Skepticism’s Pictures: Figuring Descartes’s Natural Philosophy 9780271096384

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Arguing with Pictures
1 The Picture Multiple
2 The Composite Universe
3 Matters of Replacement
4 Twists of Realism
5 Ironic Copies
Epilogue: Descartes Without Pictures
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Skepticism’s Pictures

Skepticism’s Pictures Figuring Descartes’s Natural Philosophy

Melissa Lo

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Publication of this book has been supported by a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Grant from the Renaissance Society of America This book has received the Weiss-Brown Publication Subvention Award from the Newberry Library. The award supports the publication of outstanding works of scholarship that cover European civilization before 1700 in the areas of music, theater, French or Italian literature, or cultural studies. It is made to commemorate the career of Howard Mayer Brown. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Lo, Melissa, 1982– author. Title: Skepticism’s pictures : figuring Descartes’s natural philosophy / Melissa Lo. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Explores the visual idioms that made, sustained, revised, and resisted Cartesian philosophy. Locates Descartes’s physics and its reception in a panoramic visual culture, where knowledge of the invisible depended on what could be seen”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022060801 | ISBN 9780271094823 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Descartes, René, 1596–1650—Illustrations. | Scientific illustration—History— 17th century. | Illustration of books—17th century. | Wood-​engraving—17th century. Classification: LCC Q222 .L63 2023 | DDC 502​.2​/2—dc23/eng20230316 LC record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2022060801 Copyright © 2023 Melissa Lo All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-​free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

For Matt & George, 罗妈妈 & 罗爸爸

Contents List of Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments xiii List of Abbreviations  xvii

Introduction: Arguing with Pictures  1 1 The Picture Multiple  13 2 The Composite Universe  43 3 Matters of Replacement  73 4 Twists of Realism  103 5 Ironic Copies  131 Epilogue: Descartes Without Pictures  165

Notes 175 Bibliography 191 Index 207

Illustrations 1. Frans van Schooten Jr., Portrait of René Descartes, 1659  6

from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637)  27

2. René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 15 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637)  14

11. René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 263 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637)  27

3. René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 251 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637)  14

12. René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 268 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637)  28

4. René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 6 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637)  14

13. René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 270 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637)  29

5. René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 36 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637)  15

14. Giambattista della Porta and unknown engraver, page 202 from De refractione optices (Naples: Jacob Carlinus, 1593)  30

6. Frans van Schooten Sr., Uitgewerkte voorstellen van theoretische en toegepaste meetkunde, 1600–25?, fol. 83r  21

15. Simon Kick, A Company of Soldiers in a Guardroom, n.d.  39

7. René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 49 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637)  23 8. René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 56 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637)  24 9. René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 255 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637)  27 10. René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 258

16. René Descartes and unknown engraver, page 78 from Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam: Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1644)  44 17. Christopher Clavius and unknown engraver, page 13 from Opera mathematica (Moguntiae: Sumptibus Antonij Hierat excudebat Reinhard Eltz, 1612)  48 18. Samuel Marolois and Hans Vredeman de Vries, page [60] from Opera mathematica ou oeuvres mathématiques (Amsterdam: Chez Ian Ianssen, 1627)  49

19. Samuel Marolois and Hans Vredeman de Vries, page [656] from Opera mathematica ou oeuvres mathématicques (1614–15)  50

30. Abraham Ortelius, Typus orbis terrarum, from Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570; reprint Antwerp: Joannes Baptista Vrients, 1603)  63

20. P. Le Mardele, page 69 from Euclid, Les quinz livres des elements geometriques d’Euclide megarien, trans. P. Le Mardele (Paris: Denys Moreau, 1622)  53

31. Esaias van de Velde, Pad langs een boerderij, 1615–16  64

21. Pierre Bourdin and unknown engraver, page [53] from Le cours de mathématique (Paris: Pelican, 1645)  53 22. Samuel Marolois, page [62] from Opera mathematica ou oeuvres mathématicques (Amsterdam: Chez Ian Ianssen, 1627)  55 23. Johannes Kepler and unknown engraver, page 181 from Harmonices mundi (Linz, 1619)  55 24. Adriaan Metius and unknown engraver, page 165 from Arithmeticae libri duo et Geometriae lib. VI (Leiden: Elzevier, 1625–26)  56 25. Johannes Kepler and unknown engraver, page 181 from Mysterium cosmographicum (Tübingen: Georg Gruppenbach, 1596)  57 26. Walter Bigges and Nicola van Sype, opposite title page from Expeditio Francisci Draki . . . (Leiden Apud Fr. Raphelengium, 1588)  58 27. Sébastien Basson and unknown engraver, page 417 from Philosophiae naturalis adversus Aristotelem libri XII ([Geneva]: Rouiere, 1621)  59 28. Pierre Bourdin and unknown engraver, SD, from Le cours de mathematique (Paris: Pelican, [1645])  61 29. Johannes Bayer and Alexander Mair, plate 10 from Uranometria (1648; reprint, Augsburg: Christoph Mang, 1603)  62

( x )  Illustrations

32. Claude Audran, author portrait from Galileo, Systema cosmicum ([Strasbourg], 1635)  65 33. Willem Pietersz. Buytewech, The Road at the Edge of the Forest, plate 4 from Verscheyden Landtschapjes (Amsterdam: Claes Jansz. Visscher, ca. 1616)  66 34. Abraham Ortelius, Delphinatus, from Abraham Ortelius: His Epitome of the Theater of the Worlde (1603)  69 35. Unknown sketcher, page 111 from Physique nouvelle de Jacques Rohault (1667)  74 36. Henricus Regius and unknown engraver, page 39 from Fundamenta physices (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1646)  83 37. Claude Clerselier and unknown engraver, page 79 from René Descartes, L’homme de René Descartes . . . (Paris: C. Angot, 1664)  86 38. Florent Schuyl, page 98 from René Descartes and Florent Schuyl, De homine (Lugduni Batavorum: apud Franciscum Moyardum & Petrum Leffen, 1662)  87 39. Claude Clerselier and unknown engraver, page 71 from René Descartes, L’homme de René Descartes . . . (Paris: C. Angot, 1664)  88 40. Unknown engraver, page 320 from Jacques Rohault, Physique de M. Rohault (1667)  91 41. Unknown engraver, Ville, Citté, Université de Paris, 1666  92 42. Louise-​Magdeleine Horthemels, Cloistre de Port-​Royal des Champs, n.d.  92

43. Abraham Bosse, La déroute et confusion des Janssenistes, n.d.  93

54. Romeyn de Hooghe, De Doot van het Eeuwige Edict, 1674  123

44. Jacques Rohault and unknown engraver, page 366 from Traité de physique de Jacques Rohault (Paris: Jean Cusson, 1671)  94

55. Gabriel Daniel and unknown engraver, page 316 from Voiage du monde de Descartes (Paris: La Veuve de Simon Bénard, 1690)  132

45. Jacques Rohault and unknown engraver, page 348 from Traité de physique de Jacques Rohault (Paris: Jean Cusson, 1671)  95

56. René Descartes and unknown engraver, page 110 from Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam: Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1644)  133

46. Pierre Gautruche and unknown engraver, from Philosophiae ac mathematicae totius . . . institutio, vol. 2 (Caen: J. Cavelier, 1665), n.p.  95

57. Zacharie de Lisieux and unknown engraver, Relation du pays de Jansénie, 1660  144

47. François de Poilly, Charles Le Brun, Jean-​Baptiste Colbert de Seignelay, Jean Richet, Conclusiones ex universa philosophia . . . , 1668  97 48. Wolferd Senguerd and Adrian Schoonebeek, page 40 from Philosophia naturalis . . . (Leiden: Danielem A. Gaesbeeck, 1680)  104 49. Wolferd Senguerd and Adrian Schoonebeek, page 51 from Philosophia naturalis . . . (Leiden: Danielem A. Gaesbeeck, 1680)  104 50. Wolferd Senguerd and Adrian Schoonebeek, page 125 from Philosophia naturalis . . . (Leiden: Danielem A. Gaesbeeck, 1680)  105 51. René Descartes and unknown engraver, page 128 from Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam: Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1644)  105 52. René Descartes and unknown engraver, page 244 from Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam: Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1644)  120 53. René Descartes and unknown engraver, page 271 from Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam: Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1644)  121

58. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle and unknown engraver, La description de l’empire de la poésie, from Mercure galant, January 1678, facing p. 46  145 59. Unknown engraver, page 116 from René Descartes, Le monde (Paris: M. Bobin and N. Le Gras, 1664)  148 60. Antoine Fournier, Cours de sciences, seventeenth century  149 61. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Jean Dolivar, and Israel Silvestre, page 318 from Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Paris: La Veuve C. Blageart, 1686)  150 62. Israel Silvestre, Design for a theater set created by Giacomo Torelli da Fano for the ballet “Les Noces de Thétis,” 1654  151 63. Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Francesco Maria Grimaldi, “Figura pro nomenclatura et libratione lunari,” figure 6, from Almagestum novum (Bologna: heirs of Vittorio Benatio, 1651), 204  154 64. Unknown engraver, insert between pages 150 and 151 from Gabriel Daniel, Voiage du monde de Descartes (Paris: La Veuve de Simon Bénard, 1690)  156

Illustrations  ( xi )

65. Gabriel Daniel and unknown engraver, page 323 from Voiage du monde de Descartes (Paris: La Veuve de Simon Bénard, 1690)  157 66. Gabriel Daniel and unknown engraver, page 394 from Voiage du monde de Descartes (Paris: La Veuve de Simon Bénard, 1690)  158 67. Guy Tachard and unknown engraver, figure 26, “Palais de Luovo,” from Voyage de Siam (1686; reprint, Amsterdam: P. Mortier, 1687–89)  159 68. Michel de Marolles and A. Diepenbeeck, “Le cahos,” before page 1 from Tableaux du temple des muses tirez du cabinet de feu Mr. Favereau (Paris: Antoine de Sommaville, 1655)  161 69. René Descartes and unknown engraver, page 78 from Opera philosophica (Amsterdam: Blaeu, 1692)  163 70. Leonard Euler, F. H. Frisch, and Berot, Sapientissimi opus (frontispiece), from Theoria motuum planetarum et cometarum (Berolini: sumtibus Ambrosii Haude, 1744).  167

( xii )  Illustrations

Acknowledgments If, in May 2010, someone had told me that I would write an entire book about Descartes, let alone the pictures he crafted for his natural philosophy, I wouldn’t have believed them. That summer, Columbia University’s Council for European Studies had awarded me a Mellon pre-​dissertation grant to research the seventeenth-​century invention of progress as a scientific virtue. By the summer’s end, I came back to the United States with a very different project—one that has felt worth sustaining over the following twelve years. If this book contributes anything, I hope it will testify to the varieties of interpretation that a presumed cultural and intellectual inheritance necessitate, demonstrate how history puts pressure on what we think we know, and encourage the idea that difference makes for endurance. Over these many years, open-​minded, fiercely intelligent, and compassionate mentors have fortified my work. Three have helped me along with this project in particular. Erika Naginski’s historical precision, scholarly imagination, decency, and confidence have enriched every stage of my postbaccalaureate career. Katy Park has modeled intellectual generosity, brilliance, good humor, and friendship, propping me up when I thought this project was utterly lost. And Ann Blair’s professionalism refreshed my faith in the work at moments she may not have known were critical. Outside of Descartes, Steven Shapin has always been a lively interlocutor and excellent dinner company. Rebecca Lemov has shown me that the vita contemplativa is lived best with mindfulness and laughter. When I first had a hunch that this could be a real project, I reached out to the Universteitbibliotheek Leiden Bijzondere Collecties, and Ernst-​Jan Munnik shared the Wolferd Senguerd manuscripts that turned my zany fantasy into a worthy pursuit. Sylvain Matton was a lively interlocutor and magnanimous collector while I did research in Paris. And the manuscripts staff at the Bibliothèque nationale de France made hard days more fun by ensuring I would never hear the phrase “California beach” the same way again! Ellie Goodman has graciously lived with this project for a few too many years, making it better at every turn. I have benefitted enormously from her commitment to process. The manuscript’s three peer reviewers supplied me with tools for thinking deeply about the manuscript’s purpose. Laura Reed-​Morrisson and Maddie Caso lent vital support as I puzzled through all manner of edits. Alex Ramos combed over my text with real diligence. Annika Fisher brought her ace copy-​editing skills to the manuscript,

asking wonderful questions, keeping coherence in mind where I couldn’t, and using the margins for cheers and fun. Outside of Penn State University Press, I appreciate Susanna Berger’s feedback on an earlier version of chapter 4. Of course, all errors are my own. This book has been made possible by an embarrassment of riches. Research challenges were eased by a Fulbright Fellowship to the Netherlands, where my sponsor, Christoph Lüthy, welcomed me to a very new scholarly community. Additional support came from a Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources from the Council on Library and Information Research; a Junior Fellowship at the Descartes Centre at the Universiteit Utrecht; a Huntington Dibner Short-​Term Fellowship; a Scaliger Fellowship from the Universiteit Bibliotheek Leiden; and a Research Fellowship from the American Association of Netherlandic Studies. The American Association of University Women helped along the final stages of writing with a Short-​Term Research Publication Grant. The Renaissance Society of America unburdened the costs of producing this book with a Samuel H. Kress Publication Subvention Grant for Art Historians, as did the Newberry Weiss-​Brown Publication Subvention Award. My thinking about Descartes’s pictures—and visual culture in general—could only evolve thanks to wonderful interlocutors the world over. I am grateful to have had the chance to present work in progress at the University of California, Riverside’s “Inscriptions: The Material Contours of Knowledge” conference; the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science; “SEN: On Lines and Non-​Lines,” a joint conference sponsored by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and the University of Tokyo; the History of Science Society; the Science, Medicine, and Technology Program in the University of California, Los Angeles, History Department; the Caltech History and Philosophy of Science Seminar; “Shapes of Knowledge: Art, Form, and Ideas in Early Modern Europe” at the University of Southern California; the Bucharest Early Science Colloquium; “Tools of Reason: The Practice of Scientific Diagramming from Antiquity to the Present” at the Stanford Humanities Center; SCI-​Arc’s Faculty Talk series; and the Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania. This book has survived an unexpected, circuitous post-​PhD career. At The Huntington Library, I became better adept at working with the past because of colleagues like James Glisson, Alan Jutzi, Vanessa Wilkie, Jenny Watts, and Dan Lewis. As we founded the Cedars-​Sinai Center for the History of Medicine, Leon Fine’s verve widened my intellectual horizons and gave me so many opportunities for professional flourishing. And who would have thought a television production company would be a great place to revise an academic book manuscript? Turns out, the laughter I shared with Shondaland friends—especially Lauren Gamble, Paola Limon, Britni Danielle, Abby Ajayi, and Marco Esquivel—was the fuel I needed to keep my commitments to the manuscript. It feels like a full-​circle moment that I am completing it having just come aboard ( xiv )  skepticism’s pictures

the Getty Foundation in time to support, among other initiatives, the third edition of Pacific Standard Time, which probes the intersections of art and science. The visual culture in which Descartes and his successors were immersed was much more attainable because of cultural institutions that have made their collections digitally available. These include the Rijksmuseum, the Universiteitbibliotheek Leiden, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, the ETH-​Bibliothek Zürich, the Wellcome Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library. For the duration of research and writing and beyond, a warm scholarly community that takes the work seriously—but not themselves—has been essential. Hector Reyes, Iris Moon, Stephanie Tuerk, Ellen Dooley, Jenna Tonn, and Jason Nguyen have been the most energizing intellectual companions I could have possibly hoped for. Latif Nasser has showed me the fun of putting our training to uses we could not have foreseen. Jennifer Nelson helped me make sense of early modern hurly-​burly. Thank goodness for Maureen Warren and Liza Oliver, who brought much more amusement to my stays in the Netherlands and Paris, respectively. Michael Osman, Anna Neimark, and Emily Beeny have been ballast in moments of confusion. I also remain deeply grateful to Raz Chen-​Morris and Lyle Massey for their kind encouragement. I was able to live with this book for so long because of friends who reminded me I am more than my work: Tania Sew Hoy, Katherine Stirling, Sue Bell Yank, Emily Halpern, Liz Phang, Jean Yu, Linda Theung, Laura Bernstein, Bryony Roberts, Leah-​Marie Butarain-​Schneider, Blair Socci, and Sharon Mashihi. Working with the Feminist Center for Creative Work board has made me believe that a better world is possible— and that we get to create it together. My book club helped me revise my conception of myself as both writer and reader. And what better place to learn about ironic devastation than the holiday party where we steal gifts from each other? I continue to marvel at the family the universe had in store for me. My parents, Amelia and Shu Shin Lo, supported me as I found my own path, even when it was never clear what that path would be. They knew something worthwhile would come from my stubbornness, even when I did not. (A Chinese American daughter who could speak Dutch!) George Tai-​Shang Warburton arrived in August 2021. Like this book, he was long in the making. He is showing me love and joy no book ever could. Finally—infinitely—there is Matt Warburton. This book simply would not exist without him. His intelligence has helped me clarify what I mean; his love has bettered me beyond measure. I am so lucky to have his partnership in adventuring through the past, present, and future.

Acknowledgments  ( xv )

Abbreviations René Descartes. Oeuvres de Descartes. Edited by Charles Ernest Adam and Paul Tannery. 3rd ed. 11 vols. Paris: Vrin, 1996. CSM René Descartes. The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–85. DE René Descartes. Discours de la méthode & Essais. Leiden: Joannes Maire, 1637. PP René Descartes. Principia philosophiae. Amsterdam: Louis Elzevier, 1644. AT

Introduction Arguing with Pictures

A little formalism turns one away from History, but . . . a lot brings one back to it. —Roland Barthes, “Myth Today” (1957)

N

ew thinking requires new pictures. As the seventeenth century’s natural philosophers began to know nature through corpuscles and geometry, woodcuts, etchings, and engravings were essential to their arguments. This book attends to the creation and fortunes of one particularly rich corpus of prints: those of René Descartes. In his best-​known illustration, Descartes proposed an indefinite universe of celestial whirlpools full of matter in constant motion (see fig. 16). Forty-​five years later, a successor etched the philosopher’s subvisible particles onto a Dutch realist tabletop (see fig. 50). These pictures, among dozens more, contributed to the eclectic formulations of a new physics in the years between 1619, when Descartes learned to draw, and 1690, when Jesuit priest Gabriel Daniel reproduced Principia philosophiae’s most recognizable woodcut to withering effect. I argue that Descartes transformed natural philosophy with the introduction of a new graphic language, triggering a wide range of pictorial responses shaped by religious affiliation, political commitment, and cultural convention. Presenting a detailed account of Cartesian visuality, this book pushes the study of seventeenth-​century natural philosophy further into the realm of visual culture and mines the interconnectedness of building knowledge and making pictures in early modern Europe. Outside of scholarly circles, Descartes is characterized as “the father of modern philosophy,”1 and his pictures are all but ignored. Even inside the academy, his oeuvre is often subject to extraordinary compression, where the single (and still stunning)

dictum “I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum) provides a shorthand for his philosophical achievement. An inheritance from Discours de la méthode (1637) and Meditationes de prima philosophia (1640), that phrase has coursed through contemporary Western philosophy, cultural history, art and visual culture, and literary criticism and served as many things: the lynchpin that secured reason in the face of radical doubt, the rallying cry for deduction and geometry, the catalyst for subjectivity, and the foundation for a new epistemology proudly separate from Aristotelian scholasticism—an epistemology that entrusted knowledge to thinkers with minds of their own.2 This book does not attempt to upend those long-​standing interpretations. It follows the lead of philosophers and historians of philosophy who have investigated the reconstruction of the natural world through Descartes’s “metaphysical physics” and puts key prints— including those in the original editions of the Essais (1637) and Principia philosophiae (1644)—at the center of an episodic history of one of the seventeenth century’s new approaches to knowledge.3 It does, however, reconsider cultural and intellectual historian Martin Jay’s claim that Descartes was “a quintessentially visual philosopher, who tacitly adapted the position of a perspectivalist painter using a camera obscura to reproduce the observed world.”4 By starting with Descartes’s woodcuts, I demonstrate that the philosopher’s attentions to the visual were not tacit at all.5 His pictures were unusual for scholastic natural philosophy circa 1637. Aristotelian textbooks included inheritances from medieval manuscripts, such as Porphyrian trees, almond-​shaped diagrams of the eye, and concentric circles of the universe.6 Allegor­ ical broadsheets for the classroom recapitulated scholasticism’s natural-​philosophical concepts, such as form and substance, and primary and secondary qualities.7 The woodcuts for the Essais and Principia refused to traffic in either the intricate mapping of epistemic concepts or the imposition of a single ideological template onto the stuff of the world. They instead took cues from Descartes’s seventeenth-​century visual vernacular, combining sword-​wearing musketeers with mathematical diagrams and bending dotted lines to make celestial matter. They approached knowledge building as an ad hoc procedure, vying for thoughtful engagement with one object after another— engagement that was geometric as much as qualitative. These pictures defined what natural philosophy was coming to be (mathematized, mechanical, and increasingly concerned with experience), how it could be practiced (by hand, in the physical world, with the help of military engineers and artisans, compromised by fewer and fewer nods to the ancients), and what all that meant (that nature had begun demanding new forms of attention because the instruments of knowledge had themselves been irreversibly altered). They laid claim to the pictorial field as a generator of knowledge. And in so doing, they elaborated on the philosopher’s argument about the deceptions of the eye. Descartes’s woodcuts demonstrated that a central problem of the new physics was the fitting of three-​dimensional worlds onto two-​dimensional surfaces. ( 2 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Four centuries of historiography have all but obscured the significant shift effected by these pictures. But their impact was not lost on Descartes’s contemporaries. Robert Boyle, promoter of experimental philosophy and the importance of descriptive drawing, acknowledged the debt that natural philosophy owed the Frenchman: I have not hitherto mention’d a Service, that Mathematicks and Mechanicks may often do the Naturalist, which is not fit to be silently pretermitted, and it is, That by Lineal Schemes, Pictures, and Instruments, they may much assist the Imagination to conceive many things, and thereby the Understanding to judge of them, and deduce new Contrivances from them. That I do not groundlessly say this you will grant, if you consider how difficult (not to say impossible) it were to go through with a long Geometrical Demonstration, without the help of a visible Scheme, to assist both the Fancy and the Memory; and how difficult it is to give Beginners an Idea of the Grounds of Cosmographie and Geographie, without Material Schemes and Globes, your own very recent Experience, as well as that of others, will, I presume, inform you. As it also may, how useful, not to say how necessary, Pictures, and in some cases, Models, are wont to be, when Engines, Houses, Ships, and other Structures are to be judg’d of, that they may be approv’d, or improv’d: but I shall rather take notice that not onely Mechanical, Mathematical, and Anatomical things, need Schemes and Pictures, to represent them clearly to our Conceptions; but many things that are look’d upon as more purely Physical, may, in my Opinion, by much illustrated the same way. Of which if Des Cartes has, as some say, been the Introducer, I think he deserves our Thanks for it.8 Boyle did not limit his comment to Descartes’s pictures for the Essais and Principia in and of themselves. He was identifying those woodcuts as consequential for having necessitated a visual response. This is what makes the Cartesian case remarkable. Descartes’s successors not only relied on copies of his pictures; they crafted their own, whether abstractions of the glass-​tear experiment (see fig. 35) or landscapes infused with the new philosophy’s vortices (see fig. 49). Their dramatic alterations were not merely new illustrations. These pictures exacted arguments.9 They corrected, reworked, adapted, and tailored the Essais’ and Principia’s woodcuts to new contexts. If Descartes had offered a thoroughgoing renovation of the graphic foundations—and thereby the visual culture—of natural philosophy, a handful of his interlocutors in Paris and Leiden conscripted familiar epistemic forms to persuade skeptical audiences of the new philosophy’s virtues. The visual acuity of early modern natural philosophers has a long historiography. Art historians and historians of science—even literary critics and philosophers—have introduction  ( 3 )

