Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London by Matthew C. Hunter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London by Matthew C. Hunter Anita Guerrini Matthew C. Hunter. Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London. Chicago: Chicago, 2013. Pp. xvii + 329. $55, £38.50. An art historian, Mr. Hunter defines “wicked intelligence” variously as a description of the “acrimonious dynamics and nefarious tactics” practiced by early members of the Royal Society with regard to “visual enterprises”; as referring to the “shady reputation” of many experimentalists; as recalling the fragility of the “internally divided visual project” of Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren, and others; and as revealing the tension between current historiographical debates over Hooke: was he a gentleman or an artisan? Finally, Mr. Hunter employs the current Bostonian definition of “wicked” as “excessive, flabbergasting awesomeness” although it is not entirely clear what exactly is awesome here. Overall, it is characterized by a “ruthless cleverness,” which also forms a good description of this book. [End Page 173] Mr. Hunter’s argument, as far as I can discern it, is that images and their production (including other works on paper) were central in the experimental enterprise of the Royal Society. This claim is not particularly novel. Mr. Hunter focuses particularly on Robert Hooke, whose archive of visual materials has not, until recently, been widely exploited by historians, and secondarily on Christopher Wren. Despite the enormous outpouring of scholarship on Hooke in the past two decades, Mr. Hunter manages to say something new about him and his work. He emphasizes what he calls (borrowing a term from the Elizabethan virtuoso John Dee) the “archietonical” agency or power of the mind to organize things. This is a central concept for Mr. Hunter, but it is slippery. He introduces this concept in his introduction to argue that knowledge of the materials of visual reproduction was critical to an understanding of the objects of experimentation. He equates this with, among other things, historian Pamela H. Smith’s idea of “artisanal epistemology,” but Mr. Hunter makes much bigger claims for this concept as a kind of mental and physical organizing principle, as he discusses toward the end of his book. The first half of Wicked Intelligence focuses on image-making, including drawing, paper models, and painting. His first chapter begins with Hooke’s rough pen and ink drawings of the comet of 1683 and moves to his iconic and much-analyzed illustrations for Micrographia (1665). Ambitiously moving beyond art historical interpretations exemplified by the work of Svetlana Alpers on the relationship between seeing and representation in the seventeenth century, Mr. Hunter tries to grasp the “entanglement” among ephemeral events, drawing, and experimental practices. However, his subsequent close reading of Micrographia is mostly indebted to standard art historical analysis and does not engage closely with the historiography of science; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s influential Objectivity (2007) is not mentioned at all, although an earlier article of theirs is referred to in the notes. The attention paid here and elsewhere in the book to Hooke’s artistic education is instructive, but not paradigm breaking. The second chapter employs Hooke’s paper model of a micrometer from 1667 as a jumping-off point for a broad examination of the role of paper technologies in the science of the Royal Society. This chapter provides a particularly good example of Mr. Hunter’s strategies and techniques. He argues that Hooke turned to paper in reaction to his work in dissecting live animals between 1664 and 1667. The scientist’s revulsion to, in particular, open-thorax experiments on dogs to demonstrate the role of the lungs in respiration has been well documented. Mr. Hunter draws an interesting but not entirely convincing causal relationship between these experiments and Hooke’s discovery of a book of so-called flap anatomy (with lift-up flaps to illustrate inner structures), which revealed to him the puzzle-solving capabilities of paper and led to the construction of the paper micrometer. But Hooke continued to dissect live animals, although he did not repeat the open-thorax experiment; and flap anatomies were not as unusual as Mr. Hunter indicates. Moreover, although one of the main arguments of...