A Strange Business by James Hamilton

Author:James Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2015-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

After fifty-seven years in Somerset House, the Royal Academy moved in 1837 to the eastern half of the National Gallery building in Trafalgar Square. Twenty years later the Royal Society moved to new premises in Burlington House, Piccadilly. Thus the quasi-university of the liberal arts that Somerset House had been in its early nineteenth-century heyday was falling apart, with the Society of Antiquaries, the Geological Society and the Royal Astronomical Society following the procession from Somerset House to Burlington House in 1874, as competition for space in the former building grew from government departments in the increasingly bureaucratized Victorian state. The slow fragmentation of scholarly disciplines at Somerset House, just as much as galloping increases in knowledge, led to a diminution of collective interest and a shift in the centres of gravity of art and science in London.

For painters, it is a short step from a mixture of interest, opportunity and confusion in the face of new scientific developments in colour-making, to a collective excitement at the possibility that scientific instruments could sharpen perceptions of the world. The key purpose of the manufacture and trade in scientific instruments was to enhance observation and understanding. While artists, armed with pencils, brushes and an infinite variety of colours, prepared the way through art and diagram, the ingenuity of inventors, engineers and instrument-makers enabled observation of the world and its horizons to go closer, wider and deeper. In his treatise on the microscope published in the 1760s, Micrographia illustrata, a catalogue of all the optical products he made or could supply, the instrument-maker George Adams described his variation on the camera obscura: an instrument where art and science met, the ‘New Camera Obscura Microscope, designed for drawing all minute objects, either by the light of the sun, or by a lamp in winter evenings, to great perfection’. Here the requirements of art are met through the perseverance of science. Where Adams had prospected, artists followed: improved variations of the camera obscura – the camera lucida and the graphic telescope – were made in the nineteenth century by the watercolour painter Cornelius Varley, brother of the incautious John.

In the 400 years between the days of Cennino Cennini and Sebastian Grandi, the practice of commercial colour manufacture had moved forward through the ingenuity and invention of chemists. The practice of scientificinstrument making also gathered pace to keep up with and affect the discoveries that shaped the modern world. In Cennini’s day, when he was advising on the grinding of cinnabar, knowledge of electricity was limited to the curious properties of amber when rubbed; by the time Grandi was grinding and boiling sheep’s trotters and filling pigs’ bladders with pigment, electric current could be created at will in batteries, measured, stored and put to work, or released in a dramatic discharge. If the modern world had had to wait for the development of colour manufacture to get going, we might be in the steam age still. The largely untested riches of newly available colour clarified artistic

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.