Giandomenico Tiepolo'sIl Mondo Nuovo: Peep Shows and the “Politics of Nostalgia”

Peepboxes, Society, and Visuality in Early Modern China

“…15 Giandomenico Tiepolo's (1727-1804) two Il Mondo Nuovo (1757 and 1791) frescoes confi rm that the peepbox enjoyed a signifi cant cultural presence in Italy. 16 However, Zhang's pinpointing of a particular country as the origin of the device is unusual, and somewhat unreliable given that most objects of European origin were generically identifi ed as 'Western'. More important than this foreign identifi cation, however, is his characterization of the peepbox as a means for understanding the world, and his use of the specifi c lexicon of late imperial Chinese approaches to knowledge, which emphasized 'investigating things' (gewu) in order to understand their universal principles (li).…”