; instead, it opens a history of “temporally evolving chemical objects”—of materials known and valued for changing visibly in time, while affording conceptual reflection on time. This introduction defines the temporally evolving chemical object and maps the structure of the book as a relay through and beyond British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century.

This chapter explores Joshua Reynolds’s experiments with unstable chemical materials both in his painting practice and in his theory of art. It places the painter in his native environs of Plymouth where Reynolds maintained strong connections to makers of watches and precision time-keeping instruments (including members of the Mudge and the Northcote families), along with artists known for their chemical experimentation. The chapter then tracks Reynolds’s involvement with chemical experiment at the early Society of Arts in London and in his own studio. Considered against the practices of seemingly more experimental contemporaries such as Joseph Wright of Derby, the chapter closely examines the preparation, delivery and aftermath of Reynolds's controversial sixth discourse to the Royal Academy in 1774, which would align academic art with what the painter called “nice chymistry.” Read against contemporaneous debates about the representation of time in history painting, the chapter argues that Reynolds’s strange “infant portraits” of the early 1770s constitute the most telling manifestation of his chemical work. The chapter concludes by placing these unstable paintings between ideas of the chemical homunculus and the time proper to the fine arts themselves.

This chapter considers how late-eighteenth-century chemical replicas after chemically unstable academic paintings were rediscovered in the early 1860s. Seeking to acquire a prototype of James Watt’s steam engine from the Soho manufactory established by Matthew Boulton in the mid-1760s, curator Francis Pettit Smith unearthed a set of replicas, which he called “sun pictures.” Smith identified the images as early photographs. On that basis, he claimed that photography must have been invented at Soho in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Although Smith’s story found support among several leading photographers in the 1860s, it was strongly opposed by Matthew Piers Watt Boulton, grandson of the Soho industrialist. This chapter demonstrates how M.P.W. Boulton destroyed Smith’s story. It also highlights the ways in which Boulton simultaneously integrated Smith’s chemo-mechanical findings into his own aircraft designs. The chapter concludes by arguing for the extensive connections between the leading inventors of photography and combustion-engine research.

This chapter examines the work of entrepreneurs and industrialists from the mid-1770s through the 1790s who competed for supremacy in developing chemical techniques by which to replicate chemically unstable academic paintings. Highlighting the involvements of many chemical replicators with radical politics, the chapter places lithography (the best known of the period’s chemical-imaging innovations), encaustic, and enamel painting in relation to the chemical scandal of the “Venetian Secret” as made public in 1797. Therein, Benjamin West and other leading Academicians had pursued a fraudulent compilation of painting techniques purportedly used by Titian and other Venetian masters. The chapter expands to consider a host of lesser known chemical technics including “pollaplasiasmos,” James Watt’s copying machine and the interventions into the philosophy of time advanced by Thomas Wedgwood, purported “first inventor” of photography. The chapter argues against the familiar identification of Thomas Wedgwood’s chemical research with photography.

This chapter surveys research into artificial phosphorus conducted in the 1670s by leading figures in the early Royal Society of London. Mastered by itinerant chymists from German-speaking lands, artificial phosphorus could be synthesized from human waste, then rubbed onto visual art to make it glow in the dark. But, it also spoke to broader interests: studies of light and combustion, production of organic vitality, and other problems of central interest to Restoration experimentalists. Tracking phosphorus research through those networks, the chapter centers on a spectacular lecture read twice before the Royal Society in summer 1682 by Robert Hooke. The final installment of his lectures on light, Hooke’s text used competing preparations of artificial phosphorus to model the ontology of time and to explain key features of human temporality. Examining how Hooke’s controversial claims about time would be reconfigured by contemporaries such as Nehemiah Grew, the chapter concludes by examining the ways in which the phosphorus research theorized by Hooke would later be claimed in larger chemical genealogies of photographic image-making.

