Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education

Playful illustions, spellbinding games, and lifelike automata were once integral to education. This reveals the intertwining of enchantment with enlightenment in the early modern period. A cross-disciplinary guide to intellectual high and low life of the 18th century, it makes the case for the pedagogical opportunities inherent in an oral-visual culture. Barbara Stafford draws on a range of historical sources and popular imagery, exploring from a new perspective the perceptual cognition that she anlalyzed in "Body Criticism". Her reinterpretation also casts many well-studied paintings as instances of an instructive art of demonstration. The book opens by describing the evolution of mathematical recreations and their relationship to the middle class's increasing leisure time. Subsequent chapters focus on the problem of distinguishing legitimate science from virtuoso fraud; the public performance of experiments; and early attempts to create informative and attractive natural history exhibits. Throughout, Stafford emphasizes the concern for telling truth from fiction in a world of alluring technology. The enlighteners' relentless association of sensory evidence with deception led to the submergence of a "tricking" oral-visual culture by "serious" mass literacy drives, Stafford observes. Yet sophisticated teaching techniques and ingenious learning machines made abstractions concrete and appealing to ever-widening 18th-century audiences. With the modern computer graphics revolution always in view, this analysis suggests fresh means for putting intelligence, enjoyment and communicative power back into thinking with images.