poured over the pictures that made for a new science outside the universities, especially those of adjacent fields—like natural history, medicine, mechanics, alchemy, astronomy, and geometry—that enlivened the new philosophy.10 The invention of perspective has long spearheaded this scholarly conversation.11 More recently, cartography has gained wider notice.12 And the pictures made by those who gathered outside the schools—like Matthew Hunter’s “pantheon of tricksters” and his Royal Society’s clever and “crafty” visualizations of experimental philosophy—are enjoying wider attention.13 But the visual grammar of scholastic natural philosophy has been left largely untapped. Véronique Meyer and Susanna Berger have done much to historicize the broadsheets introduced to Continental natural-​philosophical classrooms throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.14 But woodcuts in natural-​philosophical books and textbooks, whether they were produced expressly for scholastic consumption or to put pressure on the interpretation of nature in the schools, have enjoyed less intensive treatment.15 I think this may be due to their deceptive reasonableness. Many of these diagrams look familiar to us inheritors of the so-​called scientific revolution.16 They appear neither masterly enough to prompt art-​historical scrutiny nor epistemic enough to attract the historian of science. But perhaps this is only because we are well practiced—too well practiced—in their conventions and blind to their cultural specificity. Descartes’s pictures demand close attention to the world for which they were made. This, I think, means following pictures and diagrams into the books, manuscripts, prints, drawings, paintings, beliefs, and rituals early modern natural philosophers engaged; tracking their figural resonance; and identifying the shapes of representation that informed them. Some may read this concern with the formal particularities as a preoccupation with style, whether philosophical or graphic. The question of style is less urgent for me, though I identify as a historian of science with investments in art-​historical methods. If pressed, I would recall Horst Bredekamp’s recent description of those art-​historical commitments as “shift[ing] the problem of style from a matter of psychological-​mental disposition to form as it has become”17 and say that I explain Descartes’s woodcuts as forms that would not have been possible without minds conditioned by early modern image making of all kinds. With Gabriele Werner, I share a belief that pictures made to express natural knowledge “show or reveal something that both exists outside of them and yet does not come into being without them.”18 To get at that “something,” the guidance of classic art-​historical texts has been invaluable. It was in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy that Michael Baxandall reminded us that “a picture is sensitive to the kinds of interpretive skill—patterns, categories, inferences, analogies—the mind brings to it. [Someone’s] capacity to distinguish a certain kind of form or relationship of forms will have consequences for the attention with which [she] addresses the picture.”19 Natural philosophy’s woodcuts and engravings ( 4 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

were no different. They were shaped by pictures outside the field for which they were created because materials and experiences outside of natural philosophy shaped natural philosophers themselves. To date, Descartes’s natural-​philosophical figures have attracted a rethinking of the epistemic categories the philosopher endorsed. Scholars have used the Essais’ and Principia’s woodcuts to complicate Descartes’s rationalism with the brightness of his imagination.20 They have also framed his pictures as little feats of cognitive engineering, whether “models of how things might work” that “sharpen our mechanical intuitions”21 or as “bridge[s] between logical deduction and rhetorical persuasion”—a murky, mnemonic “twilight zone” that hovers between representation and resemblance.22 Scholars including Rebecca Wilkin, Claus Zittel, and Eleanor Chan have taken up the reception of the new philosophy, accounting for the dramatic discrepancies in posthumous illustrations accompanying the first two editions of L’homme. Though somewhat outside of natural philosophy, Florent Schuyl’s highly descriptive engravings for Tractatus de homine (1662) and Claude Clerselier’s diagrammatic woodcuts for L’homme (1664) reveal that, on the one hand, Descartes himself made no visual prescriptions, and, on the other, interpreters of the new philosophy brought different priorities, alternative graphic techniques, and circumstantial anxieties to their depictions of the new philosophy, as I will explore in chapter 3.23 Indeed, the themes of unfixity and local revision recur throughout all these studies. It turns out that, in an age torn asunder by skepticism, a philosophy aimed at recovering certainty was liable to produce irony. What is more, history is fickle. The past is constituted by near-​endless specificity, and so its study demands specific attention. This is why I locate Descartes’s pictures within a cultural history of the new philosophy. My treatment extends a historiography that puts Descartes back in his milieu and reshapes his intellectual program with context in mind.24 So, too, does it sync up with reminders of the philosopher’s intellectual debts, like the scholastic traditions to which he was introduced at La Flèche.25 But somewhat differently from its predecessors, Skepticism’s Pictures begins with the formal attributes of its corpus of natural-​philosophical figures. It is sustained by identifying the historically specific arguments those attributes attached to—and the cultural logic that dictated—each picture’s composition. (This leaves most methods of book history and histories of print and publication beyond this book’s scope.) My analysis develops less a genealogy of the new philosophy’s pictures and something more like an archaeological recuperation of the contemporary pictures and representational habits in which the new philosophy’s pictures were fluent.26 A near-​contemporary portrait of Descartes dramatizes what I have in mind (fig. 1). Made by Frans van Schooten Jr., the philosopher’s only known pictorial collaborator, this engraving portrays the buttoned-​up, stately body of the sitter. But, more than anything else, the philosopher’s exaggerated sidelong glance dominates the entire frame: he is not simply looking straight forward introduction  ( 5 )

Fig. 1 Frans van Schooten Jr., Portrait of René Descartes, 1659. Etching. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

or to the side. His eyes strain toward the more extreme, inconspicuous corners of his world. A viewer of the portrait may chuckle at the sitter’s side-​eye, but then they may be compelled to ask: What exactly was Descartes looking at? And what about this philosopher’s work—and specifically the pictures he produced—compelled his close contemporary to depict him looking so hard? This line of inquiry also animates my project as a whole. I look to seventeenth-​century broadsheets, textbooks, perspective manuals, student notes, fantastic voyage narratives, and maps of places far from the Netherlands and France to discover the surprising, even seemingly far-​fetched visual resources at my historical actors’ disposal. The discursive affiliations of the new philosophy’s pictures make them extraordinary examples of the seventeenth-​century crisis of representation.27 This was what Michel Foucault characterized as the move away from epistemologies founded on likeness and toward those that depended on something standing in for another. Some thinkers, like Peter Burke, have already acknowledged this upending in natural philosophy. But instead of noting an interaction between scientia and the vitality and stylistic range of the period arts (whether sculpture, painting, decorative arts, or architecture), Burke has separated these activities.28 This presupposes that there was no traffic between the ( 6 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

two realms and especially assumes that natural philosophy had no truck with pictures at all. Recent scholarship, like Susanna Berger’s, as well as classic studies, like Svetlana Alpers’s, have taught us otherwise. With their guidance, we learn, first, that the picture was a tool of early modern intervention (Berger describes allegorical broadsheets as integral to the teaching of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-​century philosophy)29 and, second, that artists were encouraged by naturalists’ heightened attention to empiricism (Alpers shows that art was infused with new ways of knowing the world).30 The figures wrought by Descartes and his successors help map another aspect of this exchange. Throughout this book, I argue that they chart natural philosophy as a locus of epistemic crisis in part because its pictures were undergoing such radical renegotiation. This project began as a response to what surrounded me during the summer of 2010— or, rather, what did not. Archive fever comes in different forms,31 and, in this case, it was the symptom of archival failure—my failure, really, to retrieve any interesting evidence about the concept of progress as a seventeenth-​century invention. (I had hoped Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Nachlass at the archives of the Académie des sciences would yield some insight.) In some listless, desultory bit of searching for an early modern something—anything—on Gallica, the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s online repository, I came across a late seventeenth-​century text. As its thumbnails filled my screen, I recognized a JPEG of Descartes’s notorious vortices woodcut. But the title of the book to which this image belonged was not Principia philosophiae. I realized the picture was a copy that had been introduced to a fantastic voyage narrative, Gabriel Daniel’s polemical Voiage du monde de Descartes (1690). Historical instinct, coupled with training in art history—and a healthy familiarity with Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”—made me burrow deeper. The picture revealed itself to be a jester’s toy. It was a copy that exploited the notoriety of Descartes’s woodcut; indeed, it was a copy that had been made to render the original picture flimsy, ridiculous, and meaningless. There will be more to say about that copy in this book’s final chapter, but, for the moment, this origin story helps me lay a few more of my cards on the table. My thinking and research have been driven by archival curiosity and a predilection for historical detail. It has also been guided by a general commitment to the history that comes out of comparing one picture to another. Daniel’s vortices copy was just one example that made me wonder: How had Descartes’s pictures mattered beyond Descartes’s own texts? Where else might I find evidence of visual debate over the philosopher’s compendium of woodcuts? These questions have led me to the book before you. The surprising variations in Cartesian picturing began to make more sense when I framed them as indices of their respective religious and political climates, as products of cultures whose truth making relied on appropriate kinds of picture making. Because introduction  ( 7 )

each mark could be freighted with meaning—could be inflected with a French Catholic or Dutch Remonstrant approach to the image—the privileging of one form over another was a consequential choice. Such wild flexibility in the making of certainty kept stunning me. My interest in epistemic procedures, and, thus, historical epistemology, will ring familiar to historians of science who study how knowledge changes over time. But it is also engaged in restoring paradox to these pictures. My taste for paradox is owed to an eclectic range of scholarly debts—especially work that takes seriously the case study as method.32 My inclination toward the strange, stubborn object is also the result of an orientation to the world that wonders at reconstructing what an object was, what it meant, and how both object and meaning changed over time. Sometimes this has required me to face down piles of paper, reams of text, and the early modern period’s proliferation of images. (The archive—and a scholar’s notes from visits to the archive—can feel like an endless funhouse designed for exhaustion and distortion.) But I take an approach Erika Naginski taught me during my master’s program: to find an object of historical interest, learn what its form meant, and build a history—and a world—according to the evidence of that object. Though sometimes the things one chooses to historicize prove to have been outliers that bucked the patterns of their age, it is precisely in their rejection of the typical—or, better put, their wish to make novelties conventional—that one can learn more about the values that contributed to making them. Indeed, the friction between the form of Descartes’s pictures and the pictures that surrounded them is precisely what permits a more meaningful set of cultural histories. The following chapters have been written in this spirit. Before introducing them, a note on terminology may be useful. Throughout this book, I use the term “picture” to describe the visual output of Descartes and most of his successors. “Image” has always struck me as spreading not only a very broad tent, evoking visual representations in every medium, but also the shadow play confined to one’s own mind. It also gestures toward the opinions one has about something or someone.33 This is too diffuse for my purposes. “Illustration” sounds better, though the word seems to characterize visual representation as serving a single text rather than cocreating with it. This strikes me as too limited. “Picture,” though, seems just right. The term brings with it the exigencies of two-​dimensional materiality, bundles of visual strategies, and a rich historiography of art. While “picture” has been most consistently used by connoisseurs to designate paintings, I have been helped in thinking of the word as a formalization of “depiction,” which art historian Michael Podro usefully defines as “the recognition of [a] subject, and this remains so even when the subject is radically transformed and recognition becomes correspondingly extended; it remains so not because we seek the subject matter despite the complications of painting but because recognition and complication are furthered by the other each serves the other.”34 This sense of complicated recognition, echoed by those who contributed to the more recent interdisciplinary research ( 8 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

project “Das Technische Bild,”35 has informed my analysis. “Figure,” a term my historical actors employed, is a handy alternative. I also use the word “graphic” in the hopes of emphasizing the medium of the black-​and-​white print and the graphic arts. Most important, in widening the aperture for understanding natural philosophers’ engagement with graphic representation, I emphasize the recruitment of recognizable visual forms for expediting the adaptation of new ideas. I ask my reader to keep that intention in mind in the pages to come and even in this brief overview of the book’s chapters. A cultural history of the woodcuts for the Essais forms the subject of chapter 1. Specifically, I demonstrate how, in particular, the habit in essays like Dioptrique and Météores of grafting geometry onto figures was indebted to the domain of practical mathematics. (Not only did Descartes learn to draw while a mercenary in Prince Maurice’s army— which was chock full of engineers practiced in this art—but Descartes’s illustrator was an instructor at the Leiden Duytsche Mathématique, where many of Maurice’s men were taught.) These were new kinds of figures for natural philosophy, and, in conjunction with Descartes’s writing on visual perception in terms of the physical constitution of the printed image, they reveal how pictures themselves were not necessarily philosophy’s culprit. Rather, the woodcut or the engraving pointed to the vagaries of perception and the human tendency to mistake an image for that which it depicts. The Essais’ figured geometries showed that the combination of two different forms of representation underscored a picture’s status as a picture—and, thus, as an active tool for processing the world rather than merely reflecting it. These pictures also instantiated a very contemporary seventeenth-​century look and feel to inquiry about natural knowledge. This had much to do with the rejection of scholasticism, but it was also an assertion about the resources that were most important for enunciating the new philosophy: pictures steeped in contemporary seventeenth-​century practices. Chapter 2 turns to Descartes’s famous vortices picture (see fig. 16). The woodcut is one of the strangest Descartes ever produced—perhaps one of the strangest produced in his century. It purports to describe a universe with multiple galaxies (including the earth’s very own off-​kilter solar system) whose whirling matter is interrupted by the path of a comet. Such worlds were invisible for Descartes’s contemporaries; not even the telescope could spy such celestial wonders. No full-​page print like this had ever surfaced before in natural philosophy, and the philosopher deemed it necessary to reprint the woodcut ten times throughout Principia. Surprisingly, none of Descartes’s interlocutors objected to the picture’s overall form. They voiced more concern over Descartes’s written explanations,36 which led me to wonder about the general legibility of the picture: How were the philosopher’s correspondents and readers equipped to identify this woodcut as a picture of a world beyond earth? How could they see the intergalactic behavior that Descartes wished them to see? To make this picture, introduction  ( 9 )

the philosopher and his illustrator knit together basic graphic vocabulary from across early modern visual culture: the point, the dotted line, the field of dots, stippling, and the frame. All this mark making—borrowed from maps, mathematical textbooks, star charts, natural-​philosophical treatises, and printed landscape and portraits, all within easy reach—had semiotic power to represent, all at once, the shape of matter, the look of motion, and the nature of the stars and planets—concepts and physical phenomena that were otherwise intangible. Brought together to work together, these visual conventions rendered Descartes’s universe into an apprehensible—and soon iconic— picture of a new world. The rest of the book concerns the graphic reinterpretation of Descartes’s pictures. The figures of experiments Jacques Rohault took to his conférénces and then his Traité de physique (1671) preoccupy chapter 3. The French physicien deviated significantly from the visual output in the Essais and Principia, replacing Descartes’s woodcuts with a combination of delightful experiments and terse, almost notational figures. Rohault’s substitutions, I argue, attempted to protect the new philosophy from the escalating French Catholic discomfort with perceived implications of Descartes’s philosophy for the Eucharist—implications that, for many theologians, were redolent of the Calvinist undoing of the sacrament. The physicien’s public conferences mimicked Catholic ritual; his figures evoked the Thomistic explanation of transubstantiation. They also borrowed from the radical abstraction that Clerselier, Descartes’s literary executor, had ascribed to the new philosophy. Rohault’s equivocating reformulations offered opportunities to meditate on the changes required to sustain knowledge—and to wonder at how much change an epistemology could endure before it became something else entirely. Rohault’s bare outlines stand in complete contrast to the highly descriptive still lifes and landscapes in Wolferd Senguerd’s Philosophia naturalis (1685). In chapter 4, I examine those etchings in light of the epistemic values of late seventeenth-​century Dutch realism and their undertaking of what Alpers calls “the art of describing.” When Senguerd placed Descartes’s celestial particles on ordinary tabletops, or when he inserted the vortices into a characteristically Dutch sluice, he was attempting to neutralize a contested and seemingly obscurantist natural philosophy with a very familiar, time-​tested visual language. But far from simply demonstrating unquestionable facts about attention, observation, and experiment, such etchings revealed the volatility of the Dutch realist picture. Or, better put, they summoned descriptive realism’s susceptibility to alteration and deviation from the visible world precisely because this type of picturing had become so trusted for giving form to the exotic and the unseen—and, above all, for demonstrating the skill of picture makers. Even receptacles that, at the beginning of the century, had been constructed to elevate humble description had, by the last decades of the century, been distorted. ( 10 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Daniel’s Voiage is the subject of chapter 5. As briefly sketched above, Daniel had copied Descartes’s vortices woodcut into his fantastic narrative in order to drain it of its power (see fig. 55). The chapter explains how and why, in late seventeenth-​century France, this made for an effective strategy. Throughout his clever text, Daniel wove together natural-​philosophical fictions, cartographies real and imagined, fabulous polemic, Descartes’s own pictures in Principia, and the variations to which his acolytes had subjected the vortices. Voiage’s pastiche mocked the picture as a vacant fantasy, a speculation that, in the end, was nothing but a picture. The chapter characterizes the pressures that word can exact on image by focusing on a picture whose form ostensibly had not changed at all. Cases like Daniel’s Voiage remind us that the seventeenth century’s crisis of representation did not merely reside in the prints that stood in for nature or eyewitness experiences. They underscore a thrilling, troubling early modern theme: that text and image could no longer be reliably conjoined. The epilogue moves toward historicizing the disappearance of Descartes’s pictures from Western European philosophical consciousness—and French visual culture, in particular. That process contributed to the dimming of natural philosophy’s light and was integral to the nineteenth century’s narrowing definitions of philosophy; its new sets of expectations for truthful, scientific pictures; and its nostalgic, politicized visual interpretations of history through pictures. Those shifts are central to why, today, we do not really think about Descartes and pictures in the same breath. The point is not to mourn this as a loss in the transmission of his philosophy; nor do I think it necessary to revive Descartes’s woodcuts for twenty-​first-​century physics or astronomy. Rather, I will try to make sense of the historical procedures through which pictures are put to work, examine what renders pictures useful and what erodes their power, and clarify the meanings we ascribe to them. These woodcuts were, at once, unprecedented (for the field of natural philosophy) and conventional (if one takes a comprehensive look at the period’s broader visual culture). Taken alongside their reinterpretations, they provide a compelling case about historical change as local revision and philosophy as graphic enterprise. The reconstruction of historical circumstance and attention to the adjustments necessary for arguing truths old and new may render us more sensitive to our moment of sheer visual saturation. It may remind us that each picture is the sum of numerous choices. The interrogation of both a pictorial composition and its semiotic effects will, I hope, spark inquiry into the complex panorama of visual influence with which we live. This book is an attempt to understand the pictures we rely on to make the world and how the world’s pictures, in turn, make us.

introduction  ( 11 )

1 The Picture Multiple

W

hy did early modern natural philosophers begin to picture a geometrically analyzed world? The problem finds unique expression in two of Descartes’s Essais—Dioptrique and Météores—published in 1637 as compendia to Discours de la méthode. With these texts, Descartes rejected the strictures of conventional Aristotelianism taught in the schools, reoriented how one might obtain knowledge, and, by extension, sought new ways of describing his approach. The bulk of the historiography about the Essais remembers the philosopher trading Latinate erudition for the French vernacular; the confident subjectivity that propelled his “je pense donc je suis”; the swagger with which he washed his hands of the ancients; and how his proclivity for experiment, intuition, and deduction countered the bookish accretion of the most calcified forms of textbook natural philosophy.1 Radical though his positions were, Descartes circumscribed them with care. Galileo’s condemnation in 1633 had startled the French philosopher into formulating his Essais as a preview of his new philosophy.2 Throughout the new book were glimmers of the old ways—relics of Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, whose logic bore a strong resemblance to Descartes’s intuitive reasoning, and amendments and qualifications that Descartes’s old teachers at the Jesuit collège La Flèche had urged him to make.3 The philosopher adhered to uncontroversial, earthbound topics while leaving the heavens unharmed and immaculate. Despite his caution, Descartes filled his Essais with a most potent means for overturning Aristotelian natural philosophy’s forms and qualities: illustrations of descriptive figures negotiated with geometrical construction. These were not the Porphyrian logic trees and cosmological tables usually found in scholastic textbooks but analytical forms whose schema were familiar to any who had dabbled in mixed mathematics—a practice typically held apart from natural philosophy.