The conclusion critically examines one possible legacy for the relay of chemical image-making and its fusions with combustion-engine research examined in this book: the Anthropocene. Noting ways in which James Watt and British industrialism have figured in the historiography of an epoch of humanity’s influence on the global climate (and in critiques of the Anthropocene), the conclusion highlights the abiding, art-historical force of tools and concepts rooted in the work of Alois Riegl. Against persisting resistance within art history to interpretations privileging materials and techniques, it concludes by considering the contours and possibilities of an “elemental art history.”

Chapter 2 provides a broader cultural, historical, and philosophical context for the work of Lord Rosse and by extension other nebular researchers. By following the public circulation and consumption, reproduction and presentation of two published images of the same object (M51), it is possible to explore how different publics used the images, what was expected of them, and how the images were fashioned or manipulated in order to fit particular purposes, arguments, or visions of the cosmos. Of particular interest is how the published images of the “Great Spiral” operated as the phenomenon to be explained by scientific theory. In light of their proxy status, the images were used to identify the possible mechanics, constitution, and structure of the object in space. At the same time they were also used to critique practices of looking and drawing, and to enlarge the public’s imagination and sometimes horror of the dark infinite. This chapter broadens our perspective of the power of the image of a nebula for Victorian audiences.

This introductory chapter considers the analyses of fundamentalism that were produced by a group of scholars associated with the highly influential Fundamentalism Project, which was sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Science and housed at the University of Chicago in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These analyses are among the most sophisticated interpretations of fundamentalism that have ever been presented. Writer Karen Armstrong relied on them heavily as she was formulating her ideas about fundamentalism, as have many other writers and scholars. The influence the Fundamentalism Project has exerted on the way Americans think about fundamentalism is almost impossible to exaggerate. But for all its influence, the Fundamentalism Project was an odd enterprise in several important respects.

This chapter describes the POEMobile, an art truck with brightly painted iron wings arching above its roof and poems in two dozen languages emblazoned on its sides. Jointly sponsored by Bowery Arts + Science and City Lore, the truck projects poems onto walls and buildings, combining live poetry readings and musical performances in neighborhoods throughout New York. As poets perform in their native languages on the street or plaza, a beam of light soars past them and the words float in light above their heads, often several stories high. The projections open with an animated feathered wing brushing words onto the building, an idea inspired by a Martin Espada line: “God must be an owl, electricity coursing through the hollow bones, a white wing brushing the building.” The door of the POEMobile is inscribed with lines of poetry in some of the world's endangered languages.

From the first entry of two nebulae into the observational records of Lord Rosse, the chapter follows these objects until they are prepared for the engraver’s plate and thus, publication. The ever multiplying preliminary sketches for these two objects reveal strategies used by the Rosse project to consolidate the eyes and hands of many assistants. Central to these layered movements and accretion of visual information is the gradual familiarization that an observer gained with an object–a process that was vital in his coming-to-know. The second part of this chapter discusses the internal and external demands made for a new procedure of observation, one that was capable of incorporating both the measured and pictorial aspects in one image. The author argues that this shift was as much a reflection of a growing and hardening distinction between scientific and artistic work, as it was a reflection of a general discontent on the part of well known nebular observers outside the Rosse project. But even in the new procedures it remained a challenge to find new ways to coordinate the eyes and hands of many assistants.

The first part of chapter 4 turns to the work of William Lassell, which will underscore a characteristic of observational procedures: their dependence on the instrumental means available. This emphasis will go into further highlighting the strategies used by our earlier observers in their attempts to transcend their apparatuses and sites. Part 2 of the same chapter will investigate a procedure used by Wilhelm Tempel, which was developed particularly with an eye to artistic skill, technique, and the final lithographed product. In the face of the rising number of “contradictory” representations of the nebulae at the end of the century, Tempel proposed that observers draw only what they see and eschew the inclusion of the mind; it is what this proposal meant for him and how he proposed to achieve it that will be explored.