Event Description

For its Work in Progress Seminar Series, the Warburg Institute will host Rheagan Martin (Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellow) on “Seeing Through: The Possibility of Translucency in Fifteenth-Century Printed Astronomical Texts”.

Within a 1478 edition of Sphaera Mundi printed in Venice, a single folio contains a diagram of the pre-Copernican orbit of the sun on the recto and a diagram of the motion of the moon on the verso. In the course of turning the folio, light is transmitted through the thin paper support, illuminating both diagrams at once. I propose that viewers could have compared the two diagrams through the paper and visualized overlaps in the orbits of celestial bodies. The use of these “trans-foliate” diagrams was expanded in the 1485 edition of Sphaera Mundi to explore, for example, relationships between the positions of the planets and the zodiac.

Through an investigation of translucency and luminosity in late fifteenth-century Venetian visual and material culture, I consider how publishers mobilized technologies of print to exploit the material properties of paper. Similarly, I examine how contemporary epistemologies may have led viewers to look through the folio. I argue that producers of Venetian material culture were particularly skilled in the creation of these effects between transparency and opacity and that savvy Venetian viewers were attuned to the movement of light within and through familiar objects.

Wednesday 4 November 2020, 14:00–15:30 GMT

Source: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23130

← Back