Fig. 2 (top left)  René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 15 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB 336029. Photo: The Huntington Library. Fig. 3 (bottom left)  René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 251 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB 336029. Photo: The Huntington Library. Fig. 4 (above)  René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 6 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB 336029. Photo: The Huntington Library.

By incorporating such pictures into the Essais, Descartes aimed at challenging the presumption that an object’s persistent essence—as reflected by its appearance— underpinned its constitution and dictated any changes it might undergo.4 Descartes’s illustrations employed mathematical inscription to penetrate what could be seen, thus encouraging readers to reconsider how the eye could capture the world and what kind of knowledge it could secure. For instance, to explain the refraction and reflection of light, Descartes and his illustrator, Frans van Schooten Jr. (also known as Franciscus van Schooten [I]),5 imaged tennis players plucked from their courts and stamped with circles and ninety-​degree angles (fig. 2). Rainbows were primed for analysis with well-​outfitted gentlemen’s lines of sight (fig. 3). The movement of light particles was likened to vats full of grapes, which were compelled to fill empty space as juice was pressed from their skins (fig. 4).6 Sight itself was made into a camera obscura whose aperture was mounted with a diagram of the eye while a bearded man sporting a comfortable hood looked on (fig. 5). Grafting geometry onto figures, Descartes hinted at a world that could no longer be described through its immediate appearance. An object’s visible characteristics failed to offer an unimpeachable account of the nature that had produced it; instead, ( 14 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 5  René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 36 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB 336029. Photo: The Huntington Library.

an object’s extension and the geometries extracted from that extension offered a more definitive account of that object’s composition and behavior in the world. Descartes’s pictures thus instructed readers in a technique that subverted any certainty about deriving natural causes from what could be seen. The Essais’ illustrations evidence the slow burn of Descartes’s conceptual innovation and the larger process by which nature was mechanized throughout the seventeenth century. Historians of the scientific revolution long assumed that the new philosophy lent itself to a streamlined mathematization, a straightforward geometricization.7 Recent work has emphasized the virtues of a nuanced approach to the imaging of the new physics, especially with reference to Descartes’s visual output. Brian Baigrie led the way by characterizing Descartes’s pictures as laying bare nature’s mechanisms and thereby amounting to a set of tools for the new epistemology.8 Claus Zittel’s Theatrum philosophicum masterfully extends Baigrie’s remit and charts how, throughout his oeuvre, Descartes readily conjoined perceptual figures and conceptual diagrams, the inductive and the deductive, the mathematical and the fictional. Zittel’s formulation—with help the picture multiple  ( 15 )

from work by Daniel Sepper and Peter Galison—is that the imagination was Descartes’s crucible for melding these dialectics together. Zittel identifies Descartes’s knowledge as mutable and shifting—even oscillating—between empiricism and cogitation.9 Building on its predecessors, this chapter stresses the visual cultures that were in closest proximity to Descartes as he devised his Essais. It recuperates how Descartes visualized doubt with a graphic habit: that of practical mathematics, especially as it was taught at Leiden’s Duytsche Mathématique. True, the technique of laying geometry on top of figure did have other older sources, including, say, Theodoric of Frieberg’s De iride (1305) and Walther Hermann Ryff ’s Architektur (1547). But there is little evidence these texts had caught Descartes’s eye. In taking seriously his spurning of libraries for direct experience, one gains a deeper understanding of the philosopher’s emphatic orientation to his seventeenth-​century present and how its scientia entailed a process through which acute attention to what could be seen was poised to undergo reinterpretation by the mind. The pictures Descartes incorporated into his Essais were emblematic of his new epistemology, demonstrating an approach to knowing that intercalated various ways of knowing to forge something new but familiar. The first section of this chapter puts Descartes’s graphic epistemology into relation with the Duytsche Mathématique’s visual practices, evidencing the close contact that the philosopher had with its students and instructors and how the former appropriated the visual preoccupations of the latter. In the second part, I examine how such contact transformed Descartes’s thinking about sensation and the mind’s apprehension of sensation. The third part makes a strong case for the seventeenth-​century accoutrements that Descartes integrated into his pictures and, thus, the presentist attitude ideally cultivated by those practicing the new philosophy. To conclude, I briefly sketch why pictures formed both the foundation and condition for the new philosophy. This exercise goes beyond showing that pictures were important to Descartes. It casts the philosopher’s epistemology into larger visual relief. The aim is to recognize that the skeptical foundations of Cartesian knowledge were inscribed into line and figure.

Figured Geometries In the Essais, Descartes was silent about the sources for his combinatory images, and his correspondence reveals little more. No extant document maps the pictorial collaboration he undertook with Van Schooten Jr.; none describes why the Essais’ pictures look the way they do. For instance, when Descartes was fretting about putting his book together, Constantijn Huygens counseled him to find a draughtsman well versed in philosophy and pointed the way to Van Schooten Jr.10 Huygens also consoled the philosopher when the production of the woodcuts delayed the printing of the Essais.11 The pictures were ( 16 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

important, but discussing what they were was less so. Even a search through Descartes’s earlier correspondence barely turns up anything related to the approaches he would eventually take to imaging the world. On occasion he had exchanged diagrams with an artisan like Jean Ferrier, his trusted mathematician confidante Marin Mersenne, and possibly mechanist Isaac Beeckman, but these were either mechanical drawings or purely geometric.12 The few passages in which the philosopher describes any facility with pictures show him to have believed images to be indispensable to conveying ideas13 and reveal that he regretted he was a poor draughtsman.14 But, curiously, in January 1619, while volunteering for Prince Maurice of Nassau’s army, Descartes began learning how to draw. As he joked to Beeckman on 24 January 1619: “Lest, however, you consider me so lazy as to have quite uselessly filled my time, [I can tell you that] I am occupying myself with matters which your ingenium, busy with other things, doubtless pays no attention to, and looks down upon from the elevated heavens of the sciences: namely, drawing, military architecture, and, particularly, Flemish.”15 Descartes’s gentle and joking sentence reveals how marginal pictorial representation was within the early seventeenth-​century study of scientia. Even for his friend Beeckman, who flouted the sharp distinction between transcendental scientia and the artisanal, applicable, and quotidian,16 drawing was far from a priority. An early promoter of mechanical philosophy, the Dutch philosopher had little aversion to the human-​made and experimental; he was convinced that the marriage of ars, techne, and scientia would result in a better comprehension of both the world’s physical properties and its universal laws.17 In fact, Descartes’s early visits to Beeckman’s workshop had awakened the Frenchman’s fascination with physics precisely because Beeckman had put artificial mechanism at the center of his reformation of natural philosophy.18 But even the most artisanal of natural philosophers were assumed to give little thought to pictures. Ars was integral to the generation of true knowledge, but graphic representation was negligible. Despite this, Descartes sought out visual practices that supplemented the text-​heavy abstractions he had learned in school. His teachers at La Flèche had guided him through the Coimbran Jesuit commentaries on Aristotle’s Physica (published in 1592) and Collegio Romano professor Franciscus Toletus’s De physica auscultatione (1580). They trained him in the verbal traditions of explanatio and argumentum, disputationes and respondens.19 The use of diagrams in such books was rare, conceptual, and geometric. The Euclidean gnomon—that L-shaped polygon left over when a small parallelogram is extracted from an original parallelogram—was one of the few examples Descartes would have encountered in Toletus’s De physica auscultatione.20 And though his Jesuit instructors may have pointed to elaborate allegorical broadsheets to explain natural philosophy, those prints supplemented scientia’s texts; they were not yet integral to them.21 Indeed, figures like those in the Essais were nowhere to be found in the image-​poor texts at the picture multiple  ( 17 )

La Flèche.22 Between 1614, when he left the collège, and 1619, when he reached Maurice’s camp at Breda, Descartes spent a year studying civil and canon law at the Université de Poitiers. This left him restless. As he later put it in Discours, his curiosity directed him well beyond the scholar’s cabinet: As soon as I was old enough to leave the supervision of my instructors, I completely abandoned the study of letters. And, resolving to seek no longer any other science than the knowledge I could find in myself, or in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling: visiting courts and armies, associating with men of different characters, with different lots in life; collecting myriad experiences; proving myself in the situations that fortune set down before me; and, above all, reflecting on those experiences to gain something [from them]. For it occurred to me that I should find much more truth in the reasoning of each man concerning the affairs that mattered to him[—the affairs] in which he must be swiftly punished if he judged poorly—than in those conducted by a man of letters in his study, regarding speculations that have no effect.23 Descartes pursued experience with zest. He wrote to Beeckman of draughtsmanship, fortification design, and Flemish, further indicating that new encounters with all sorts of people and in all sorts of places had encouraged an interest in how best to represent such experience. If the abstractions he had learned in school were devoted merely to “speculations,” then more descriptive modes could give form to his contact with “the great book of the world.” The circumstances under which Descartes was stationed with Maurice were ideal for developing graphic skills. The Prince of Orange had won peace for the United Provinces. He had beaten back the threat of civil war ignited by the rift between the Arminians (who had allegedly restored free will to human dignity) and the Gomarists (who piously rejected the doctrine of free will in the name of a strict Calvinism); the Synod of Dort was well on its way to reconciling those two factions and restoring order across the land. Although the threat of Spain usually loomed large, this was year eight of a twelve-​year cease-​fire.24 Both time and workforce were abundant. Descartes learned to draw in the company of Maurice’s engineers, many of whom had gained their graphic know-​how at the Duytsche Mathématique. Founded by the prince in 1600, the Mathématique was an engineering school in Leiden whose purpose was to train a reserve of surveyors, range finders, and military architects skilled enough to sustain the fight against Spain. Simon Stevin—the man who had tutored the prince in practical mathematics and whom Maurice kept close at hand as both a personal adviser and quartermaster general for the United Provinces’ army—had designed the ( 18 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Mathématique’s curriculum. In addition to his talent for making geometry and calculation useful, Stevin was an avid proponent of the clarity of the Flemish language and had a knack for explaining with pictures.25 With Maurice’s support, a practical, vernacular, and visual pedagogy thrived. The Mathématique took men who were assumed to possess no knowledge of mathematics and transformed them into graphic-​savvy practical geometers. Each cohort was comprised of carpenters, masons, schoolteachers, and even curious university students from around the United Provinces.26 Their educations began with basic arithmetic and the fundamental principles of Euclidean geometry; they learned all their lessons in Dutch. Students started with the definition of a point; from there, they were tutored in the recognition of intricate polygons, and once they became comfortable with multiplication and division, they began to master the art that they would most frequently exercise as engineers: trigonometry. Literally the “measurement of triangles,” where knowledge of one side of the shape and two of its angles could help the mathematician calculate the length of a triangle’s other sides, trigonometry was the key operation through which engineers reduced the world to mathematical constructions. Through it, they could measure the distances of faraway watchtowers, site the location of their enemies, and plot newly acquired property.27 The Mathématique’s students honed their trigonometric acumen by “draw[ing] the outlines of lands which they [had] to measure, and further identifying a place on the same page for drawing a clear landmark.”28 Figuration laid the groundwork for trigonometric functions to come. Drawing (teckenen) at the Mathématique encompassed three forms of representation: descriptive drawing;29 the abstraction of a visible, tangible object into a mathematically manipulable shape (or “outline”); and the lines and angles of geometric analysis. When the practical geometer brought these visual modes together, he performed a graphic balancing act where figural objects were preserved in the face of geometric construction. Uitgewerkte voorstellen—a manuscript of lessons compiled, circa 1620, by one of the Mathématique’s most popular teachers, Frans van Schooten Sr.—attests to the intensity with which figured geometry guided instruction. For example, one problem tasks the student to measure the distance between two “peaks,” A and B, with the length of base CD already given (fig. 6). The landscape and its most prominent landmarks are outfitted with details that overwhelm Stevin’s original advice to “outline”: at the top of the ridge stands a church whose nave has been extended by a few piecemeal additions. Toward the bottom are woolly trees and bushes. To the left of point B is a curious, stony absence, whose shape seems to resolve into a nose, chin, and neck. All the while, grass spills off the mountain’s edges, from one promontory to the next. Staffage dots the base of the mountain: in the lower-​left corner, a couple looks out toward the opposite end of the page as a dog leads an energetic boy their way. To their right is a lone woman who stops short of the cliff face. Frozen in her tracks and hunchbacked, she the picture multiple  ( 19 )

is a ready measure of the mountain’s size and solidity. With descriptive attention to the jagged landscape, with a sensitivity to how that landscape dwarfs its inhabitants, Van Schooten Sr. evoked the details of Hendrik Goltzius’s early drawings of Haarlem’s dunes or Jan van Goyen’s later views of The Hague. Observation conditions trigonometric calculation: out of the terrain, triangles AFC, ABD and ABC emerge and prove useful. The landscape spreads across the bulk of Van Schooten Sr.’s page, stressing that the surveyor’s numbers and geometric lines only make sense in terms of the landscapes he has drawn. If Descartes’s few years with Maurice gave him only temporary exposure to such pictorial modes, there was another, more direct channel through which the philosopher likely became versed in them: his illustrator, Van Schooten Jr., consummate child of the Mathématique. While the younger Van Schooten may have witnessed his father’s pedagogical prime, after he graduated from Universiteit Leiden, he was hired as a temporary instructor at the Mathématique and taught alongside his father (eventually replacing him after his death in 1645).30 Huygens was, of course, well connected to Dutch Republic knowledge makers like the Van Schootens. And it is likely that he brought Van Schooten Jr. to Descartes’s attention because he believed the practical mathematician could bring both trigonometrical instinct and fine draughtsmanship to a revised conception of nature.31 Under Descartes’s guidance, the young Leidener married those talents, translating them into a critical apparatus for the new science.

Surveying Natural Philosophy How did Descartes and Van Schooten Jr. import engineering’s visual language into the rarefied world of natural philosophy? In the second section of Discours, Descartes identified mathematics as the basic tool of all the sciences. But he scoffed at the notion of mastering all mathematical operations. His new science would be based on the “relations” and “proportions” between objects. Descartes had certainly learned about these from Euclid’s Elements, and he had delved into their implications for music with his Musicae compendium. But his wish remained to draw lines between things, which he related as the engineer’s pictorial task: Observing that, although [the various sciences’] objects may be different, they all agree in considering only the various relations or proportions which can be found among those objects, I thought it best that I examine only proportions in general, without assuming that they were present solely in those objects that made themselves most readily available to me. In other words, I analyzed [such relations and proportions] without binding them to these objects alone, ( 20 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 6  Frans van Schooten Sr., Uitgewerkte voorstellen van theoretische en toegepaste meetkunde, 1600–25?, fol. 83r. Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden, BPL 1013. Photo: Leiden University Libraries.

so as to be better able to apply them to all other similar objects. . . . In order to understand these relations I should sometimes have to consider each one in particular and sometimes only have to recall them, or apprehend many of them together, [and] I thought that, in order to treat them best individually, I should view them as [manifesting] in straight lines, since I could find no simpler object to present to my imagination and my senses; and that, in order to recall them, or reflect on many at the same time, I should explain them by a few characters as brief as possible.32 In moving between the abstractions of “general form[s]” and the vagaries of particulars, Descartes outlined a commitment to invisible lines and economic symbols like the geometric concerns of the Duytsche Mathématique’s curriculum. For both Maurice’s school and Descartes’s new school of thought, epistemic relationships were underwritten by representing the visible surround and calculating only with reference to the picture multiple  ( 21 )

representations of what was seen. But if Leiden-​trained engineers measured the distance between one landmark and another for eventual use on the battlefield, Descartes and Van Schooten Jr. replaced these landmarks with gentlemen playing tennis or looking at rainbows, with anatomies of the eye and brain, with vats full of grapes. Then they offered these geometrically entangled pictures as the basis of the world’s laws. Descartes leveled these pictorial claims at the Aristotelian understanding that qualities such as hot, cold, brilliant, dull, soft, hard, thick, or thin dwelled in an object or were inherent to each object by itself. Qualities were to be understood as the results of distances between objects or between one part of an object and another. Merely looking at or sensing such qualities would not help decipher their causes. No combination of image and text better taught this idea than Descartes’s lesson about eyes sensing objects at a distance (fig. 7). To undermine the Aristotelian characterization of sight as the transmission of images from objects to the eyes, Descartes and Van Schooten Jr. coordinated four different forms of visual representation: anatomical description (the brain and the grasping disembodied hand), reductive diagramming (the eyes), geometric analysis (alternately converging lines that demarcate the traveling of light from one point to another), and letters and numbers that signified location (M, Y, X, V at the top; r, s, t and R, S, T, at the back of the eyes; and the pair of 7s, 8s and 9s at the optic nerve). Much like Van Schooten Sr.’s landscapes, Van Schooten Jr. lavished descriptive detail onto the folds and recesses of the brain’s anterior, exhibiting facility with chiaroscuro and an esteem for empirical investigation. Here, the anatomy of the brain and the eye dictated mathematical work. Descartes reasoned that the visual perception of an external object depended on the part of each eye that received the line of sight from the object (the line of sight, which, according to Descartes, depended on a chain of sensations that reverberated from the object to the eye and were then refracted by the pupil). Such perception was further complicated by the distance between the right eye and the left eye. Descartes and Van Schooten Jr. were essentially guiding their readers through a triangulation between an external object, the distance between the eyes, and the lines of sight between the eyes and the object. Though the same operation had appeared in Johannes Kepler’s Ad vitellionem paralipomena (1604) and its medieval predecessors, Descartes and Van Schooten Jr.’s picture stressed the negotiation of figure and line. The measurement of invisible lines between tangible figures cut across subsequent phases of their explanation. First, Descartes illustrated a blind man who “sees”—that is, feels—the world with a pair of batons (fig. 8). This analogy, which stretched back to Aristotle and medieval commentators on perspectiva,33 reified sight as tactile sensation rather than an image’s immaterial emission. But Descartes then used Van Schooten Jr.’s image to reason that even if the blind man did not know the lengths of his batons, provided that he knew the distance between his arms (that is, between A and C) and ( 22 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 7 René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 49 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637). Woodcut. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RESM-R 76. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

the degree of the angles ACE and CAE, he would still be able to establish the location of point E. The solution would simply be derived “through a natural Geometry.”34 Then, when switching back to the eyes themselves and encouraging his readers to import (mentally) the model of those sensation-​giving batons, Descartes proposed that if one knew the length of Ss and the degrees of angles SsX and XsS, one would still be able to figure out the position of point (or object) X. He soon defined his “natural Geometry”: “This, by an action of thought, which, although of the simplest imagining, does not fail to involve reasoning entirely similar to that which is made by Surveyors, when, by means of two different stations, they measure distant sites.”35 Descartes thus elevated the surveyor’s practice and its forms of representation into a collective mode of “reasoning”—“an action of thought”—that possessed natural-​philosophical stakes. The bond between the surveyor’s art and the new science signaled a sharp inversion of ars and the picture multiple  ( 23 )

Fig. 8  René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 56 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB 336029. Photo: The Huntington Library.

scientia. It required the investigation of nature to place unprecedented stock in figurative descriptions that framed geometrical analysis, to take experience and mathematize its contours. This was not obvious, and the joining of surveying with natural philosophy was novel even for Descartes himself. Recall 1619 once more. While stationed with Maurice’s regiment and learning to draw, Descartes was also writing the manuscript Regulae ad directionem ingenii. Included among his guidelines for intellectual comportment was a working definition of perception. Remarks about the labor of the surveyor were nowhere to be found. Instead, representation first surfaced as a phenomenon endemic to the cognitive processing of sensation. In Rule XII, Descartes described optical perception vis-​à-​vis Aristotle’s (Platonic) wax seal: “You must not think this expression is just an analogy; the external shape of the sentient organ must be regarded as really changed by the object, in exactly the same way as the shape of the surface of the wax is changed by the seal.”36 But the philosopher did not stop there. He further conceived that this initial, literal impression triggered a chain of similar impressions, where negative and positive casts of the external object were relayed from one sensing body part to the next. At the end of this process, an image of the external object—without a corporeal equivalent— would be relayed to the common sensibility. The common sensibility would deliver its own representation of the object to the imagination. That is, Descartes was beginning to juxtapose a chain of sense impressions and physical resemblance to the task of cognition. And, yet, he was still puzzled by how the mind made sense of the myriad impressions it had received: Sometimes [cognition] receives images from the common sensibility at the same time as the phantasy does; sometimes it applies itself to the images preserved in memory; sometimes it forms new images, and these so occupy the ( 24 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

imagination that often it is not able at the same time to receive ideas from the common sensibility, or to pass them on to the locomotive power in the way that the body left to itself would. In all these processes the cognitive power is sometimes passive, sometimes active; it plays the part now of the seal, now of the wax; here, however, these expressions must be taken as merely analogical, for there is nothing quite like this among corporeal objects.37 In this scheme, cognition worked as a command post that filtered sense impressions, as well as the imagination’s noncorporeal reconfigurations of these sense impressions and common sensibility. It read the images it received while, simultaneously, generating its own images for the imagination to consider and then transform into nonphysical images. Descartes’s early understanding of cognition featured the mind juggling multiple representations: some old, others new; some that seemed drawn from the senses, and others that were not. But none of these images were direct replicas or pictures of the outside world; all had undergone a process of sensational and cognitive alteration. But sensed impressions alone, Descartes implied, clouded thought. Reason divided problems—such as the senses, in general, and optical perception, in particular—into their simplest terms. Each division, he insisted, “should be pictured in our imagination entirely by bare figures. Thus it will be perceived much more distinctly by our intellect.” “Bare figures” disciplined the mind more readily than descriptive pictures; streamlined images would ensure a smoother, more direct translation of the sensed object to the mind’s interpretation of that object. In Rule XVI, Descartes offered further counsel for how to keep the mind focused: “As for things which do not require the immediate attention of the mind, however necessary they may be for the conclusion, it is better to represent them by very concise symbols rather than by complete figures.”38 Together, these passages prop up abstract figures—diagrams and letters—as cognition’s essential helpmeet.39 Such reduction ensured a mind free of distractions. But during the eighteen years between the Regulae’s first precepts and Joannes Maire’s publication of the Discours and the Essais, such distractions constituted Descartes’s search for knowledge. The philosopher was confronted with the stubborn fact of the senses, their figuration in pictures, and the mind’s ability to throw any manner of representation into disarray. (For instance, during his travels in Dordrecht, he watched a professor of anatomy struggle to put words to the dissection of muscle and bone.)40 He refined his ideas about the sequence of physical, physiological transformations through which the body sensed an object and the mind then received information about it. He replaced the analogy of cognition as wax with the blind man’s batons and effectively eliminated the physical impression that could be conveyed from the external object to the eye, from the eye to the mind. (The mind would now have to rework the sense impression back into an image.) Descartes began to chart an even the picture multiple  ( 25 )

more pronounced series of representations between media, which first started with the external object bending light and that bent light then hitting the eyes and proceeding on to how the eyes continued to refract those rays until they suddenly met at the retina. That meeting triggered a vibration of the nerves that would travel to the pineal gland, which would then be translated into immaterial thought for the mind.41 This concatenation of mechanisms produced representations that were suffuse with materiality until they reached the center of cognition. As Descartes would soon describe in the sixth part of Discours, the mind wove a web of empiricism and deduction: I have hardly observed a single particular effect which I cannot at once recognize as capable of being deduced by man in many different ways. But my greatest difficulty usually is to discover which of these modes the effect is dependent upon; for out of this difficulty I cannot otherwise extricate myself than by again seeking certain experiments, which may be such that their results are not the same if we explain the phenomenon in one mode and then explain it in the other.42 The entirely “bare figure” would no longer suffice, and the graphic possibilities for the new philosophy abounded. Descartes used the sixth part of the Discours to confess that nature’s laws required a process of knowledge making rather than the tired set of categories that had long guided Aristotelian investigation. The mind disciplined by the Regulae played but a minor part in this process. Because the mind was now set to weigh figural information alongside intellectual distillation, Descartes and Van Schooten Jr. filled the Essais with pictorial variety. The book’s figures were the products of moment-​to-​moment assessment. Using a method that preserved the complexity of encountering, processing, and thinking about nature, they mirrored the analytical flux of a mind firmly situated in the world.

