Popular Science in early modern France: Abraham Bosse's Sight

Abstract

Included in Abraham Bosse's Sight from the series of Five Senses that he etched during thc latcr 1630S is an image that may not seem particularly remarkable to anyone familiar with early modern history: among the various means of ‘seeing’ is a man looking through a telescope (figure 1). The most central and typical example of the technology underlying the ‘Scientific Revolution’, the telescope is especially closely associated with Galileo. And this is the connection suggested in the catalogue of the recent quatercentenary exhibition celebrating Bosse's birth: that his is an evocation of the theories of Galileo and his French followers Gassendi and Peiresc, an endorsement of the ‘new science’. I But if the approach that ultimately transformed the image of science involved technology, it was not technological in nature. The Galileans argued, rather, for a radically new understanding of the laws of physical science, a sea-change, a ‘paradigm shift’ or ‘epistemic break’ that resulted in what was arguably the greatest scientific controversy of the early modern period.’ Under attack in the Galilean system, moreover, was the preoccupation with sense experience originating with Aristotelian natural philosophy, embodied in many traditional representations of the Five Senses, and apparently acknowledged in the remainder of Sight with its rebus-like arrangement of figures and symbols. Thus, if the man with the telescope in Bosse's image is indeed an affirmation of Galileo's controversial discoveries, it would be such, paradoxically, within the framework of the traditional system that Galileo aimed to overturn. But is the evidence for a Galilean reading of Sight indeed compelling and if so is the above-mentioned interpretation the correct one? The broad context for these questions is the nature of the historical relationship between visual art and science that scholars have been investigating for at least half a century, with particular attention to the influence of Galilean astronomy. These studies, however, invariably have examined paintings made for a relatively homogeneous elite audience broadly familiar with philosophical (scientific) ideas as well as traditional art and iconography. Operating within an alternative print or commercial culture, Bosse would have been addressing a more diverse audience, with different educational backgrounds, opinions and expectations. And his prints — like seventeenth- century French prints more generally — have rarely been subjected to the in-depth analyses of paintings or been examined within the context of the burgeoning print culture in which they were produced. Bosse's prints, additionally, juxtapose image and text in surprising ways and are thereby of interest within the larger study of this interaction. A study of Bosse's Sight is worth undertaking, in sum, as a fascinating image in its own right, for holding out the possibility of opening a window onto a great and transformative moment in the social and cultural history of which print culture was an integral part, and as a contribution to word/image studies.