Images and Meaning-Making in a World of Resemblance: The Bavarian-Saxon Kidney Stone Affair of 1580

Abstract

This article de-constructs and re-constructs the dynamic of a sixteenth-century political dispute between the Catholic Bavarian Duke Wilhelm V and the Protestant Saxon Elector August I. By focusing on the visual imagery which ignited the dispute, the paper explores sixteenth-century 'ways of seeing' and the epistemic role realistic images played in the production of knowledge about the natural world. While the peculiar dynamic of the affair is based on a specific understanding of the evidential role of images, the paper also argues that the wider socio-cultural context, in particular certain strategies of truth-telling, provide further clues as to the dynamic and closure of the affair.

The body re-imagined: the Bizzarie di Varie Figure and performative cycles of prints in seventeenth-century Florence

“…6 It is well known that the early modern understanding of the natural world was not arranged around unmoveable categories; the production of meaning through images and establishing of laws was a fluid process. 7 However, this notion has not consistently been used in the analysis of images that reproduce nature. Starting from this proposition, then, the main argument of this article is that this print, as many others from Braccelli's Bizzarie di Varie Figure, represents an unexpected site of experimentation on the production of figures and form, a site for the construction of knowledge of nature.…”