Inscribing the Rainbow Nowhere was this new approach better exemplified than in Descartes’s explanation of the rainbow. While there remains some dispute about how much the philosopher extended his method to any of the Essais’ chapters,43 Descartes derived great satisfaction from the way he applied it here: “The rainbow is a marvel of nature so remarkable, and its cause has been so curiously sought out by great minds of all eras, and [yet] so little known, that I could not have chosen a more appropriate topic with which to show how, by my method, we can secure knowledge about those things which have yet to be had by the writings we have.”44 What distinguished Descartes’s explanation—apart ( 26 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 9 (top left)  René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 255 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637). Woodcut. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RESM-R 76. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Fig. 10 (bottom left)  René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 258 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637). Woodcut. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RESM-R 76. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Fig. 11 (above)  René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 263 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637). Woodcut. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RESM-R 76. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

from his boasting—was its range of analysis and the manifold combinations of geometry and figure that constituted it. The discours started with a man looking out onto a rainbow (see fig. 3) and moved on to a much-​abstracted experiment with a prism (fig. 9).45 It then imagined a microcosm of matter as pearl-​like corpuscles that vibrated and rolled as a result of the pressure of light (fig. 10), only to switch back to the prism experiment and then settle, for a bit, on an abstracted geometric construction of a raindrop (fig. 11). The raindrop was further reduced to two tables of geometrical-​cum-​ trigonometrical analysis before a look back at the prism experiment and a final pair of landscapes—one featuring a man admiring an upside-down rainbow (fig. 12) and the the picture multiple  ( 27 )

Fig. 12  René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 268 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB 336029. Photo: The Huntington Library.

other depicting another man looking at the rainbow produced by a mechanical fountain (fig. 13). Together, these images plotted an analytic arc. They crystallized the most salient moments of a text that moved energetically from the macroscopic to the invisible to the abstract and then back again—a method that deconstructed the problem so as to reconstruct nature’s phenomena—and, ultimately, to exercise a new natural philosophy. Descartes and Van Schooten Jr.’s radical array of images was precisely what earlier attempts to explain the rainbow lacked. In De refractione optices (1593), Giambattista della Porta relied on a handful of diagrams, most of which looked like protractors (fig. 14), to claim that the appearance of the rainbow was solely the product of a series of refractions. Mimesis played no part in this figure; not even in the semicircle AC that corresponded to a colorful iris. The Italian polymath was guided by the assumption that every appearance of a rainbow would be the same as the last, which meant that all mechanisms of the rainbow, likewise, would be the same. His rainbows were the consequences of cloudy days, when rays of light shone forth from the sun (A), casting themselves onto clouds (FM), which would then refract those bent rays along parallel line segments (OB, PB, and FB) to an “oculum” stationed at point B. The rainbow, he then concluded, consisted of a continuum of colors that spread between points F and M.46 Della Porta’s diagram presumed a strict division of epistemological labor. The descriptive, the figurative, and the mimetic could not help in the explanation of this light-​based phenomenon. Optics—and, along with it, the behavior of light—was ( 28 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 13  René Descartes and Frans van Schooten Jr., page 270 from Discours de la méthode . . . (Leiden: J. Maire, 1637). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB 336029. Photo: The Huntington Library.

generally presumed to adhere only to a geometric rubric set down by Euclid, Ptolemy, and Alhazen.47 Della Porta’s third-​person universalizing narrative did everything to counter erratic, untenable observation; it avoided the historical particulars of witnesses, places, and specific instances of the phenomenon. And as deduction in the mold of the Euclidean axiom, his diagram followed suit. It was just the kind of image that would have conformed to Descartes’s early regulae for diagrams best suited for the mind’s contemplation. But, by 1637, such radical suppression of the world would no longer do. Instead, Descartes and Van Schooten Jr.’s multiplicity of representational strategies depicted the philosopher’s subjective exploration of the problem and the high degree of variability it encompassed. In the early lines of the discours, Descartes took a cue from Pont-​à-​Mousson professor Jean Lereuchon’s Recreations mathématiques (1624) and accounted for all the varieties of rainbow that one might see. He reminded his readers that there were rainbows in the sky, rainbows produced by fountains, and even smaller rainbows that appeared when water was spritzed before our eyes.48 This inventory allowed the philosopher to specify the key objects of his investigation: how rays of light acted on drops of water and how those rays of light hit the eye.49 Descartes then claimed to have crafted an experiment to investigate drops of water as the common denominator for all these rainbows. (Never mind that Alhazen had devised the experiment centuries earlier.50) On a bright day, he turned his back on the sun and held up a big round glass bowl—a giant artificial raindrop ready to refract the sun’s rays. When he the picture multiple  ( 29 )

Fig. 14  Giambattista della Porta and unknown engraver, page 202 from De refractione optices (Naples: Jacob Carlinus, 1593). Woodcut. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2564–066. Digital image: The Internet Archive.

lifted the bowl up to a particular height, he saw a full, bright, bold band of red appear toward the bottom of the bowl. Even when he moved the bowl to the right or to the left, the brilliant red remained in place. And whenever he moved the bowl up or down, he discovered that it disappeared. But when he moved the bowl slightly higher than its initial height, he could see a red dot form a little closer to the top of the bowl and on the side closest to him. And, soon, he discovered that this coveted spot was the result of a forty-​two-​degree angle, produced by both an invisible line that extended from the bottom of the bowl to his eyes and another invisible line that extended from his eyes to the ground beneath his feet. As Descartes unspooled his narrative, he continually referred to Van Schooten Jr.’s first rainbow picture, identifying the experimental glass bowl as BCD and his eye as point E. Descartes was already setting up the critical terms of his investigation: the specific experiment, the physical phenomenon that organized geometric analysis, and himself as intrepid investigator. But Van Schooten Jr.’s accompanying figure was no mere illustration of Descartes’s text (see fig. 3). Its main player was a man—outfitted in a skirted doublet and ready to brandish his sword—who was merely admiring a rainbow. He seemed to look up at a large circle that had been stamped on top of the dots upon dots that stood in for a colorful arc-​en-​ciel. And his lines of sight were inscribed across the picture. All these graphic elements compressed the experience of seeing a rainbow in the sky: the revelation that the drop of water was the site of the light’s refraction, the experiment that Descartes had performed with his glass bowl in order to magnify the phenomenon of reflection ( 30 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

and refraction, and the subsequent geometric analysis that Descartes had performed in order to arrive at the forty-​two-​degree angle. And all these various woodcuts would have remained disparate narratives if not for Descartes’s constant recourse to himself throughout his text. His own point of view, his subjective work through the problem, unified and collapsed this analytical itinerary. And, yet, the little figure cannot be described as a portrait. Certainly, it identified a category of man, a kind of musketeer. But Descartes’s words moved between the faceless man, the unmarked field, and the radical synthesis of information they effected toward a higher degree of specificity. The sky was designated with the letters A, F, and Z; the water-​filled bowl was represented by circle BCD; and “mon oeil” was simply point E.51 In his larger narrative, the conditions of experience and the boundaries of experiment consisted of the man Descartes looking at a rainbow; the same was true within the confines of the picture. However, because Van Schooten Jr.’s pictorial details were sparse, the picture could serve, simultaneously, as a depiction of what Descartes had done and as a generalization of nature’s laws. The philosopher was offering nothing less than a subjective geometry for apprehending the world. Now Descartes could begin to account for all instances of the phenomenon. His experience, instead of some transcendent geometry, provided the initial parameters of his analysis. To move toward a mechanical and physical explanation for the rainbow’s appearances required a further breakdown of the problem—one that acknowledged that rainbows were also generated by prisms (see fig. 9). He described an experimental mise-​en-​scène in which a prism sat on a shelf; a small slit that had been gouged out of that shelf, just underneath the prism’s base; rays of light passing through the prism; and, on a blank sheet of paper pasted onto the wall underneath the shelf (PHGF), the rays “paint[ing] all the colors of the rainbow, [such] that they always paint the color red at F, and blue or violet at point H.”52 The figure of a prism casting a rainbow onto a wall, complete with a bald-​faced sun, had nothing in particular to do with any subjective geometry. Van Schooten Jr. curbed specificity and reduced any physical description to geometric shape. Nothing but fine black lines distinguished the solid prism, the wooden shelf, and the thick wall from one another; even the geometric line that traced the invisible force of light was made of the same stuff as the prism’s outline. The observer of the experiment was no longer a point on which the geometrical construction hinged; indeed, the observer was no longer pictured. But Descartes preserved elements of subjectivity by emphatically framing his discussion in the first person (“me souvenant qu[e],” “j’en ay consideré,” “j’ay observée,” and “j’ay appris”).53 This voice effectively saddled the image with a descriptive mode, despite the picture itself being all abstraction and symbol. Experience and the world’s physical objects continued to dictate geometric analysis. After having accounted for both indoor and outdoor varieties of rainbows, the fundamental question about the phenomenon remained: What causes the colors to the picture multiple  ( 31 )

appear at all? The pictorial answer required a clear departure from the first image of the man and his rainbow and a complete mental reversal from the picture of the prism on the shelf. The abstractions of Descartes’s mind had to be built into tangible figures (see fig. 10). The philosopher explained that with this figure of spheres and their subtle chiaroscuro, Van Schooten Jr. had attempted to picture an “understanding [of light] as an action or movement of a certain quite subtle material, which we must imagine as little balls that roll in the spaces of earthly bodies. I conceived of these balls as rolling around in various ways, according to a diversity of determining causes.”54 Matter’s subtle particles were completely invisible if not nonexistent. Thus, to produce a convincing argument, Van Schooten Jr. turned to the tricks of figurative representation, relying on the seemingly unquestioned efficacy of mimetic resemblance. Descartes’s thinking about matter was thus made to look as though it were tangible, visible and present in the world. This maneuver had deep implications for the kinds of pictures that Descartes believed were suitable for the mind to contemplate; it also expanded the field of images that he thought the mind could generate as it thought. Again, the methodical mind had to negotiate between the sensible and the geometric, but what was astounding was its having to do so even when it came to objects of pure intellection. The Regulae’s dictum of bare figures and streamlined symbols no longer held. It was but one of multiple graphic strategies for working through natural-​philosophical problems. When the mind was piecing through the universe and imagining its fundamental properties, the techniques of mimesis had to be made available for representing the noncorporeal work of the mind. At this juncture, Descartes refrained from using the first person and instead encouraged his reader to “think of ball 1234 being pushed from V toward X.”55 The “I” alone—and, thus, Descartes’s subjectivity alone—required support in establishing universal principles. By invoking his reader, Descartes created a collective subjectivity that was based on the figurative representation of the invisible, all in the name of introducing the underlying mechanisms that generated something as visible as the rainbow. From the invisible was rendered a shared experience. As Descartes pulled his reader away from what was visible and available to every eye (rainbows in the sky, perhaps even prisms resting on wooden shelves), Van Schooten Jr. framed his corpuscles with the whiteness of the page. This helped readers focus on Descartes’s narration of the image, which followed a corpuscle such as 1234 as it hit a waterline (marked YY), and acquired spin. Descartes explained that particle 1234 would then be surrounded by other corpuscles—some of which, like Q and R, moved toward area X with some amount of force and others of which, like T and S, would move toward X with less force. These neighboring bits of matter would also affect the rotation of corpuscle 1234. From there, Descartes concluded that the rainbow’s colors were merely the result of how quickly “the parts of subtle matter, which transmit the action of light, tend to turn . . . in such ( 32 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

a way that those which tend to turn more create the color red and those which tend to move only a bit cause the color yellow.”56 To cap his statement and to affirm its universality, Descartes placed his explanation within the larger realm of experience: In all of this, reason aligns itself so perfectly with experience that I do not believe it could be possible, after having understood the one and the other, to doubt that the thing is as I have just explained. For, it is true that the feeling we get from light may be caused by the movement or inclination to move some other material which touches our eyes, as many other things evince, it is certain that the many movements of this material must [in turn] cause in us many sensations. It is not possible to find anything in prism MNP which can produce colors.57 To merge experience and reason—and thereby enlarge subjectivity’s script from one man to include that man and his readers—was a bid to make the new philosophy a viable means of investigating nature. Obdurate objects needed to be probed by reason, and heightened abstractions of prisms, like MNP, had to be complemented with figured thought, such as corpuscle 1234. Only after having divided the rainbow into its most basic elements, only once Descartes had established the wide range of pictorial modes through which thought could be materialized, could he and Van Schooten Jr. return to a barely figured geometric diagram (see fig. 11). The philosopher and illustrator scaled up their investigation, moving from subtle corpuscles of matter to the individual raindrop. Hearkening back to the first picture of the discours, their new raindrop was the previous raindrop / glass bowl rotated forty-​five degrees to the left. Through it, philosopher and illustrator began to probe the appearance of the double rainbow. They wondered why the primary rainbow (whose colors were bolder and appeared below the secondary rainbow) could only be seen when the angle made by the raindrop, the observer’s eyes, and the ground beneath the observer’s feet was forty-​two degrees. In their figure, straight geometric lines described the trajectory of one ray of light EF as it moved from the outside to the inside of the raindrop and then followed its refraction at point F, its reflection at point K, and its arrival at point N. From point N, Descartes described, there were two different paths the ray might take: first, it might leave the drop of water and hit eye P, which would then see the primary rainbow, or second, it might reflect to point Q, from which the ray of light would refract back outside of the drop of water and travel to another eye at point R, which would then see the secondary rainbow. At R and P were two eyes, furnished with lids and brows, that stressed the visible world (eyes could themselves be seen) and the subjectivity of vision. Van Schooten Jr. included a geometricized ray of light that failed to result in the appearance of any rainbow. (If, for example, the picture multiple  ( 33 )

ray EF were not refracted at point F, it would go straight to the edge of the raindrop, along dotted line FG.) He also included radii AC and CD as well as line segment CI that built scaffolding for more precise geometric analysis. Despite these intricacies, the eyes maintained the rainbows as physical phenomena whose appearance—whose nature—was contingent upon a viewer, because the position of the eye defined whether either the primary or secondary rainbow would appear. Then, much like Van Schooten Sr.’s measurement of two peaks, came a series of trigonometric functions bound to autopsia. Striving for exactness, Descartes sought to understand the range of angles at which the primary rainbow would appear for the eye at P and those that produced the secondary rainbow for eye R. The tables he includes bear out these calculations.58 Their parameters were based on the law of refraction that the philosopher had already set down in Dioptrique: namely, that the proportion between AE, HF, and CI were useful constraints for measuring the refraction of a ray of light hitting a waterdrop.59 Descartes reported the range of angles and line segments that he had derived from his geometric construction and, thus, provided detailed support for how he had [taken up my] pen and made an accurate calculation of the paths of the rays which fall on the different points of a drop of water to determine at what angles, after two refractions and one or two reflections, they will come to the eye. . . . And then I found that after one reflection and two refractions there are many more rays which can be seen at an angle between forty-​one to forty-​two degrees than at any smaller angle; and that there are none which can be seen at a larger angle. I found also that, after two reflections and two refractions there are many more rays which come to the eye at an angle of fifty-​one to fifty-​two degrees than at any larger angle, and none which come at a smaller angle.60 Multiple strategies of representation had secured epistemological certainty: the raindrop needed to be reduced to a circle; the invisible path of the ray of light needed to be traced as it was refracted and reflected in the raindrop/circle; a series of geometric line segments, which did not pertain to any concrete, physical matter but described the physical configuration of the light ray and the waterdrop, needed to be added onto the geometric construction; the geometric construction had to be reduced to a trigonometric equation in order to extract the subtle geometric configuration that governed the appearance of the rainbow; and figurative eyes had to stand in for the specter of subjective observation. With all these representational modes at their disposal, Descartes’s readers were now equipped to make mental adjustments to Van Schooten Jr.’s figures—to essentially ( 34 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

reason with and transfigure the philosopher’s own woodcuts. Descartes returned to an earlier figure—the prism (see fig. 9)—to explain how the thickness of the refracting body caused the primary rainbow’s colors to appear always in the same order. He instructed his reader to imagine that the blank sheet of paper at FGH had now been replaced by an eye. As this eye looked up into the prism, it would notice how the prism bent rays of sunlight and created a spectrum of colors: “One will see red near the thickest part [of the prism] MP, and blue near N, because the red-​colored ray comes from point C, the part of the sun furthest from MP, toward F.”61 Descartes expected his readers to inhabit the picture and to conjure the succession of colors that he had described. Then, with a quick “and this same logic applies to the center of each drop of water,”62 he led his readers to graft the prism mentally into a raindrop. Descartes offered no other picture, explaining in his text that at the “thickest part [of the raindrop], being outside with respect to the colored points which form the primary rainbow, red will appear on the outside of that rainbow; and being inside with respect to those points which form the secondary rainbow, red will appear on that rainbow on the inside.”63 The reader was tasked with shuffling through the array of images in the discours, whether doing so in his mind or by flipping through previous pages. Descartes assumed that, at this late moment in his explanation, the only pictures that his readers would refer to were Van Schooten Jr.’s. All these subjective variations on figured geometry thus circumscribed the limits of the natural-​philosophical explanation. To affirm these modes of visual exegesis and conclude the discours, Descartes and Van Schooten Jr. added two more examples, the upside-​down rainbow and the rainbow fountain (figs. 12 and 13). Much about these two figures hearkened back to the discours’s first illustration. Common to all three landscapes was a man carrying a sword, his feet planted amid little tufts of grass, his gaze directed toward a rainbow. They also featured solid lines and dotted lines that mapped the reflection and refraction of the sun’s rays of light. But with these final figures, Van Schooten Jr. and Descartes no longer deemed the geometricized glass bowl / raindrop necessary. They had brought the problem back to a scale visible to the naked eye and concluded that the defining angle CBF would be forty-​two degrees.64 Descartes also noted the environmental conditions that must be in place to catch a glimpse of this marvel: wind cannot disturb the body of water; clouds must be gathered so as to prevent the rays of the sun from making direct contact with the drops of rain; and the eye must be positioned right in between the sun and the rain in order to actually witness the phenomenon.65 The final woodcut of this discours worked in much the same way. Descartes’s text mapped the coordinates of Van Schooten Jr.’s rainbow fountain: When water is spritzed from the openings of a fountain (such as ABC) and expands into the air as high as area R, and when the sun’s rays, coming from area Z travel in a straight line ZEM, the angle MER is around forty-​two degrees, and “the eye E cannot miss the rainbow at R.”66 The relationship the picture multiple  ( 35 )

between text and image in both examples is direct, one-​to-​one, and illustrational. Such alignment was won only because the mechanism and the geometrical-​trigonometric analysis of the rainbow had been accomplished and only because other kinds of representational modes had been explored. Trust in the mimetic and geometric conventions of practical mathematics could only be gained once Descartes’s old Regulae adage about bare figures corresponding to the mind’s invisible fodder had been methodically eliminated. Descartes and Van Schooten Jr. were thus at liberty to describe the visible world once again because they had so incontrovertibly altered the analysis of it. What set this discours apart from the rest was not simply how it hurtled toward a specific numeric value for a natural phenomenon. Descartes and Van Schooten Jr. had demanded that the examination of nature required a range of cognitive gymnastics through diverse combinations of image and text. As Descartes drew the discours to a close, he wondered at Messinian mathematician and astronomer Francesco Maurolycus’s unadulterated belief in observation. Maurolycus was supposed to have been the first to claim that the only angle from which an observer might see a rainbow was forty-​five degrees (and, subsequently, posited that the angle between the secondary rainbow and the viewer was fifty-​six degrees). For Descartes, that speculation had not been inquisitive enough, only “demonstrat[ing] how little faith we must place in observations which are not accompanied by true reason.”67 “True reason” was the matrix that supported the mind as it transformed a physical phenomenon into a set of geometrical constructions, trigonometric problems, and the mechanical laws of subtle matter. What constituted that matrix was a range of possibilities for putting figures down on paper and a willingness both to use abstraction to explain the visible and to employ figurative description to demonstrate thought.

