Somewhere along the timeline of early human intellect, art and science were not separate entities, but bled naturally into one another. This presentation of information via creative artforms is the central focus of Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, the main exhibit that opened at the Block Museum on Jan. 17.
The exhibit features work by northern European artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Hendrick Goltzius and Jacques de Gheyn.
"Many of the prints that I was seeing by well-known artists were scientifically informed and of subjects that we would in the 21st century call scientific," said curator Susan Dackerman at a lecture during the reception last Thursday. "Were they just illustrators? Or did they in fact play a more active role in enabling theorists to conceptualize and ultimately visualize these ideas that were emerging and being codified in the 16th and into the 17th century?"
Part of the faculty at Harvard University Art Museums (from where most of the prints are sourced), Dackerman is also the author of an illustrated catalogue that accompanies the exhibit. The catalogue features select reproductions of prints, etchings, woodcuts and engravings featured in the exhibit.
The exhibit itself features various prints, three-dimensional scientific instruments and original books from medieval Europe. The objects are organized into disciplines such as astronomy, geography, anatomy, cosmography and biology. Along the walls are also various replicas of original objects that museum-goers are free to touch and examine. Additionally, there are in-gallery digital displays, video and audio segments and an interactive mobile app.
"When we leave the field of art history to explore what feels to me like the neighboring field of the history of science, there is a kind of a vast expanse between the two fields that is just now being bridged by scholars from both fields," said Claudia Swan, an associate professor of art history at Northwestern.
Swan teaches courses on 15th and 18th Century northern European culture at Northwestern and contributed an essay in Dackerman's catalogue.
"The extent to which [the collection] really operates across boundaries is entirely new, it's very brave," Swan said. "I think it opens up a vast array of doors."
The collection is the result of a collaborative effort between various institutions. While most of the art is sourced from collections at Harvard, many are from libraries and museums throughout Europe.
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, a curatorial fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, contributed an essay about printed scientific instruments to the exhibit catalogue.
"It's really about how the techniques of printmaking that were becoming popular and really comfortably used were starting to be used in other ways, to be pushed to make other technical leaps," she said. Schmidt explained that printmakers would make multiple copies of designs on paper to be cut out and folded into instruments, such as globes and sundials. "It's about the techniques that were being used creatively at the time to try to figure out what they could really do with the medium and how that affected people's understanding of early science."
Almost 100 people, including students and community members, attended the gallery reception and formal opening.
"It's just something that you're not so used to talk about, this imagery," said Frederika Tevebring, a graduate art history student. "You're used to thinking about art and thinking about science as two very separate things, but here you see them before they were really separated."
Deborah Wood, senior curator at the Block Museum, welcomed the guest lecturers on Thursday and spoke to the exhibit's virtues: "To see the mark of the artist through his imprint on paper and to realize the manner in which they have represented what, to many, was invisible, is simply inspirational."
Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe is open at the Block Museum through April 8. Guided tours are available every Saturday and Sunday starting at 1 p.m.