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In the mid-1920s, a new coalition of museum reformers, including curators, educators, businesspeople, journalists, and foundation officials, began to assert that museums needed to modernize the content and pedagogical approaches of their displays if they hoped to remain effective institutions for education. They argued that the popularization of science was a matter of civic necessity, and that museum displays should explain modern biological and ecological concepts and highlight how recent applications of the life sciences affected Americans’ daily lives. No clear consensus emerged about the best way to accomplish this goal, however, and reformers simply began experiment as a result, sometimes trading ideas but more often innovating in isolation. But as they tested new ways of visualizing the life sciences, they developed new forms of exhibits, incorporating more interactive elements, and ultimately established an entirely new institutional paradigm: the science museum. Though era’s dire economy frequently thwarted proposals for reform, and changes in exhibitions and insitutions that resulted were often local or temporary, the institutions that developed and the exhibitionary experiments conducted during this time would set the agenda for museum display over the next thirty years.

This chapter comments on the genesis of the New Science, with particular emphasis on two principal decisions made by Giambattista Vico: his rejection of Cartesianism and his extension of his conception of universal law to a doctrine of universal history. It first considers Vico’s dismissal of René Descartes’s first truth of the cogito ergo sum and his articulation of the basis from which rightly to obtain first truths. It then discusses Vico’s constant revision of the New Science, writing several annotations to the book even while he was rewriting and printing it. In summary, Vico published three editions of the New Science: in 1725, 1730, and 1744. The chapter shows that the genesis of Vico’s new science goes back to his confrontation with Cartesianism in his 1709 oration On the Study Methods of Our Time, and that he offset Descartes’s fatherhood of modern science by a science of history that combines philosophy and philology.

This chapter comments on the structure of the New Science. The New Science has been interpreted in philosophical terms, which dwells on its theory of knowledge, or in political terms, which places emphasis on its theory of society. GiambattistaVico’s own field of thought is rhetoric as the key to the law as the wisdom and order of civility. On opening the New Science, the reader is immediately puzzled as to what the order of its contents means. Expecting a logical order of topics, the potential reader remains confused but perhaps intrigued by the array of principles and subject matters. This chapter considers a way of comprehending what Vico has in mind as the structure of the New Science by focusing on the divisions of forensic oratory of his Institutes: invention, disposition, exordium, narration, digression, proposition, confirmation, confutation, and peroration. It shows that these divisions of forensic or judicial oration correspond to the parts of the New Science.

This chapter comments on the sense and method of the New Science. It begins by examining the New Science in relation to the works of Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Hugo Grotius. It then considers Giambattista Vico’s two new sciences, the science of history combined with the science of mythology, and suggests that what Galileo, Newton, and Bacon had done for our comprehension of nature, Vico would do for our comprehension of history. It also discusses the method on which Vico founds the new science: to join philosophy and philology, which in the New Science he calls a “new critical art.” Finally, it describes Vico’s discovery of the verum-factum principle, found in the opening chapter of On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710), as the basis of knowledge.

This chapter offers a philosophical commentary on Giambattista Vico’s notion of poetic wisdom (sapienza poetica), which forms a section of the New Science. Poetic wisdom is a wisdom of the senses that is presupposed by philosophic wisdom (sapienza filosofica), a wisdom of the intellect. In On the Study Methods of Our Time, Vico endorsed the need for proper education to be based on a wisdom of the whole. He argues that among the ancients a single thinker was a whole university, whereas among the moderns students are taught by various specialists without what is taught being governed by a vision of the whole. This chapter examines Vico’s two schemes in which to organize the fields of knowledge in their original poetic form: as a tree of knowledge and as the nine Muses. It also considers why Vico identifies the nine Muses with the nine sciences of his poetic tree of knowledge.

This chapter comments on Giambattista Vico’s conception of a fourth kind of republic that is natural and eternal (the first three forms of government correspond to those of the three ages of ideal eternal history) in his conclusion to the New Science. Vico first summarizes the essential points of the new science before moving the reader’s emotions with the picture of a people who, through malgovernance, “are rotting in that ultimate civil disease.” This is a state of the “barbarism of reflection” that infects Vico’s time as well as our own, because his time and ours is the same period of history. This chapter examines Plato’s connection to the first principle of Vico’s new science, providence, and to the first requirement for attaining wisdom, piety. In particular, it considers Vico’s interpretation of Plato’s Republic as well as his discussion of poetic wisdom. It also analyzes what Vico means by “an eternal natural republic, the best of its kind, ordained by divine providence.”

This chapter examines why Giambattista Vico deleted the Novella letteraria with which he planned to begin the New Science and replaced its pages with the dipintura he commissioned and an explanation of it. It suggests that the answer involves both Thomas Hobbes and Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury. Vico may have intended the central figure of his frontispiece, Dame Metaphysic, to stand in opposition and represent the purest values of the spirit. Hobbes’s frontispiece in Leviathan (1651) combines within it the device of the impresa by placing above the head of his figure the line from the book of Job in the Latin Vulgate, warning that there is no power greater on the earth than Leviathan. This chapter considers what Vico thought of his frontispiece compared to that of Hobbes. It also discusses Shaftesbury’s Second Characters and Francis Bacon’s conception of the art of memory. Finally, it explores what Vico means by this analogy of the New Science with the anonymously written Tablet of Cebes.