Images of the Present Understanding the Cartesian method along these lines calls into question a recurring tendency: to identify Descartes’s “clear and distinct ideas” with a geometric minimalism and epistemic clarity that was furnished by a total retreat from the world. That interpretive custom has stubborn evidence to recommend it. In what has become one of the Discours’s most famous passages, the philosopher reports to having holed himself up in a Bavarian cabin and experienced three vivid dreams whose lucidity guided him toward his new epistemology.68 Descartes’s quasi-​nomadic restlessness—which saw him move from Leiden to Friesland, Utrecht to Amsterdam, and Groeningen to The Hague within ten short years—has been interpreted as further proof of his eagerness to avoid the distractions of society.69 However, more recent histories of the philosopher have attributed Descartes’s remarkable independence of mind—and even the cogito ( 36 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

itself—to a life lived as much as possible in seventeenth-​century society. To recover Descartes’s contemporary surround, these scholars have pointed to the philosopher’s enthusiastic contact with artisans and his pursuit of the crafting of things. They have caught Descartes in the thankless pursuit of a perfectly ground, perfectly curved lens;70 spotted him at Saint-​Germain-​en-​Laye admiring the grottoes full of automata and mechanical fountains and wondering at how they worked;71 characterized him as having been so frustrated with the chaos of the artisanal workshop (and his apparent protégé Ferrier) that he penned the fourth part of Dioptrique to get the artisanal house, body, and mind in order.72 Harold Cook has even dispelled the image of the sickly, bed-​bound French philosopher and built in its place a new Descartes—a highly social creature who wore flourishes of green silk cut in the fashion of his late king, Henri IV.73 Descartes the man and Cartesianism the philosophy were made from a thorough engagement with the world.74 What follows is a similar probing of some of the Essais’s images and an argument for their semiotic purpose. If previous pages have historicized the graphic mode Descartes put to work as an instantiation of his method, those that remain examine the men and objects that Van Schooten Jr.’s figures signified. Here, I attend to traces of seventeenth-​century culture that Descartes and Van Schooten Jr. incorporated into the new philosophy. As Descartes himself put it: “Books—at least those whose reasons are only probable, and which have no demonstrations, being composed of and bloated by the opinions of so many diverse men—do not apprehend the truth as much as the simple reasoning that a man of good sense can make of the things which present themselves to him.”75 Reading the Essais’ pictures alongside this statement results in a loose portrait of the sorts of men who could capably and skeptically import a figured geometry into natural philosophy. It also amounts to a prescription of the cosmopolitan objects that would further this new scientia. Descartes and Van Schooten Jr.’s rainbow landscapes offered up a willing, if somewhat vague, picture of the “man of good sense” (see figs. 3, 12, 13). Between the three pictures, the contemplative gent varied as much as his accessories, from skirted doublets to capes, from broad-​brimmed hats to bare heads. But one feature remained consistent: the side-​sword—an armament that designated many kinds of fighters. In the Netherlands, the side-​sword was the sign of a member of the French noblesse de l’épée, a mercenary of the sort Descartes had been to Maurice, or a regular foot soldier called to do his part.76 It decorated the nobleman’s son who may have been trained at one of Europe’s new military academies.77 It was liable to signal that he had witnessed— or even participated in—the brute depravity of war, as Jacques Callot had pictured it in his unrelenting cycle of prints Grandes misères et malheurs de la guerre (1633).78 But it was also just as likely that the sword accompanied the sort of soldier who had been the subject of kortegaarde (guardroom) scenes, a genre of painting made most popular the picture multiple  ( 37 )

by a circle of Amsterdam-​based schilders (painters) during the 1620s and 1630s. Many such pictures caught soldiers making merry at one inn or another while playing cards, throwing back steins of beer, gambling, or reveling in plunder. But Simon Kick, who was active in Amsterdam between 1624 and 1652, gave form to a more refined type of warrior. His Company of Soldiers in a Guardroom (undated) registered a middle-​class taste for soldierly refinement and wonder (fig. 15). Having abandoned large tomes and weaponry to the floor, Kick’s soldiers marvel at the glinting curve of a glass goblet; in their eagerness to plot their next siege, they grab the nearest drum and use it as a surface for sketching a map.79 Van Schooten Jr. and Descartes’s admirers of rainbows were forged from similar mettle. Equipped to engage with the enemy, they also indulged their curiosity about the world. It was this flexibility—this independence of mind— that characterized the new natural philosopher. As Van Schooten Jr.’s pictures indicated, this seeker of knowledge would continue expanding his store of experience. Besides reaching out to anatomists, who dissected the brains of oxen and sheep, and apart from circulating among artisans, who ground glass and constructed telescopes,80 he would use the enhanced techne around him to revive older analogies about the behavior of light. Foremost among such devices was the camera obscura. Earlier in the century, in Ad vitellionem paralipomena (1604), Kepler had likened the darkened chamber to ocular mechanics. The cornea acted as a hole drilled into the walls of such a chamber, and the retina, much like the back wall onto which the camera obscura’s image was cast, received (and thereby perceived) an upside-​down image of the external object. For most men, direct encounters with these machines were rare. The construction of such a darkroom was no menial task; it required practitioners to devote an entire room to the enterprise, piercing a hole through one of its walls and committing it to darkness.81 Though the German mathematician had elected not to picture such a chamber in his own text, his analogy proliferated. Christoph Scheiner confirmed as much in a plate for Rosa ursina (1626–30): the analogy worked because it maintained a distance between the art of the camera obscura and the nature of the eye.82 But, the philosopher that Descartes envisioned would take such thinking one step further and picture the analogy anew (see fig. 5). He would embed the eye in one of the camera obscura’s walls and declare it a mechanical aperture. In this play of light and shadow, the boundaries between art and artifice were erased.83 Descartes’s new philosopher would similarly remake old Aristotelian warhorses, comparing, for instance, the refraction and reflection of light to the bounce of a ball.84 The twist was to outfit the analogy with a popular seventeenth-​century activity: tennis. Scholars like Friedrich Reisner, who had compiled Alhazen’s treatment of vision alongside that of thirteenth-​century scholar Erazmus Witelo (articualted in Opticae thesaurus, 1572) and alongside Kepler’s responses to Witelo, had revised the analogies to oars in water and visualized geometrical abstractions. When Descartes’s new philosopher took ( 38 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 15  Simon Kick, A Company of Soldiers in a Guardroom, n.d. Oil on panel, 122 × 122 cm. Photo: Johnny van Haeften Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.

on the subject, he would recast it as a series of one-​sided tennis matches at the edge of a lake. Reflection would become a tennis player about to hit a ball onto a solid, highly reflective surface (see fig. 2); refraction was turned into another sporting man launching a ball toward a body of water, which would then refract the ball’s path;85 and, finally, a weaker kind of refraction was embodied by a third player hitting the ball across a taut piece of fabric.86 All the while, the game of tennis was flourishing across Europe. Among students at Leiden, it was a choice study break and a prime opportunity for swindling freshmen less adept with the racquet. Amsterdam had twenty courts for its townsmen and bugermeesters; Paris had as many as 250.87 By putting the analogy in such contemporary terms, the new natural philosopher avoided ancient wisdom on ancient terms. This picture reinforced that this comparison—and his graphic method for recuperating natural knowledge—operated in the present tense. With other analogies came worldliness. Not only was Descartes’s nonscholastic thinker likely to be caught admiring wine in a glass, he might have also glimpsed a wine press in Bourdeaux, La Rochelle, or the Loire Valley, only to realize that the trickle of juice through half-​pressed grapes could embody the movement of light through a world full of subtle particles (see fig. 4). Such encounters would have marked him as more than a consumer of wine—one who had likely had more direct contact with the viniculture that was prospering across Europe and in its colonies. Perhaps he was a wealthy Dutchman who had invested in distilleries in France. Maybe he had seen business boom as he imported casks of Canarian malvasia into the United Provinces via Tenerife. Or perhaps, as a French vintner, he had chuckled at Lord Delaware and his vignerons’ failed attempts to plant hundreds of vines in Virginian soil.88 Whatever his lot in life, this kind of man did not stop at enjoying the fruits of his world; he was attuned to the process by which they came to his table. All this was to insist on a present juxtaposed with the past. More conspicuous indictments of the ancients were latent in illustrations about sight that we have already seen. Recall the blind man with his batons (see fig. 8). That figure, with his loose-​fitting toga and coarse bare feet, was a relic of an old world. Passing from one place to another with only his impoverished senses and a hunchbacked dog, he embodied the ancients’ blindness to reason. Blindness extended, too, to those philosophers who sought to emulate the ancients. When, for example, unthinking proponents of a fallen age—marked by their supposedly sagacious, unshorn beards and stoic hair in disarray89—stepped into the interior of a camera obscura, their eyes were revealed to have been gouged out; their wits unaware of the mechanisms of sight that an investment in techne could reveal (see fig. 5). Absence of insight was all the ancients had to offer. Descartes’s natural philosophy required a form of representation in which semiosis and mimesis could unite in mutual dependence. These pictures gave space to the new philosophy’s admixture of reason and experiment, observation and thought. In order ( 40 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

to upend the now-​suspect assessment of the world’s qualities alone, new pictures—and emended understandings of such pictures’ capacities—were imperative. This reeducation would have to start from the basic constitution of any picture—a point that Descartes relays in the fourth discourse of Dioptrique: As we see in engravings, a little ink here and a little ink there on a piece of paper look to us like forests, towns, people, and even battles and storms; and although they make us think of countless different qualities in these objects, it is only due to their shapes that there is any real resemblance. And even this resemblance is very imperfect, since engravings represent bodies of varying relief and depth on a surface which is entirely flat. Moreover, following the rules of perspective, they often represent circles by ovals better than by other circles, squares by rhombuses better than by other squares, and similarly for other shapes. Thus it often happens that in order to be more perfect as an image and to represent an object better, an engraving ought not resemble it.90 It may seem that this characterization of pictures as brute matter would diminish Van Schooten Jr.’s figures. Such a materialist view was liable to bleed the Essais’ tennis players into mere inkblots; dissolve its rainbows into black confetti; unravel that cross section of the brain into filament after filament. But sensitive printmakers could grasp that the pictorial description of an object found in the world required the artist to radically distort that object and lay it across a flat page.91 Such transformation spoke to the physical incommensurability between the two-​dimensional confines of the picture and the fugitive stuff of three dimensions. Nature was to be understood as absolutely different in kind and power from its illustrations. Thus, a figurative picture may have gestured toward the experience of nature, but, fundamentally, it evidenced how an artist had wrought a series of mental reconfigurations to ready nature’s objects for pen and ink. This fact—that the most mimetic picture is a drastic reformulation of the outside world—allowed Descartes to place stock in so many illustrations as he forged his new philosophy. He no longer had to worry that pictorial description would invoke the Aristotelian dependence on qualities. Every figure was a product of a mental alteration and, once on the page, could also become a condition, a synoptic device, for other modes of analysis. Descriptive forms were vessels produced by thought about the world that then conditioned further probing of that world. Such devices had to be tempered with analytical equipment, such as the subvisible particle, the surveyor’s line, and the geometer’s construction, each of which had been held apart from the old natural philosophy. So many graphic combinations wove corresponding varieties of thought together, rendering the new physics into a multivalent art—a picture multiple.92

the picture multiple  ( 41 )

2 The Composite Universe

T

he first full-​page illustration in Principia philosophiae (1644) offers a series of paradoxes (fig. 16). Descartes described it as “the visible world,” where celestial vortices press each other into shape and comets cross the skies, leaving paths of stardust in their wake.1 In each vortex, matter whirls around in an ellipse. Our solar system—marked with an S—stands at some remove from any cosmological center, and it is but one of many thrumming worlds. But there is a perplexing mismatch between this picture and what little early moderns could see: the picture does not record the heavens as observed through a telescope, and it seems to have no patience for the starry nights encountered by the naked eye. What is more, Descartes was in no hurry to offer any mathematical justification for the features of this picture. And the woodcut bears none of the hallmark figured geometry of the philosopher’s pictures for the Essais. Descartes was quick to characterize this as a “hypothesis.”2 So how could a hypothesis be visible? And why depict it in this way? These questions become all the more compelling when we recognize the picture as an unflinching novelty. Up until Principia, the universe had never looked like a field of undulating dots. Comets did not disturb thick blankets of celestial matter. No other picture had combined so many abstractions in order to figure the unseeable reaches of the firmament. Oddly enough, Principia’s first readers did not comment on the picture’s newness, much less concern themselves with what a unique and strange graphic achievement it was.3 Instead, they assumed the woodcut was intelligible and worried over whether its contents made natural-​philosophical sense. One Monsieur Le Conte fretted over how the philosopher had explained the movement of particles from one end of a vortex to another and the trafficking of matter between vortices.4 Henry Moore and subsequent critics contended with the physical, metaphysical, and theological implications of Descartes’s proposal, never referring explicitly to the picture itself.5 The French

Fig. 16  René Descartes and unknown engraver, page 78 from Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam: Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1644). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB 700392. Photo: The Huntington Library.

philosopher’s critics could recognize what the woodcut described—the indefinite heavens, with matter swirling in liquid motion—and were quick to rebuke its claims. But they seemed to take the picture itself as a foregone conclusion. Centuries later, scholars have tended to follow these early respondents’ lead. Less interested in how dotted lines amounted to a possible depiction of the universe, they have looked past this woodcut’s composition, opting to evaluate its metaphysical and epistemological repercussions. E. A. Burtt’s astonishment generated the model for decades to come: The vortex theory was . . . a most significant achievement historically. It was the first comprehensive attempt to picture the whole external world in a way fundamentally different from the Platonic-​Aristotelian-​Christian view which, centrally a teleological and spiritual conception of the processes of nature, had controlled men’s thinking for a millennium and a half. God had created the world of physical existence, for the purpose that in man, the highest natural end, the whole process might find its way back to God. Now God is relegated to the position of first cause of motion, the happenings of the universe then continuing in aeternum as incidents in the regular revolutions of a great mathematical machine. . . . The world is pictured concretely as material rather than spiritual, as mechanical rather than teleological.6 Here, a concept rather than a picture shatters natural-​philosophical convention and theological certainty. In describing “the vortex theory” as “an attempt to picture” that gave way to a “world [that] is pictured,” Burtt seems to engage unconsciously with the woodcut but does not seize the opportunity to examine the woodcut itself. The habit stuck. In the next six decades, scholars marveled at the metaphysics Descartes’s new world offered but not the picture that defined that new world.7 More recently, philosophers and early modernists have brought their eyes back to the vortices print, reading the philosopher’s metaphysics and epistemic allegiances alongside it. Brian Baigrie, the forerunner of this line of inquiry, sees the woodcut as a tool for sharpening a mechanical probing of the visible world.8 Dmitri Nikulin asks if this is thought or thing: “As extended, [the] geometrical figure should belong to the res extensa; but as thinkable it should belong to the res cogitans.”9 Christoph Lüthy argues that, despite the philosopher’s insistence on “clear and distinct ideas,” the image is nothing of the sort: Descartes tries to deduce, as far as possible, physical consequences from metaphysical principles, but he is early on forced to infer backwards from the phenomena to their supposed principles. Downward deductions and the composite universe  ( 45 )

the upward hypotheses do not, however, always interlock. It is in this twilight zone that Descartes’s illustrations perform their function: where the indeterminacy of “clear and distinct ideas” threatens to lead to an impasse, Descartes feeds the outer eye, and thanks to it the recipient mind, with a type of “clarity” whose epistemological source is excitingly unclear. . . . What is shown [in these pictures] is neither deduced nor given by experience. It is as if Descartes, playing the role of the malin génie, wished to feed the reader’s mind with false realities.10 Still others—Claus Zittel above all—understands these pictures as evidence of Descartes’s heavy reliance on the imagination.11 In all these treatments, the vortices’ visual instantiation acts as a springboard for exploring and deepening the contours of Descartes’s philosophy. The philosopher’s innovative mind, treated as an abstraction, remains their object of interest. So one is still left to wonder about this visual innovation and the pictorial resources at Descartes’s disposal when he set about making his picture. To put this as a question: What were the specific configurations of visual culture available to the philosopher that could make such a curious and bewitching illustration so legible? For a century and a half, Northern Europe had been an excellent crucible for creating pictures of nonexistent, never-​before-​seen things. Hieronymus Bosch was foremost among its experts, of course. His versions of heaven, hell, and the many landscapes in between featured creatures whose avian tails began where their insect legs ended, whose human heads gave way to tree trunk arms and cracked-​egg asses. As Joseph Koerner puts it, Bosch’s fantastical beasts “affirm the thing-​ness of what—profoundly—is not a thing.”12 That artist’s extraordinary hybridities called back to flora and fauna that he and his viewers could see in nature, but they depended on the capacity of pictures to seamlessly relate the imagined through the language of the real. Western European natural historians inherited these strategies, prolifically describing rhinoceroses and camels and faraway lands with a credible visual grammar—one that made what they themselves had never and would never see into information about nature’s genius.13 Descartes’s vortices were likewise shaped by looking at what was familiar and trustworthy. This chapter uses the woodcut’s composition to investigate its pictorial logic—and thus, its historicity. Each section below accounts for its basic elements: an abundance of dots, myriad dotted lines, dotted ellipses and polygons, and a thin but purposeful frame. These formal building blocks can hardly be mistaken for cavalier scribbles on a page: the illustration’s woodcutting alone was an arduous, considered task. (Imagine the control required to carve away enough wood to make one stamp of a dot possible. Then imagine having to create hundreds of dots more according to Descartes’s design specifications.) Given the company Descartes kept, the attention he paid to picturing the Essais, and the range of images woodcutters themselves were typically employed to ( 46 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

produce, I assume the philosopher and his unnamed illustrator were inclined toward pictorial sensitivity14—and that they expected their readers to share it. They were depending on these elements remaining legible even as they worked together to make a picture of something never before seen. Art historians will rightly suspect that the rubric for my account is borrowed from Baxandall and his essay “Piero Della Francesca’s The Resurrection of Christ.” There, Baxandall broke down a useful term, “pictorial events”: “ ‘Pictorial’ in that they are proper not just to seeing but to seeing a depiction on a plane surface; and ‘events’ in the sense that one may be led to consider them as outcomes from conditions. These events must be part of a sense that the picture has a character beyond the sum of its parts.”15 With his usual eloquence, that preeminent art historian laid out a system of analysis comprised of isolating pictorial ingredients and their effects so as to demonstrate their contributions to a larger whole. In taking up this approach, I wish to stress both the independence and interdependence of Descartes and his illustrator’s pictorial decisions. And following Baxandall still further, I am eager to demonstrate how the illustration’s visual contingencies stimulated an important aspect of Descartes’s emergent epistemology, especially his treatment of the subject-​observer.16 I save this for the chapter’s end. Although my analysis connects the vortices woodcut to new materials and an alternative set of methods, I believe this chapter’s intentions are not terribly radical. My interpretation, like so many others, details how Descartes’s universe departed from the knowledge generated in the schools of seventeenth-​century Europe. It seeks to explain how Descartes made his philosophy understood to his first readers. By taking the picture as an unusual puzzle, it asks how nothing more than a profusion of dots and a thin black frame could have aimed at, and succeeded in, overturning several centuries’ worth of received wisdom. The period’s graphic conventions answer that question. After all, as detailed below, Descartes and his illustrator used pictorial devices that were credible and ubiquitous. Visual idioms in early modern astronomy, cartography, and Euclidean geometry—the workhorses of the early modern printmaker—possessed representational alacrity. Only as recognizable signs of clarity, liquid materiality, and limitlessness could they invent a subversive pictorial strategy. Descartes’s world was viable—his world was visible—because its essential parts were self-​evident. But they were self-​evident only because Descartes and his illustrator had seen so many pictures before making this one.

