Victorian Science and Imagery: Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture (Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 082294653X ISBN 13: 9780822946533

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

Synopsis

The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and sexual selection, deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science - and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media, from photography to oil painting. This volume reminds us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences, but rather fields that shared forms - manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries - and invest in the idea of the evolution of form.

About this title

About the Author

Nancy Rose Marshall is a professor in the Art History Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082294653X
• ISBN 13: 9780822946533
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Marshall Nancy Rose