This chapter discusses the Elements section of the New Science. According to Giambattista Vico, the axioms he puts forth in the Elements are intended to give form to the materials presented on the Chronological Table. This form will be not static but dynamic. Vico employs the image of the circulation of the blood in On the Study Methods of Our Time to suggest that one should never lose sight of the aim of the learning process from its beginning to its end. The aim is to study the ancients against the moderns in an effort to find a balance between them. This chapter considers the axioms articulated by Vico in the Elements, his conception of the natural law of the gentes, and his doctrine of poetic wisdom. It also examines how Vico has taken the elements of the threefold distinction employed by Plato in his quarrel with poets in the Republic and put them into positive relationship.

This chapter examines how the frontispiece or dipintura provides the reader with a conception of the New Science before reading it and an aid to recalling it after it is read. The first two-thirds of Giambattista Vico’s Idea of the Work is an inventory. The last third, beginning with his declaration that “this New Science” and “metaphysic” are synonymous, is a description of the central concepts of the science and their interconnections. The central figure of the dipintura is metaphysic, standing atop the globe. According to Paolo Rossi, the source of this image is a composite of the figures of metaphysic and mathematic in Cesare Ripa’s Iconology (1593). This chapter considers Vico’s conception of the donna Metafisica as well as the substantive source of the figure, its idea. In particular, it discusses the female figure of philosophy, or Lady Philosophy, that appears to Boethius in prison in his Consolation of Philosophy. It also explores Vico’s inventory of the objects in the dipintura as well as his explanation of its contents.

This chapter offers a philosophical commentary on the Principles section of the New Science. Giambattista Vico intends “principles” to be taken in two senses: as that which is first in the genesis of something, its origin, and as that which is first in thought about it. The principles on which all human society depends and from which it originates are religion, marriage, and burial—things that identify human groups as human. This chapter examines Vico’s views on religion, marriage, and burial as well as his conception of the family. It also discusses Vico’s claim that the existence of God and the soul do not require a rational proof such as René Descartes sets forth in the Meditations.

This chapter offers a philosophical commentary on Giambattista Vico’s confutation of the ideal eternal history in Book 5 of the New Science. In forensic oration the confutation is intended to refute conclusively the basis of the opponent’s case. Vico’s principal opponent throughout the New Science is seventeenth-century natural law theory, as represented by Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and John Selden. This chapter examines Vico’s argument—the ultimate basis of his confutation—that the natural law theorists omit not only the age of heroes but also the presence of divine providence, which he claims has directed the course of the nations and then directs their recourse. It also considers Vico’s comparison between ancient Roman law and feudal law as well as his views regarding the governance of the nations of the modern world.

This chapter discusses the Chronological Table of the New Science. The Chronological Table, the first section of Book 1—Establishment of Principles—shows the origin and genesis of the ancient nations, which are the groundwork of Giambattista Vico’s science of their common nature. In his opening comments on the construction of the table itself, Vico says Herodotus was his source for the doctrine of three ages, which are the ages of ideal eternal history: that of the gods, that of the heroes, and that of men. This chapter considers Vico’s conception of sacred history, with particular emphasis on one fundamental issue that Vico wishes to settle in terms of the table: that the Hebrews, not the Egyptians, are the most ancient of the nations, and that, because of this, sacred history can be kept distinct from the history of the gentile nations. It also discusses the entries on the Chaldeans, the Scythians, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Romans.

This chapter examines the section on the discovery of the true Homer in Book 3 of the New Science. In his introduction of this section, Giambattista Vico asserts that Homer as an individual author did not exist and that the Trojan War that he describes never occurred. Although the ancient Greeks considered the Homeric poems to be relations of historical events, modern critics agree with Vico. This chapter considers Vico’s argument that calling Homer a “heroic character” implies that Homer himself is a “poetic character” as are the heroic characters of his poems. It also discusses Vico’s claim that Homer composed the Iliad in his youth and the Odyssey in his old age, along with his interpretation of Homer’s epic poems and its implications for the origins of dramatic and lyric poetry.

This chapter considers the reciprocal influences between the presentations of museums and commercial and industrial fairs, from which curators have sometimes admitted having drawn inspiration. These close-knit exchanges between apparently distant worlds show that museums, far from being isolated and timeless institutions, were able to intercept the latest developments in display techniques. Museums used audio-visuals not only for educational purposes and to preserve memory, but also to attract a wider public and to keep up with the dynamic nature of modernity. This issue is discussed with specific reference to two case studies: the 1920s European Avant-Garde exhibition design, and the use of educational films in the galleries of the New York Museum of Science and Industry.

This chapter offers a philosophical commentary on the Method section of the New Science. Giambattista Vico begins Method by saying that to complete the establishment of principles requires discussing the method which the science is to follow. The establishment of the beginning of the subject matter of the new science must be derived from both the philologists and the philosophers, since the new science itself is predicated on the joining of philology and philosophy. The philologists will take us back to the myths of the origin of men from natural objects, whereas the philosophers provide theories of protohumans. This chapter considers Vico’s conception of the giants as well as his depiction of the original state of human existence among the gentiles. It also explores Vico’s claim that the new science, in one of its principal aspects, must be a “rational civil theology of divine providence.” Finally, it assesses Vico’s list of seven philological proofs that concludes the section on Method.