I The entirety of the vortices picture is comprised of a single kind of mark—the modest little point—made many times over. But nowhere in Principia does Descartes explain the composite universe  ( 47 )

Fig. 17  Christopher Clavius and unknown engraver, page 13 from Opera mathematica (Moguntiae: Sumptibus Antonij Hierat excudebat Reinhard Eltz, 1612). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB 750653. Photo: The Huntington Library.

the pictorial strategy he and his illustrator employed. “I will strive,” pledges the philosopher, “to make visible that all the World’s Bodies are composed of three Forms, which can be found in Matter, as three different Elements: the Sun and the fixed Stars are composed of the first of the Elements, the Skies that of the second, and the Earth alongside the Planets and the Comets that of the third.”17 The sentence works as a legend for the picture, identifying each dot as the second element. But to stop there would be to fail to account for the epistemic sum of all these parts. Each little speck acts as something more. Take vortex S, for example. What about S conveys that it is a vortex? It would seem that its dots amount to a series of concentric ellipses, and these appear to give shape and dynamism to the celestial phenomenon described as the solar vortex. But how was it possible for a seventeenth-​century viewer to recognize these shapes as the unfurling of the universe—multiple universes, in fact—across the picture plane? How was it that a bunch of dots strung together could look like matter in motion? Again, Descartes’s text alone did not provide the answers to these questions. Instead, the techniques of the early modern picture maker—and the application of those techniques across an array of printed pictures serving a wide array of fields—had given the humble point an astounding epistemic capacity. Descartes could rely on this simple mark to serve as the generative device from which all concepts, shapes, and worlds sprung; the critical tool for mapping out the relationship between objects in space; the modest instrument through which the ultimate immensity, God, could be invoked. First, geometry. Descartes and his fellow seventeenth-​century readers had learned an innovative version of the subject: that the point was a constructive object—a catalyst for thought and action.18 When Descartes was a student at the Jesuit collège La Flèche, his mathematics instructors had likely taught out of Opera mathematica (1612), compiled by the mathematician and astronomer Christopher Clavius, who had set the post-​Tridentine curriculum for Jesuit schools (fig. 17).19 At the beginning of this Euclidean text, Clavius had pictured a lone point; setting it off from his text ( 48 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 18  Samuel Marolois and Hans Vredeman de Vries, page [60] from Opera mathematica ou oeuvres mathématiques (Amsterdam: Chez Ian Ianssen, 1627). Engraving. ETH-​Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 9211, https://​ doi​.org​/10​.3931​/e​-rara​-1070; Public Domain Mark.

and giving it wide margins and sufficient space to be contemplated as an object unto itself. The mathematician had described it as the fundament from which all lines were issued, the indivisible part derived from nothing, having neither length nor width nor depth.20 It was an invisible, intangible object made visible. The concept was not just the province of intellectual abstraction. In applied geometry, the point was the terminus a quo for drawing the shapes on which fortifications and dykes would ultimately be built. For Oeuvres mathématiques (1617)—the choice manual on fortification building for Prince Maurice’s regiments21—Samuel Marolois and his illustrator, Hans Vredeman de Vries, visualized this importance of the point with aplomb. On the book’s first plate, it served as the stimulus for an evolving succession of geometric constructions: lines, arcs, right angles, parallel lines, and polygons (fig. 18). It was the means for beginning to build and know the world.22 Descartes’s woodcut maximizes all this potential. Like crude, diffuse pointillism avant la lettre, its points generate all other forms on the picture plane. But these dots do not overlap to create a blur of shade and shadow (let alone color). Instead, each point has breathing room. It is the space between one point and the next that activates a relationship from which the kinetic ellipses comprising vortices F and S emerge. the composite universe  ( 49 )

Fig. 19  Samuel Marolois and Hans Vredeman de Vries, page [656] from Opera mathematica ou oeuvres mathématicques (1614–15). Engraving. ETH-​Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 9726, https://​doi​.org​/10​.3931​/e​-rara​ -10733; Public Domain Mark.

The point was also a key device for creating spatial complexity on a single picture plane. Seventeenth-​century Dutch picture makers who sought to defy the constraints of the two-​dimensional page practiced a form of this that did not center on the real-​life viewer of the picture plane: which is to say, their points related the world of the picture plane unto itself. This was distinct from the single-​point perspective of their quattrocento Italian counterparts and differed from northern illusionists who specialized in extreme distortions like anamorphosis.23 As early as the 1630s, northern artists had been experimenting with the intercalation of multiple points of view within their pictures. In Interior of the Church of St. Bavo (1636–37), Pieter Saenredam had painted the amalgamation of different perspectival points—one for looking down the nave, another for marveling at the church’s vaulted ceilings, and still more for inspecting the bases of its massive columns—thereby revealing more about the depth of a space and how it was populated than catering to the viewer’s eye through single-​point perspective.24 In his own Perspective (1604), Vredeman de Vries had explored the same principle even more emphatically. In plate 28, every point constructs a funhouse rife with sight lines (fig. 19). The walls, the ceiling, and the floor are gridded, inviting mathematical analy­ sis of the space. But it is not this continuous grid alone that gives the space its depth. The relationships between figures and objects, as designated by points on their bodies ( 50 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

or surfaces, do that work, too. Take, for instance, the visitor walking through the back door: he sees all, his eyes serving as points out of which no fewer than eleven visual rays are emitted. All those rays define how this figure might clock the various elements of this room or how many steps he would have to take to get to the open door on the left. Then there is a second figure stretched out on the floor, whose chest—as though pinned down by a dotted X—gauges the distance between (1) the wall on the left, (2) the corner at which that wall and the floor meet, (3) the ground closest to the viewer, and (4) the threshold through which the figure on the right enters. Even a seemingly random point on the back wall—just to the right of the number 6—defines the height of the door on the right. These points relate to one another not simply because they have been placed in the same space. They build a spatial complexity where the proximity of one point to another ultimately constitutes kinetic possibility and how this space might accommodate coming and going (and remaining at rest). Principia’s woodcut traffics in a similar network of relational points. Each dot is defined by the points that surround it, creating, in turn, the picture’s illusions of three-​dimensionality. From these relationships, a complex, multidimensional space, possibly inhabited by multiple perspectives, begins to emerge. Just as the point generated perspective and multiple dimensions, it also brought the ultimate unfathomable space to bear: God’s. For early modern Jesuits, like those who had initially educated Descartes, the point was a revelatory tool for spiritual humility. So contended Antonius Sucquet, who, in his highly imagistic and illustration-​filled spiritual meditation Via vitae aeternae (1623), reasoned: “When the soul [anima] summons itself in the presence of God, & considers God, as He was before the creation of the world, filling everything, & sufficient in Himself alone, & such that [the soul] is alone with Him, & in Him, who alone is everything, & alone sufficient, [the soul] is like a mere dot & pours all its love into Him.”25 For Sucquet (by way of Spanish Jesuit ascetic Luis de la Puente), it was the minuteness of the point that determined God’s endless immensity. A spot of faith made the soul possible.26 By the time Descartes published Principia, the philosopher’s awe at God had already been deemed insufficient. In his Second Replies to Objections to his Meditations, the philosopher had already had to defend his belief in a God of “absolute immensity, a simplicity, and a unity.”27 Any reader familiar with Suquet’s “mere dot” could bring divine comfort to Descartes’s new world.

II If the single point could characterize spatial relationships between human beings and their surroundings—and even their communion with God—the dotted line marked the composite universe  ( 51 )

out a particular instantiation of the passage of time: the provisional. In one variation, the dotted line signaled the process of constructing a figure. P. Le Mardelé’s 1622 French translation of Euclid’s Elements offers a prime example in the solution to problem 7, proposition 12 (fig. 20): “Given a straight, infinite line and a point which is not on it,” Euclid challenged, “form a perpendicular line.”28 In Le Mardelé’s figure, a bold, unbroken line demarcated the shape and its initial conditions, while the dotted line denoted the process of constructing the shape. Le Mardelé was imagining the geometer taking up a compass, placing its spike on point C, and creating a 180-degree arc. This arc intersected with the given line at two points, D and E. From there, the geometer constructed two lines, DC and EC, which formed a triangle with line segment DE. DC and CE were also depicted as dotted lines. Le Mardelé then pulled a line down from C to point F on line segment AB and used bold line segments AB and CF to form the sought-​after perpendicular. The figure was not a mimetic depiction of the making of a perpendicular line (compasses do not typically leave dotted arcs). Rather, Le Mardelé recruited the broken line to represent the act of working through the problem. He distinguished between the form of a figure that offered an answer to the problem and the temporary scaffolding that helped build toward a solution. For Le Mardelé, geometry was not given but made. This was also the case for the practical mathematics instructors who taught engineers how to plan for the built environment. Take the example of Pièrre Bourdin, a Jesuit instructor who had begun to teach at La Flèche the same year Descartes matriculated there.29 In his Le cours de mathématique (1645), Bourdin used the broken line to remind his pupils that the most durable walls depended on provisional geometry (fig. 21). In his instructions for designing fortifications, Bourdin depicted a basic foundation with bold lines (in the illustration’s figures A and 2), and he used dashed lines to depict further elaborations (in the illustration’s figures 3 and 4). Of course, once built, the three-​dimensional structure would bear no trace of this interim work. Still, the dotted line marked out a crucial moment in the life of the drawing and an early step in the eventual warding off of enemies. In propaedeutic texts like Le Mardelé’s and Bourdin’s, the dotted line educed the somethings that would come from nothing. Everything, from the most basic of shapes to the barracks that would defend against a well-​equipped opponent, started with a drawing, and no drawing could magically appear polished and complete. The dotted line was the critical mark for an idea-​in-​the-​making. No wonder the dotted line was so indispensable for giving shape to Descartes’s “hypothesis.” It dramatized the temporary nature of Descartes’s proposal. And it rendered Descartes’s universe into nothing more than a picture—though one that might lead to something as solid as a fortress. In early modern geometry, dotted lines also visualized intellectual reinterpretation. For Marolois, they could pull two-​dimensional shapes into three dimensions. ( 52 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 20 (top)  P. Le Mardele, page 69 from Euclid, Les quinz livres des elements geometriques d’Euclide megarien, trans. P. Le Mardele (Paris: Denys Moreau, 1622). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB 707151. Photo: The Huntington Library. Fig. 21 (bottom)  Pierre Bourdin and unknown engraver, page [53] from Le cours de mathématique (Paris: Pelican, 1645). Engraving. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB753573. Photo: The Huntington Library.

Take figure 32 in this page of his Oeuvres, where four dotted lines connect to each of the four corners of two pebbled rectangles, forming a narrow box (fig. 22). This seems to have been deliberate. Marolois could have easily used solid lines to portray each of the edges of this box. But he chose a form of picturing that created something more than the sum of its two-​dimensional parts—a form that underscored the operation necessary for conjuring the illusion of depth and therefore rendering a thing-​ness that exceeded the limits of the page. But unlike Bourdin’s fortification plans, these dotted lines would not be disappeared. They held the transformation of the shape together. Dotted lines could also effectively reveal the underlying shape of three-​dimensional things. In Harmonices mundi (1619), Kepler used them to reveal the basic squares within complex three-​dimensional objects like tetrahedra, octahedra, and dodecahedra (fig. 23). These were reminders of geometries that would otherwise be invisible. Elsewhere, dotted lines could help calculate that which would otherwise resist calculation. In Arithmeticae libri duo (1625–26), Adriaan Metius offered up three tracts of land—labeled 4, 3, and 5—whose stubborn, jagged edges made their areas a challenge to define (fig. 24). By cutting each plot into a series of dotted polygons, calculating each polygon’s area, and adding them all up, Metius showed how an unwieldy challenge could be made manageable. He called each of these temporary lines a “lineam . . . fundamentalem” (fundamental line).30 There was so much more beyond what could be seen, and it was incumbent upon those who wished to know more of the world to find a graphic language for their analysis. The dotted line was a hermeneutics rather than an ontology. Across Descartes’s woodcut, the dotted line gives form to a hypothesis, suggesting its contours but never settling on any hard and fast definition. The picture’s play of three-​dimensional illusion against the stubborn fact of a two-​dimensional page is extraordinary. In vortices Y, f, and L, dotted lines expand like a bellows. They are worlds that press up against flatter cross-sections, such as S, F, and D, which share with the dotted lines in Bourdin’s rampart a preparatory, sketch-​like quality. Toward the bottom of the page, the broken line ORQ hearkens back to Kepler’s dotted squares, interrogating the interior of the vortex POQ and mapping its diamond-​like structure. In textbooks that made geometry useful, dotted lines were easy to miss. But the entirety of Descartes’s print is comprised of them, and the picture is impossible to imagine otherwise. The one straight, diagonal line A seems to summon comparison, making every dotted line look agile and impermanent—an indication of form rather than a confirmation of fixity. The provisional dotted line also afforded Descartes’s picture a sense of movement across space and time. Surprisingly, this was not owed to conventions in early modern mechanics, where motion was depicted with solid lines.31 Rather, the dotted line featured in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-​century astronomies tracked a planet’s itinerary around a star and distinguished one kind of movement from another. For ( 54 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 22 (top)  Samuel Marolois, page [62] from Opera mathematica ou oeuvres mathématicques (Amsterdam: Chez Ian Ianssen, 1627). Engraving. ETH-​Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 9211, https://​doi​.org​ /10​.3931​/e​-rara​-1070; Public Domain Mark. Fig. 23 (bottom)  Johannes Kepler and unknown engraver, page 181 from Harmonices mundi (Linz, 1619). Engraving. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB751763. Photo: The Huntington Library.

Fig. 24 Adriaan Metius and unknown engraver, page 165 from Arithmeticae libri duo et Geometriae lib. VI (Leiden: Elzevier, 1625–26). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB701557a. Photo: The Huntington Library.

instance, in Astronomiae instauratae progymnasta (1610), Tycho Brahe had memorably employed the technique when he described the orbit of the moon around the earth— that is, when he had begun to disintegrate solid orbs.32 But Kepler offered a subtler and more daring twist (fig. 25). When diagramming the still-​contentious Copernican universe for Mysterium cosmographicum (1596), he pictured the circular orbit for planets inscribed within a Platonic solid. Which meant that the dotted line signified the mathematical adjustment necessary for the planets to travel along perfect geometries, even though the geometries were somewhat off-​kilter compared with one another. These techniques shape the reading of the vortices woodcut. In cross-sections F and S, concentric ellipses appear to borrow from both Tycho’s orbit of the moon and from Kepler’s quiet, calculated shift of planetary movement; they are solar systems with objects that swirl around their centers. Furthermore, Descartes’s picture lacked solid circles for comparison. These dotted concentric worlds invited mathematical analysis, which could then be used to explain anything that seemed amiss about the picture.

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Fig. 25  Johannes Kepler and unknown engraver, page 181 from Mysterium cosmographicum (Tübingen: Georg Gruppenbach, 1596). Engraving. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB708373. Photo: The Huntington Library.

III Dotted lines were also regularly featured in period maps, depicting the irregular movement of specific bodies from one place to another. Nicola van Sype’s representation of Drake’s historic circumnavigation of the globe was a case in point (fig. 26). Made in Leiden around 1583, it was a world picture whose dotted line traced a circuitous snail’s path from England to the Cape of Good Hope, to the Molucca Islands and the tip of “Terra Girantin,” and all the way up the coast of what would later come to be known as Baja California.33 Van Sype’s repetition of Drake’s brig—at Ariea (in present-​day South America), St. Lucia, and up near Java—conveys the stopping and starting of the journey. The blank white band clears a path through the seas, displacing all the water around it and giving form to the route that Drake and his company took. Van Sype’s

the composite universe  ( 57 )

Fig. 26  Walter Bigges and Nicola van Sype, opposite title page from Expeditio Francisci Draki . . . (Leiden Apud Fr. Raphelengium, 1588). Engraving. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB9074. Photo: The Huntington Library.

dotted line plots the inching of the boat from one edge of the world to the other, figuring not just terrains covered but time passed. Descartes applies this form of picturing to the movement of one body—a comet— across his ever-​shifting, geometrically inflected universe. The Principia fireball wends its way down from the upper right-​hand corner of the picture to vortex N thanks to an elegant, snaking pathway, à la Van Sype’s depiction of Drake’s route. Its stop-​motion animation—with pauses at 4, 2, and N—is reminiscent of the fits and starts with which Van Sype had described Drake’s brig. Celestial matter’s displacement is just as material—just as fluid—as the wake behind a ship. Moreover, the path of the woodcut’s comet can be read itself as a giant dotted curve. This was distinct from most seventeenth-​century depictions of comets, which featured multipointed stars with cones of fire bursting behind them.34 For Principia, the philosopher and his illustrator crafted a button-​like dot, syncopating its rhythms against the regular ellipses of each vortex. And speaking of syncopation, for readers who knew something of sheet music, the path of the comet may have even invoked seventeenth-​century musical notation. Each small black particle had the potential to summon allegro-​like celerity, while the larger unfilled circles—like Descartes’s comet ( 58 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 27  Sébastien Basson and unknown engraver, page 417 from Philosophiae naturalis adversus Aristotelem libri XII ([Geneva]: Rouiere, 1621). Woodcut. Göttingen, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Historisches Gebäude, 8 PHYS I, 4200 (1). Photo: Niedersächsische Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen.

at each of its weigh stations—might represent slower notes, something more akin to andante.35 Musical or not, the comet and its path were about being moved.

IV But what, apart from the comet, is moving in this picture? Descartes’s ekphrasis only went so far as to describe these little dots as a multitude of God-​given bits: “We can contemplate that God devised all the matter which is in space AEI, into an immense number of small parts, which He had moved, not only each around its own center, but also, all together around center S; & in the same way, that He moved all the parts of matter which are in the space AEV around center F, & so forth with the others; in such a way that they comprised many different vortices.”36 Further in Principia, Descartes qualified this description with a few pictorial consequences. For one thing, the philosopher was clear that these small parts should not be mistaken for “the chaos of the Poets”—that is, atoms.37 Thus, Descartes and his illustrator had to find a means of depicting all this matter in motion while avoiding the usual dot-​matrix form that atoms took.38 Two counterexamples suffice. In Philosophiae naturalis adversus Aristotelem libri XII (1621), Sébastien Basson had christianized Democritus and Lucretius by organizing his atoms into a pair of dotted crosses (fig. 27).39 And in Labyrinthus sive de compositione continui (1631), Libertus Fromondus parodied the attempt to explain atomism by drawing aimless zigzags across a field of points. Fromondus had concluded that, in its utter disregard for Aristotelian substantial forms and reasonable geometry, atomism was little more than nonsense.40 Of course, Descartes and his illustrator could not let go of representing matter in motion as little dots on white paper. Accordingly, they traded atomism’s rigid, angular nonsense for undulating dots that swelled and contracted like accordions. Even the the composite universe  ( 59 )

edges of each vortex—like the boundaries IE between vortices f and S, or EV between f and F—were free from any regimented lining up of dot after dot. They were made from a cushion-​type scrunching up of little points such that the teeming particles from one vortex could encounter the teeming particles of another. Descartes also described his universe as a plenum and, thus, void-​free.41 Picturing a universe thick with matter was, likewise, an entirely new proposition. In my research, I have yet to find a single picture before Principia that attempted to depict celestial plenitude. This makes me wonder, alongside Lüthy, at the conundrum that Descartes and his illustrator faced: “Black dots on white paper: there is of course nothing plenist about this visual representation.”42 However, philosopher and picture maker did have plenty of voids to work against. Filling a page with black ink would have been far too reminiscent of Robert Fludd’s silent pre-​Creation void.43 But inverting that scheme would have left them with a blank page demanding to be filled.44 Given these limits, when Descartes declared “that the Skies are liquid,”45 he made a deliberate choice, calling back to precedents that visualized a world teeming with matter and absent absence. Two of astronomy’s examples were most relevant here. First was Tycho’s cosmology. In 1588, the Danish astronomer’s compromise between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems had revived the concept of the heavens’ fluidity. (His cosmological model had required the orbit of Mars to intersect with the orbit of the sun, which seemed a direct challenge to Aristotle’s crystalline celestial spheres. To make his model more palatable, he revived the Stoics’ fluid heavens.46) Others, like Robert Bellarmine, had been toying with the idea of a celestial medium in which planets swam like fish in the sea.47 But it was Tycho’s version that began to appear in the French Jesuit instructional tradition—the very one in which Descartes’s own young mind had been forged. Turn back to the La Flèche instructor Bourdin’s catch-​all manual on geometry, fortifications, and the natural world. There, Tycho’s universe was a swirling mass of squiggles, all contained by the circumference of a closed orb (fig. 28). The picture established an important criterion for the depiction of a fluid universe: a multiplicity of marks whose collective pattern mimicked the curving of a circle. In the vortices woodcut, elliptical paths followed suit. The other example of liquid skies came in a contemporary—or near contemporary—depiction of the Milky Way. The term via lactea had ancient roots; in Greek and Roman mythology, Hera’s milk had created the band of stardust staining the sky.48 But it was not until Johann Bayer’s oft-​reprinted Uranometria (1603) that an illustrator found a way to effectively capture it. Printmaker Alexander Mair’s Milky Way was a subtly luminous river of densely packed dots that spilled out across plate after plate of Bayer’s picture book (fig. 29).49 If Bourdin had furnished a visual shorthand for a fluid cosmology, Bayer and Mair had offered a reliable technique for representing a celestial phenomenon that had long been considered liquid-​like. For their vortices woodcut, ( 60 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 28  Pierre Bourdin and unknown engraver, SD, from Le cours de mathematique (Paris: Pelican, [1645]). Engraving. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB753573. Photo: The Huntington Library.

Descartes and his illustrator combined both. Just as Bourdin had done for Tycho, each vortex is comprised of a fully coordinated, concentric array of dots. Regular spacing implies that certain matter swirls around one center while other matter swirls around other centers. At the edges of each vortex, dots accrue, pouring over and flowing into the pull of each vortex’s center. And much like Bayer and Mair’s Milky Way, the trail of the comet meanders across the picture, skimming galaxy after galaxy. Ultimately, these graphic strategies also invoked the representation of bodies of water back on earth. (One might be tempted to think back to Descartes’s very own rainbows and their rainfall, but these read as static curtains rather than the vortices illustration’s roiling hydric galaxies.) Countless examples of the dotted seas would have been at Descartes and his illustrator’s disposal. Beginning with early incunables, such as the 1478 Roman edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia, and through maps by Abraham Ortelius and Van Sype, cartographers were accustomed to describing bodies of water as near-​indefinite fields of coordinated dots. Painstaking technique distinguished land the composite universe  ( 61 )

Fig. 29  Johannes Bayer and Alexander Mair, plate 10 from Uranometria (1648; reprint, Augsburg: Christoph Mang, 1603). Engraving. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB487000:0364. Photo: The Huntington Library.

from sea, not just marking out where one ended and the other began but also signaling a qualitative difference between the elements that comprised them.50 Van Sype’s map was a workaday instance, but the world map in Typus orbis terrarum (1570) was notable (fig. 30). Ortelius and his woodcutters had included successive lines of longitude onto their oceans, creating the illusion that this field of dots echoed the curvature of the earth. Descartes and his illustrator learned this lesson well. The bits of matter swirling at vortices Y, f, and L appear as liquid sculpted by the shape of each world. They spread and wash over the entire picture’s surface. Each vortex appears as a pool in and of itself, its waves rising and falling (vortices Y, f, and L), its edges rippling out and stopping (vortices F, S, and D). Descartes and his illustrator were not just picturing particulate matter or objects in motion but the fluidity of the skies and the viscosity of the seas: heaven and earth. ( 62 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 30  Abraham Ortelius, Typus orbis terrarum, from Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570; reprint Antwerp: Joannes Baptista Vrients, 1603). Engraving. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB32659. Photo: The Huntington Library.

V These “black dots on white paper” achieve two more crucial effects. The first is their shade and shadow, which differentiates each vortex from its neighbors. For instance, vortices Y, f, L, and N are not an indiscriminate field of black specks; their dotted lines fan out, creating bellies, for each vortex. When the dotted lines bunch up, they conjure the illusion that each vortex folds under itself or possesses depths hidden from the surface of the picture plane. The second effect is that the picture looks as though it has captured the universe in medias res. This is in part due to the dotted line and its capacity to evoke the trajectory of a single moving object. But throughout the woodcut, each dotted line contributes to a pattern of matter in motion that, in turn, animates vortices in motion. This is a cosmology where each galaxy rises and falls and morphs. And before Principia, neither of these visual phenomena—the illusion of three-​dimensional galaxies and the illusion of galaxies constantly being reshaped—had ever been pictured by astronomers. Their graphic precedents lay elsewhere. the composite universe  ( 63 )

Fig. 31  Esaias van de Velde, Pad langs een boerderij, 1615–16. Etching, 69 × 102 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Rijksmuseum.

Both are owed to a technique found in every early modern printmaker’s toolkit: stippling. Mainly the province of engravers and woodcutters, stippling was (and remains) a process of grouping together dots rather than lines to achieve tonal effects across the surface of a picture. Italian engravers had introduced it a century earlier than Principia, mainly as a means of rendering the delicate sfumato devised by northern masters. (Giulio Campagnola’s print, Venus Reclining in a Landscape [ca. 1510], supposedly after Giorgione, brought the technique to prominence.) It soon spread throughout the rest of the Continent,51 so much so that, eventually, the Dutch verb stippelen (to prick)52 gave the English their word for the technique.53 By the middle of the seventeenth century, it was widespread across Europe and easy to recognize. Slight though it may appear, stippling is especially handy for adding depth and dimension to the representation of two categories of objects. The first are those things in the world with complex, variegated surfaces. Esaias van de Velde was one of the first Dutch etchers to employ the technique to describe treetops and bushes and even dilapidated ruins across his landscapes (fig. 31). But stippling migrated to book illustration when engravers wielded it to characterize things as inscrutable as natural philosophers’ faces. In Galileo’s portrait for a 1641 edition of Systema Cosmicum, celebrated Lyonnaise engraver Claude Audran stippled Galileo’s crow’s feet and jowls, the creases on ( 64 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 32  Claude Audran, author portrait from Galileo, Systema cosmicum ([Strasbourg], 1635). Engraving. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB701194, Vito Volterra Collection. Photo: The Huntington Library.

his forehead, and the fleshy triangle just between his eyebrows (fig. 32).54 These were areas of Galileo’s face that were just off-​center from the picture’s implied light source. Such underbellies of two-​dimensional objects made darkness a condition of light. In their vortices woodcut, Descartes and his illustrator mobilized the technique across their picture plane. For instance, the billowing middles of vortices Y, f, L, and N appeared spotlit, like Galileo’s forehead in Audran’s portrait, while the vortices’ sides and corners were relegated to denser shadows. That density, much like Van de Velde’s treetops, made some vortices appear as though they were bubbling up to a surface, while others hung back and floated. It was just as Descartes had described these phenomena in his text: “Visible heavenly bodies of all kinds differ from one another not only in size but also in the fact that some shine by their own light while others only reflect light that comes to them from elsewhere.”55 To make something as inert as a picture capture evanescent, gossamer phenomena, printmakers turned again to stippling. Dutch printmaker Willem Buytewech’s clouds the composite universe  ( 65 )

Fig. 33  Willem Pietersz. Buytewech, The Road at the Edge of the Forest, plate 4 from Verscheyden Landtschapjes (Amsterdam: Claes Jansz. Visscher, ca. 1616). Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

are exquisite examples.56 In his Verscheyden Lantschapjes (Various little landscapes) (ca. 1616), cirrus clouds spread across the sky and hover quietly above the horizon (fig. 33). At once present, intangible, and fleeting, their soufflé-​like airiness stands in direct contrast to the forest of spindly branches and claw-​shaped leaves below. This language of the ephemeral is everywhere in Descartes’s picture. When taken to describe the bulbous parts of vortices f, Y, and L, it is almost as though each of these bubble-​like galaxies is about to burst and disappear. When depicting flatter swirls like F, S, and D, these dots seem to pulse in and out, as though each vortex may dissipate under the pressure of all the vortices that surround it. Together, all these dots inscribe a precarity into the picture, making the philosopher’s imagined world look as concrete as a dream. Though Descartes had insisted his vortices were hypotheses, he turned pictorial illusion in his argument’s favor. “If you think the hypothesis is false,” he submitted, “I’ll still think that I have done something worthwhile if everything deduced from it agrees with what we observe; because in that case the hypothesis will be as useful as if it were true—useful, that is, in enabling us to manipulate natural causes so as to get the effects we want.”57 All his woodcut’s carefully orchestrated dots appealed to the ( 66 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

northern seventeenth-​century visual principle of naer het leven (after the life). Or, rather, I suggest the inverse may be what was more important. Descartes and his illustrator crafted their picture to look truthful because it appeared to have been made through the visual observation of objects in the world. The vortices woodcut assimilated a pictorial argument for empiricism—an argument often predicated on illusions that were spread across a two-​dimensional surface, a point to which I will return below. With nothing more than the repetition of a single type of mark, the picture wove together a battery of visual techniques that helped printmakers create heaven on earth, that aided geometers in imagining three dimensions from two, that helped viewers imagine objects that might appear and then quickly fade from view. In Descartes and his illustrator’s hands, stippling was the descriptive tool that shaped a universe that was, at once, substantial, viscous, ephemeral, and hypothetical. Though their picture was the first of its kind, Principia’s readers understood it because it affirmed the many idioms earlier pictures had established and made utterly conventional.

VI There was still one more visual conundrum Descartes and his illustrator had to work out: How to picture the boundlessness of the philosopher’s universe? In part II of Principia, Descartes wrote his world as one beyond our own: “We also know that this world, or the extended material which comprises the universe, is not the end of the universe because anywhere we look, we can still imagine beyond its indefinitely extended spaces. We do not only imagine it but conceive it as being as we imagine it.”58 But picturing this world’s indefiniteness would seem to pose a challenge to the physical limits of any flimsy piece of paper. Happily, there was an omnipresent device whose business was visual metonymy, where the depiction of one part could stand in for and imply the whole. That was the black frame.59 Northern printmakers were especially aware of what it provided to their pictures. Unlike some of their counterparts to the south (who encrusted their allegories with elaborate borders derived from illuminated manuscripts),60 the majority of northern printmakers recruited this simple form to circumscribe all manner of printed subjects, from Buytewech framing his landscapes to anonymous etchers summarizing historic scenes, from an anonymous depiction of the execution of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt to Rembrandt’s portrait of his mother, finished with a simple square.61 These unadorned frames imparted a directness to the picturing of their content—documenting death rather than allegorizing it, recording an aging mother’s face rather than idealizing it. The border of the vortices illustration does similar work. The frame emphasizes the picture’s off-​centeredness, making it seem far from posed or composed. And though the composite universe  ( 67 )

the comet makes a special appearance, the frame encases the rest of the picture, giving it the look of a field of protean forms whose motion and shape-​shifting have been arrested at a rather unremarkable moment. What is more, in  seventeenth-​century Holland, where Descartes lived and published, the frame was an object of fascination. In some instances, it was a deceptive tool for creating economic value (and desire) for lackluster pictures. Painter and draughtsman Willem Schellinks rhymed about this: “Whoever pearls for their shells proclaims / And Paintings for their Frames, / Will let his heart by this frame be purloined.”62 But others were less troubled, acknowledging that frames themselves begged avid looking. Descartes’s own correspondent, Huygens, proclaimed: “When the Painting’s done, then let the Frame, / Wherefore many a fool the Painting prizes, Its turn be allowed.”63 Which is all to say, Dutch readers especially understood that while some frames were themselves worthy of attention, all frames had the potential to change the pictures they contained. For such astute viewers, a woodcut with its own frame could initiate several more layers of mediation. The borders of any picture differentiate the illusory pictorial field from the physical space occupied by the viewer.64 But with a print, there are finer distinctions to be made. The frame of a painting is almost always separate from its painting: the two objects are made from different materials, with the frame’s work beginning where the painting’s ends. But printed frames double this remove in compelling ways. The printed frame is made of the same materials as the picture it contains. And such was the case with the vortices woodcut. Its frame separated the world of the picture from the page on which it was printed. But what prevented the frame from being read as a feature of Descartes’s vortices-​filled universe was not the simple fact of its existence but, rather, its semiotic value. It could be a border because readers were practiced in recognizing printed frames as borders. They could see that these bold black lines were different in kind and quality from all the dotted lines that made Descartes’s universe. At the same time, the frame was also critical for helping readers imagine that the many-​worlded universe within the picture extended well beyond what the woodcut had been able to capture. Another cartographic example may help here. Take this workaday map from the 1603 English edition of Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terarrum, depicting Dauphiné (or Delphinatus) in the South of France (fig. 34). Here, cartographer Stephanus Ghebellinus captures the Rhône to the west, the Alps to the northeast, and the Durance running south to west in the lower right-​hand corner. But the map strives to communicate that this is but one of many regions in France and one of many places in the world. First, it avoids centering one particular town, mountain, or river. Instead, it lays out a regional territory, putting all its features on the same plane. Second, it props up the landscape by ninety degrees, meaning that, if Van de Velde’s or Buytewech’s etchings lingered over horizons and expanses of sky, Ghebellinus and Ortelius created a ( 68 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 34 Abraham Ortelius, Delphinatus, from Abraham Ortelius: His Epitome of the Theater of the Worlde (1603). New York Public Library, Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division. Photo: New York Public Library. https://​ digitalcollections​.nypl​.org​ /items​/510d47e4​-668e​ -a3d9​-e040​-e00a18064a99.

bird’s-​eye view in which their landscape unfurls across the page, parallel to the picture plane. And, third, the frame helps do what Meyer Schapiro identifies as the “bring[ing] out [of ] the partial, the fragmentary and contingent in the image . . . The picture seems to be arbitrarily isolated from a larger whole and brought abruptly into the observer’s field of vision. . . . [T]he framed picture appears to be more formally presented and complete and to exist in a world of its own.”65 The three main concerns of this map— the lack of a central focus, the bird’s-​eye view parallel with the picture plane, and the suggested extension of the region described beyond the frame itself—were combined specifically for this regional form of cartographic picturing.66 Furthermore, a picture like this was believable because it represented a part of the world that had been visited, measured, and sketched. This was not some conjuring of the nonexistent but rather the representation of a real part of the world that the viewer might never see. The vortices’ frame activates a very similar kind of logic. In previous sections of this chapter, I have emphasized the primary building blocks of the picture—the point, the dotted line, and its stippling. Ghebellinus and Ortelius’s regional map provides a much-​needed opportunity to reflect on how, once framed, the elements of the picture plane work together. First, there is no one vortex that claims the picture’s focus. Neither the earth nor the solar system provides a cosmological center. In fact, the woodcut’s sun is but one among many in a world among worlds. Even the comet, which would seem to be the picture’s protagonist, veers toward the middle but ultimately curves to the side. Its path meanders through the skies, like a river. Added to this, no element of the picture exists independent of any other. Dense stippling binds each vortex to every one of its neighbors. Even as vortex S expands, vortex f plumps up, and vortex Y reveals its corners; all these worlds are glued to the galaxies that surround them. This the composite universe  ( 69 )

results in a seamlessness that can be easily imagined to extend well beyond the picture plane. Likewise, each vortex creates the visual (and cognitive) expectation that each of its neighbors is a world unto itself. So while every vortex is, at base, a polygon made up of dotted lined, vortices Y and f appear as though they are just short of a corner, and vortex L looks like it is half missing. All these vortices seem to be in a state of incompleteness—an incompleteness that fully defined edges help correct. The same tactic applies to the slivers of vortices that can be found pressing against the picture’s frame. Each of these is a partial vortex whose half corners just barely indicate their existence. The frame reinforces that the picture is but a momentary glimpse of innumerable other parts of Descartes’s indefinite universe. To put the accomplishment of this woodcut in slightly different terms: it managed to picture a universe into existence simply by using dots, dotted lines, and a modest black frame. The strangeness, the radicality of the picture, was tempered by a deft coordination of visual elements whose frequent repetition encouraged the reader to infer a hypothesis that had not been visualized before. It intensified what theorist Louis Marin sees in every frame: an epistemological “edge and rim, frontier and limit.”67 In combining familiar ingredients in extraordinary ways, the vortices woodcut tested the limits out of which a plausible epistemology could be made. This picture was not an object unto itself. It drew on a raft of pictorial techniques from multiple domains of knowledge because its makers were highly attentive to their visual culture. The picture’s success at looking like something observed also relied on contemporary Dutch artists’ theorization of realism. In the first years of the seventeenth century, Karel van Mander had identified a dialectic that made northern realism possible: naer het leven and uit den gheyst.68 The first was the pursuit of a picture whose features were matched to (or mimicked) how the eyes saw an object in the world, no matter whether that object was a tulip, a hare, a sculpture of Hercules, a still-​life painting, or a drawing of a blowfish. Those types of pictures had the look of reportage; they were made to appear as though hands could draw exact replicas of what the eye could see. Uit den gheyst referred to works of art that evidenced a more forceful transformation of the mind’s mnemonic images, such as allegory and the depiction of myth. But Van Mander asserted that even the mind’s images continued to be shaped by objects seen in the world (those same tulips and hares and drawings of blowfish) because each mind processed its own personal archive of images, which was constantly informed by experiencing the world’s contents, whether natural or artificial.69 There was a seventeenth-​century Dutch sense of pictures being bound by time and space, implying, more specifically, that all pictures were contingent on when and where their makers lived and what pictures they had previously encountered.70

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Another contingency was the visual cultures in which the viewers—and in this case, readers—were immersed. Throughout this chapter, I have attempted to reiterate the sense making that Descartes and his seventeenth-​century readers applied to Principia’s vortices woodcut. This picture could only describe Cartesian matter’s constant flux because it asked readers to mine their own store of images and recognize an amalgamation of visual arguments gathered from pictures they had seen before. It asked them not to forget the old and familiar, because the old and familiar were helping to make something quite new. This, I think, recalls art historian Ernst Gombrich’s classic phrase, “the beholder’s share”: “A language of forms was ready to be projected into the inkblots, and it was new combinations and variations of these ideas which they desired rather than an entirely fresh vocabulary.”71 Every picture, from Jan van Eyck’s Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (1435) to the crudest doodle, depends on its viewers. And the meaning a viewer can make from a print or painting can only be derived from the peculiar ways she has moved through the world and the pictures of the world she has come to know. Both picture makers and their viewers labor under the assumption that they all draw on roughly the same pool of visual experience. I think Descartes was well aware of this, too, if only obliquely. That awareness makes it plausible to write a genealogy holding Descartes up as the precursor to Roland Barthes, who so famously proclaimed the death of the author.72 That origin story would seem appealing because we hear so much about the father of subjectivity as a rejecter of books, an overconfident, contemptible aggrandizer of the self, whose evangelism for the mind’s ability to generate something out of nothing was second only to his belief in the mind’s separateness from the body. Over and over again, we tell the story of a precocious thinker struck with revelation in a Bavarian cabin when, left to his own devices, he dreamt of a dictionary and a melon, concluding that thinking is being.73 However, being but a man, Descartes was, as Cook emphasizes, a man of his world.74 As the philosopher roved from one tiny town in the Netherlands to the next, he depended on a vast network of correspondents for shelter and on letters of introduction so he could connect his ideas to the world. Once he flung his books to the side, Descartes described himself as having “spent the remainder of my youth in traveling, in visiting courts and armies, in holding intercourse with men of different dispositions and ranks, in collecting varied experience, in proving myself in the different situations into which fortune threw me, and, above all, in making such reflection on the matter of my experience as to secure my improvement.”75 Philosophy depended on the exchange of minds full of particular experience. That made for a startling philosophical humility. One of Descartes’s most tender and stubbornly open-​ended passages appears in the preface to Principes, the 1644 French translation of Principia, and arrives at the same insight from a different direction: “The real fruit of these Principles is that we may cultivate

the composite universe  ( 71 )

them in order to discover more truths that I have not explained; & and also, to pass, little by little, one to the other, to acquire over time a perfect knowledge of all Philosophy and demonstrate Wisdom to the highest degree.”76 More wisdom required not a definitive list of truths but the patience to see that knowledge of the most immaculate order could only be achieved by recognizing that no single person could anticipate all truths. Perfect knowledge was a consequence of others extending Principia and tugging these principles into the future. Pictures were critical material for exercising this point. In his reply to Pierre Gassendi’s objections to his Meditationes, Descartes argued: When we look at a piece of paper on which some lines have been drawn in ink to represent a man’s face: the idea that this produces in us is not so much the idea of these lines as the idea of a man. Yet this would certainly not happen unless the human face were already known to us from some other source, and we were more accustomed to think of the face than the lines drawn in ink; indeed, we are often unable to distinguish the lines from one another when they are moved a short distance away from us. Thus we could not recognize the geometrical triangle from the diagram on the paper unless our mind already possessed the idea of it from some other source.77 This passage is reminiscent of the moment in Essais where Descartes identifies prints as being composed of nothing but blots of ink on a page.78 He asserts that it is the viewer’s mind, with her stock of knowledge and experience, that makes the portrait into a portrait. She need not have laid eyes on the flesh of the sitter, but she must be practiced in recognizing the conventions of picture making. He claims that even geometry’s basic shapes need their beholders to know a square is a square, a triangle is a triangle. Shapes, in general, may be God-​given. But they could only be identified thanks to a culture full of triangles. Complicated pictures thus required viewers fluent in multiple visual idioms. This was how the philosopher made his world visible. Here was a picture that had never before been seen, that sought to depict a universe incorrigibly unavailable to the eye. But, in fact, Descartes’s readers had seen it all before. In all its dots was a universe plural, a plenum fluid, and matter motile. Perhaps, at first glance, Principia’s readers may have taken the picture for a glimpse into Descartes’s own mind, but, in fact, the picture was nothing less than a reflection of their own.

( 72 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

3 Matters of Replacement

S

eventeenth-​century commentary about the pictures for the Essais and Principia can be hard to come by. In the fifteen years after the vortices woodcut was published, Descartes’s friends did not congratulate him for including it or any of his other illustrations; his enemies barely argued against the pictures in their published diatribes; and, more often than not, neutral observers seemed simply to leave them alone.1 Such silence might be interpreted as proof that the philosopher’s visual program had little impact. But just because there was so little explicit written response does not mean the pictures did not count. For starters, it is good to remember that in midcentury Paris—where this chapter focuses—writing about pictures was not the vigorous practice it would become in later decades. Art connoisseurs, whom one would expect to have had a great deal to say about unexpected illustrations, were not yet in the business of turning out exegeses on the cultural impact of printed images, whether loose-​leaf or book-​bound.2 And natural philosophers did not take to describing the consequences of new pictures, because, outside the classroom, natural philosophy was largely a verbal enterprise. Still, one would think that woodcuts as novel as Descartes’s would have inspired some kind of reaction. Researching that hunch has involved looking beyond the usual precincts of natural philosophy and art; it has required recongizing the cultural conditions that privilege some kinds of pictures over others. And, indeed, in the wake of the Essais and Principia, a handful of men did form surprising repertoires of woodcuts and etchings to adjust the new philosophy to cultures that had initially resisted it. Like Descartes, these early adapters left behind few descriptions of their figures, and they chose not to devote text to why or how their visual programs better advocated for the new philosophy than their predecessor’s. Rather, they remade his visual claims according to recognizable graphic conventions and took on the challenges his illustrations had posed to the evidence of visual experience. This chapter and the next chart

Fig. 35 Unknown sketcher, page 111 from Physique nouvelle de Jacques Rohault (1667). Pen on paper. Collection of Sylvain Matton, Paris. Photo: Fabien Marche.

a strange early modern phenomenon: the demand of Descartes’s pictures for a visual rather than verbal response. Rohault’s interpretation of Descartes’s oeuvre is an arresting example. The physicien, a known acolyte of the philosopher, is best remembered for the politesse of his midcentury salon-​style demonstrations. His entertainments fashioned physics for the cosmopolitan set, imparting wondrous spectacle to the new philosophy: he refuted the void with a copper syringe; he enlivened the mechanics of the eye with cardboard and crystal.3 But the experiments he recruited—and, importantly for my purposes, the figures depicting them—barely preserved any relationship to Descartes’s texts and images.4 Take this figure of a glass tear from one of his student’s notebooks (fig. 35). Neither the object portrayed nor the experiment it represents—a testing of the fragility of glass in order to describe the corpuscular motion that undergirded all materials— ever appeared in the philosopher’s treatises. What is more, Rohault himself had no hand in inventing the glass-​tear experiment. As historian and philosopher of science Sophie Roux notes, he tended to repeat parts of experiments that had originated with other, more inventive philosophers, and he borrowed the most dazzling aspects of their work ( 74 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

for his Wednesday afternoon audiences.5 Such recycling would seem to have strayed so far from the new philosophy as to have had nothing to do with it at all. This picture from Rouhault’s Physique nouvelle appears to have no right to be called a picture. More of a pictogram, its streamlined abstraction—plain, notational, underdeveloped, maybe even perfunctory6—says barely anything about the glass tear. But linger over it a while longer, and its development emerges as the result of a paradoxical sequence of transformations. Consider how it rejects Descartes’s coupling of description with mathematical analysis and how it does away with the illusionistic techniques that rendered a universe his readers could never hope to observe. Think back to the crucible in which it was forged: the sociable rituals of the salon, the conventions of an incipient culture of experiment. Now it seems all the weirder: how could a near-​diagrammatic abstraction reinforce the materiality of an invisible dictum? The figure begins to fascinate because at first glance, it appeared not to fascinate at all. Accordingly, this chapter reveals how the simplicity of Rohault’s visual output disguises a complex history. His figures’ intrigue—what turns out to be, to borrow another phrase from Baxandall, their “intentional visual interest”7—cannot merely be owed to their maker’s convincing showmanship. In France, the new philosophy was subject to pressures that threatened its survival. Catholic, Aristotelian university men had initially received Descartes’s ideas with suspicion. His matter in motion had especially troubling implications for their explanation of the Eucharist. As theologian Antoine Arnauld voiced early on—and as I will detail below—Descartes’s particulate matter was poised to undo the enduring, ancient foundation of the world’s objects on form and substance and was thus liable to echo Protestants’ perceived reduction of the sacrament to mere symbol—a problem that was visual in nature. Countering these claims required a reorientation of the new philosophy’s visuality. This was the work Rohault set out to do and that I explain here. Scholars have long characterized Rohault as eschewing the new philosophy’s metaphysical implications. His attention to the Eucharist has often been characterized as separate from his physics.8 It is true that in Traité de physique (1671), his important attempt to compile his conference demonstrations and make them available to readers beyond Parisian drawing rooms, Rohault failed to include any direct discussion of the Eucharist. And when he published Entretiens sur la philosophie (1671) three months later and included a reconciliation of the Cartesian and Thomastic-​Aristotelian interpretations of the sacrament, he seemed to separate theology from natural philosophy, taking special care to hold his demonstrations and their figures apart from any discussion of the divine.9 But taking Rohault’s explanatory figures seriously as responses to Descartes’s philosophy, thinking through the changes he made to them between his conferences and the publication of Traité, and connecting all this back to the broader Parisian surround for which they were produced encourages revisions to that story. matters of replacement  ( 75 )

The Eucharist itself, after all, was a conundrum of visual interpretation.10 The ritual of transfiguring bread and wine posed a relentless confrontation of sight versus belief: How could bread and wine have changed into Christ’s flesh and blood when they did not appear (or taste, or feel) different at all? Throughout this chapter, I contend that Rohault conscripted his figures to align the new philosophy with terms that resonated with the Catholic explanation of the Eucharist. So much of the following pages have to do with the compulsion to transform pictures, ideas, and objects in order to preserve them. Readers may already be wondering: At what point does the integrity of an original something go limp from so much reinterpretation and recalibration? After repeated and extensive retrofitting, when does the original thing cease to exist? These questions were active in Rohault’s culture, too, albeit in corners of that culture that may seem terribly remote from the matter at hand. By the time Rohault was delighting Paris’s well-​to-​do, Jacques Amyot had published a new translation of Plutarch.11 There, Rohault’s fashionable audience could find a lesson in how modifying an important object could maintain its integrity. For generations, Athenians had safeguarded the ship on which their mythic founder had sailed to Crete, slayed the island’s fierce minotaur, and rescued his men. “The ship on which Theseus set sail and returned,” Amyot’s Plutarch explained, “was a galliot with thirty oars. The Athenians preserved the ship until the time of Demetrius Phalereus, always removing old planks as they rotted, and putting new ones in their place. This has stirred disputes among philosophers such that this ship has become an exemplum of doubt. For some maintain that it is the same ship, while others, to the contrary, believe it is not.”12 Plutarch’s question—or, perhaps, Amyot’s interpretation of it—concerned the ship’s ontological status: Could a body of work remain the same if new objects, no matter how well-​fitting, were introduced to replace its defective parts?13 The question has everything to do with Rohault’s quest to support the new philosophy at midcentury. His visual program centered on substitution, where the best approach to preserving the new philosophy was to replace it with new objects, even if their underlying explanation remained the same. Of course, unlike the Athenians who continued to celebrate Theseus, Rohault was not attempting to restore Descartes’s philosophy to its original state. But his radical act of visual dissociation begs a reconsideration of how we think of pictures and their reception. Not only is a picture received in a particular place at a particular time, but any later revision to it is itself located in a culture bound by time and space. (And then, in turn, the later interpretation of the reinterpretation works in the same way.) This chapter is less interested in how the ideas of a philosopher (Descartes) changed the world and more keen on exploring how a preexisting world changed a set of ideas. It traces how Rohault transformed Descartes’s physics when he saw the hostility with which Paris had met it. The physicien’s banal woodcuts may seem very separate from Plutarch’s thought experiment. (The ancient example reflects on the ( 76 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

preservation of something long celebrated, and Rohault was laying his best defense; one is about restoring something to look the same, while the other is about changing the look of something to sustain it.) But they share an ethos of replacement as maintenance. In recovering the midcentury conditions of revising the new philosophy, the distance between Rohault’s figures and Theseus’s ship may prove surprisingly small.

Transforming the Eucharist Before publishing Principia, Descartes had anticipated that his new physics would antagonize Catholic Paris. His was a world full of little bits of matter in motion—tiny things that created the qualities perceived by the senses—which had the potential to dissolve the integrity of Aristotle’s explanation of nature, melting the ancient’s concepts of form and substance into an undifferentiated soup of stuff. The point was that, in the new philosophy, objects lost their essences, leaving the distinction between tables and chairs up to the unreliable perception of human minds. In a world torn asunder by religious difference, this had ugly implications for the Catholic Eucharist.14 With that central ritual—always an echo of the Last Supper—a priest consecrated wine into the blood of Christ and bread into Christ’s flesh and then distributed this transfigured repast to the congregation. Eating their savior—receiving his flesh into theirs—was a form of redemption and a natural phenomenon close to a miracle. Reconciling the logical underpinnings of this transformation largely depended on Thomas Aquinas, who had secured the explanation centuries before. Our Catholic Faith makes it absolutely necessary to profess that the whole Christ is in this sacrament. But note that there are two ways in which a part of Christ can be in it. The first way is as an immediate result of the sacramental sign; the second way is by a natural concomitance. As a result of the sacramental sign, you have under the sacramental appearances that into which the pre-​existing substance of the bread and wine is directly changed. This change is signified by the words of the form, ‘This is my body,’ ‘This is my blood,’ which are here just as efficacious as the form of any sacrament is efficacious. And by a natural concomitance, you have here whatever is found to be actually joined to the term of the conversion. Because, wherever two things are actually joined together, wherever you have one, the other has to be. It is only by an act of our mind that we separate things that are thus really joined together.15 Using Aristotle’s logic of form and substance, Thomas had reasoned that the sacrament changed the substance of the bread and wine, even if Christ’s supposed flesh still matters of replacement  ( 77 )

tasted like bread and still crumbled like bread, even if his blood still tasted like wine and still poured like wine. Their sensible qualities, their quantities, their accidents had not changed, but their substance had been fundamentally transformed. On the eve of publishing Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641), Descartes hoped to acknowledge the fear that his philosophy might incite. So he invited Arnauld, a young theologian recently appointed to the faculty at the Sorbonne, to respond. Arnauld voiced the worry that Cartesianism’s particulate matter threatened to undo the Eucharist and established the Catholic terms on which the new philosophy would be debated for decades to come: But what I see as likely to give the greatest offence to theologians is that according to the author’s doctrines it seems that the Church’s teaching concerning the sacred mysteries of the Eucharist cannot remain completely intact. We believe on faith that the substance of the bread is taken away from the bread of the Eucharist and only the accidents remain. These are extension, shape, colour, smell, taste, and other qualities perceived by the senses. But the author thinks there are no sensible qualities, merely various motions in the bodies that surround us which enable us to perceive the various impressions which we subsequently call “colour,” “taste” and “smell.” Hence only shape, extension and mobility remain. Yet the author denies that these powers are intelligible apart from some substance for them to inhere in, and hence he holds that they cannot exist without such a substance. He repeats this in his reply to his theological critic. Further, he recognizes no distinction between the states of a substance and the substance itself except for a formal one; yet this kind of distinction seems insufficient to allow for the states to be separated from the substance even by God.16 Descartes’s particulate matter stamped out the notion that the consecrated bread and wine were envelopes containing Jesus’s real flesh and blood. His concepts of physical constitution more broadly demanded that the invisible, physical, miraculous alteration that comprised transubstantiation be understood anew. Arnauld sounded the alarm on how perplexing and potentially upending this important feature of the new philosophy might be. Such consternation was not limited to pointy-​headed theologians or philosophers. The Eucharist had remained a bitter source of division between French Catholics and their sworn Calvinist enemies since 1545. That year, the Council of Trent had convened Catholic representatives from across Europe to fend off Protestantism’s threats, agreeing that among the most grievous of offenses was the Calvinist belief ( 78 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

that the Eucharist was but a symbol and commemoration of Christ’s sacrifice, not a transformation of substance. This question, among others, had torn the French kingdom apart with thirty years of war. France’s monarchs had taken stop-​gap measures. The 1598 Edict of Nantes had marked the end of that war; it was meant to ensure the tolerance of French Calvinists, or Huguenots, across France. But in practice, during the following half century, it guaranteed the safety of French Protestants only up to a point. Attempts at rapprochement, from a shared translation of the Bible to gestures at reconciling Eucharistic positions, surfaced only to dissipate.17 To misunderstand the Eucharist was to encounter obstacles in the body politic. By the late 1640s, the Thomistic interpretation of the Eucharist was reinforced not only in the schools but also in the fabric of Catholic worship. Ignoring Descartes’s own defense that his particulate matter changed the sacrament not one bit,18 university philosophers affirmed the teachings of the Counter-​Reformation Catholic Church, reinforcing the tenets of their community. Sorbonne philosopher François Le Rées wrote in his Cursus philosophicus (second edition, 1648): It stands from the Council of Trent: after the consecration of the host, a quantity of bread remains even though the actual extension of the bread does not remain. I respond, in accordance with the Council, that after the words of consecration, the quantity, or extension, through which the substance of bread was measurable, remains in its accidents, at least morally and, secondarily, in equivalence. To the extent that there is neither greater nor less of this substance, nor any change apprehensible to the senses in its mode of extension, through that change and its accidents, the body of Christ is demonstrable, as is the previous substance of bread.19 Like many of his contemporaries, Le Rées understood that Thomas’s interpretation guaranteed the cohesion of the Catholic Church. It was a reliable truism for congregations across the Continent. It bound the Sorbonne’s philosophers to their counterparts in theology, but it also strengthened the ties between worshippers and their priests. One might say that the Catholic explanation of the Eucharist reassured untutored women and men that a physical logic underpinned this central salvatory miracle. On the first Sunday of every month or on feast days, worshippers would approach the altar confident in the knowledge that their bodies would assimilate Christ’s flesh and blood. When sinners wished to expiate their sins, they were encouraged to avail themselves of the sacrament, heartened by the certainty that what appeared to be bread and wine had really undergone astonishing change.20 Thomas and his followers offered more than faith in form and substance. In securing an Aristotelian explanation for the Eucharist, they gave worshippers the rudiments of their culture’s natural philosophy. matters of replacement  ( 79 )

By the 1660s, just as Rohault’s interpretation of the new philosophy was gaining prominence, just as the king’s council was placing further restrictions on the number of places where the Reformed could worship and on the timing of their funerals,21 French Catholics scoffed at Calvin’s brethren with a very peculiar rhetorical device: analogizing the Calvinist Eucharist to something so slight as a picture. “If the Eucharist is not the Body and Blood of jesus christ,” cried Jesuit Jean Adam, “how can we prove by it All of God’s power? What prodigious miracle is borne of the Calvinists’ Last Supper?”22 The only answer lay with Thomas’s Eucharist: For, if, as the Calvinists teach, the Eucharist is only the sign of the body and blood of jesus-​christ, the proof offered by S. Cyrille and the general Council over which he presides would destroy themselves and would be entirely ridiculous. . . . In the opinion of our Adversaries, we know we must prove the Resurrection of jesus-​christ through the Eucharist: because one does not follow from the other. The figure of a body can exist without the Resurrection of the same body; just as the portrait of Henry le Grand and the portrait of Louis XIII are not proof that they have been brought back to life.23 Huguenots in their damnable folly had claimed that the Eucharist was but a symbol, menacing the very substance of the miracle. They had flattened the Eucharist into a portrait, a contrivance that could represent its subject but never obtain that subject’s substance. And, of course, pictures hardly resurrected the subjects they depicted. This raised an interesting question for the new philosophy. If Arnauld had been right, did Descartes’s matter in motion make all things, including the Eucharist, mere reminders of change rather than the results themselves of physical change? Rohault provided a response, materializing the new philosophy and conjoining that materialization to new circumstances and new, less illusionistic pictures.24

Ritualizing Physics Rohault was not the obvious man to play the protagonist of dramatic change. He had grown up the son of a merchant in Amiens. And, like the boys of many a comfortable seventeenth-​century French family, he likely attended his town’s Jesuit collège,25 whose curriculum was thin on scientia but taught and reinforced the Thomistic explanation of the Eucharist.26 The mutual dependence of natural philosophy and theology would not have been lost on him once he got to Paris in 1641. At the end of that year, when he enrolled at the university, he would have learned more Aristotelian commentary from instructors like Jacques Desperiers, Jacques du Chevreuil, Roger Omeloy, or Pierre ( 80 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Padet.27 These teachers conformed to Thomas’s interpretation of the Eucharist and would pay no mind to Descartes’s publications until the late 1660s (after Rohault had made his own interventions in the new physics).28 However, the Amiens youth was likely to have heard chatter about a brilliant young theologian on faculty named Arnauld, who had recently objected to a newfangled philosophical system and its troubling of the Catholic Eucharist. Rohault and his schoolmates may very well have weaved in and out of the bookstores on rue Saint Jacques only to discover or even purchase their own copies of Discours de la méthode, Meditationes, and Principia philosophiae.29 Beyond the university’s walls, Rohault’s Paris was suffused with a decidedly French conversation about experiment. Whether sitting in the audience at the Académies Montmort and Bourdelot (forerunners of the Académie royale des sciences) or reading Blaise Pascal and Florin Perrier’s account of taking their column of mercury up the Puy-​de-​Dôme, two tendencies emerged. The first was an interesting social epistemology: that trust in observation was largely not about witnessing an experiment in situ but listening to a report about new experiments that had been performed somewhere else and sometime before by a trustworthy interlocutor. Assimilating experience amounted to hearing about trials performed, and then commenting on the logic with which a presenter made sense of what he had experienced.30 This was a physics not of collective tinkering but of semipublic retrospective reasoning (and, thus, not completely unlike parishioners listening to a sermon). The second pattern was the relating of experiment to the miraculous. As Peter Dear shows, Parisian academicians were less concerned with the cataloguing of particulars—a favorite pastime of their English correspondents—and more interested in nature’s ordinary patterns. In defining nature’s general behaviors, the French experiment concretized the norms from which miracles deviated.31 Even the structures of experimental report mimicked contemporary accounts of miracles.32 In sum, midcentury French experiment provided a forum for collective reasoning about the ordinary course of nature’s materials. Implied in its accounts were the miracles that departed from general experience. Around October 1655, Rohault began to build his version of the new natural philosophy.33 At first glance, his Wednesday conferences—also known as his mercredis—seem to have been structured with only passing resemblance to their académie forerunners. None of Rohault’s demonstrations were unique to his practice. Many of his demonstrations, like water hardening plaster of Paris, were borrowed from local artisans;34 others were party tricks he had picked up in the drawing rooms of men of qualité, like Gilles Personne de Roberval’s experiment with a carp’s bladder;35 and still others were contrivances he had learned from reading reports written by Pascal and Périer, like measuring a column of mercury at higher altitudes. What is more, none of his experiments followed recognizably normal physical behavior.36 They were small delights, little surprises. Take his glass-​tear demonstration (see fig. 35). Rohault would strike the object at its little bulb matters of replacement  ( 81 )

only to lift it up and show it had remained intact. But then, when he hit the glass tear’s tail, the object would shatter into hundreds of tiny pieces. Or take his presentation of magneticism. When he brought out a knife and rubbed it with a magnet, he showed how the knife had somehow morphed into a magnet itself, attracting so many metal filings.37 His practice emphasized that which could not be readily experienced. To these demonstrations, Rohault added ritual. His conferences were not one-​offs. When Rohault opened the doors to his own salon, he offered a weekly course whose curriculum developed over a series of months. Once the series ended, he would start again from the beginning, returning to the same little transformations again and again. It was a predictable cycle.38 And unlike académie meetings, where a handful of presenters would report on new experiments,39 Rohault presided over his demonstrations every week all by himself. By dint of his knowledge and his charisma (and perhaps even his faith), Rohault formed an audience—a congregation—interested in an experimental version of the new philosophy. Unlike the rarefied gatherings of, say, Madame de Sevigny’s salon or the closed doors of the Académie Bourdelot, everyone had an invitation to Rohault’s living room: “He held his public conferences once a week, every week, and here one could find people of all kinds, from all walks of life: Prelates, Abbots, Courtesans, Doctors, Physicians, Philosophers, Geometers, Regents, Schoolboys, Provincial People, Foreigners, Artisans—in a word, persons of all ages, all sexes, and all professions.”40 Rohault’s parishioners were being introduced to a modified version of Descartes’s philosophy—one that was predicated on surprising material change.

Figures for Transformation Throughout his conferences, Rohault would display placards or supply handouts whose figures mediated between witnessing the alteration of matter and reasoning about those alterations. They served as explanatory support, creating a crucial link back to Descartes’s original texts. In reference to, say, his figure of the glass tear, Rohault asked his audiences to see that the object’s tail was filled with more excitable matter than its bulb, thus explaining the fragility of one and not the other. In another example, he referred to his figure of a magnet to describe the transferring of a magnet’s properties to a knife as the result of local movement—the pushing of tiny particles against one another.41 When his hand traced the surface of a placard or when he invited his audience to refer to a handout,42 the physicien was asserting that the best means of understanding matter in motion was not the act of bearing witness to experiment but the retrospective contemplation of his figures. Their contours guided the mind to reason matter out. Rohault’s position on his figures and their relationship to Descartes’s woodcuts evolved over time. Around 1655, he had hesitated to let them do all this work on their ( 82 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 36  Henricus Regius and unknown engraver, page 39 from Fundamenta physices (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1646). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB700497, Grace K. Babson Collection of the Works of Sir Isaac Newton. Photo: The Huntington Library.

own. The earliest record of his demonstrations—contained in a notebook kept by one of his students and now held at the Bibliothèque Sainte-​Geneviève in Paris— captures Rohault commending his audience to Descartes’s woodcuts: “It is impossible to understand [these demonstrations] if you haven’t read Monsieur Descartes’s principes, and looked at the figures in his book.”43 Unable to separate his interpretation of the new philosophy from Descartes’s original texts, Rohault almost seemed to have had picked up Henricus Regius’s Fundamenta physices (1646) and drawn inspiration from the Dutchman’s motley assembling of pictures, which set vortices on the same plane as men sucking water out of steaming funnels (fig. 36) and drew intellectual equivalence between the geometrical analysis of men marveling at rainbows and pigs being dissected to prove Harvey’s theory of the circulation of blood. In Regius’s interpretation of the new philosophy, what the world thought and what the world sensed were held in the same epistemic regard. But closer engagement with Descartes’s oeuvre and a deeper familiarity with the politics of the new philosophy’s interpretation may well have given Rohault pause. Or, more pointedly, Descartes’s contempt for Regius’s work—and his charge that the Utrecht physician had mistaken observation for thought—may have warned him away. In 1641, Regius had presented philosophical disputations at Utrecht centered on the Frenchman’s split of mind from body, which, much to Descartes’s dismay, made the new philosophy vulnerable to attacks by Dutch Calvinist theologians (more on this in the next chapter).44 Descartes could not soon forget Regius’s carelessness. So he devoted a substantial paragraph of his Principes preface to admonishing the Fundamenta’s deficiencies: matters of replacement  ( 83 )

I know there are minds that hurry so much and use so little thought in what they do that even with solid foundations they would not know how to build anything secure. Because these men are usually the quickest to produce Books, they spoil everything I have done with lightning speed. They introduce uncertainty and doubt in my mode of philosophizing, passing them off as mine or as my opinions, even though I have tried assiduously to banish those dangers from my philosophy. I have recently experienced this with a man who was an ardent acolyte, and whom I have written about in some places with so much assurance that I would have believed any opinion of his as one of my own. Last year, he published a Book called Fundamenta Physicae [sic], where, again, he put down nothing of Physics & Medicine that he did not draw from my work, both from published writing and an imperfect, badly transcribed manuscript concerning the nature of animals which had fallen into his hands. He has thrown my work into disarray, and he denies the truthful Metaphysics on which all Physics must be supported. I am obliged to disavow his work entirely, and to pray here to Readers that they never attribute any opinion to me unless they have found it in my writing; and that they do not take for true in my writings anything that does not seem to be clearly deduced from my true Principals [sic].45 Regius had not merely thrown the new philosophy to the theological wolves; Descartes was now claiming that Fundamenta’s bookish mishmash had negated his metaphysics. By 1648, Descartes was more specific about Regius’s misconceptions: Because the mind has no need of innate ideas, its power of thinking being sufficient, [Regius] says, “all common notions which are engraved in the mind have their origin in observation of things or in verbal instruction”—as if the power of thinking could achieve nothing on its own, could never perceive or think anything except what it receives through observation of things or through verbal instruction, i.e. from the senses. . . . We make such a judgment not because these things transmit the ideas to our mind through the sense organs, but because they transmit something which, at exactly that moment, gives the mind occasion to form these ideas by means of the faculty innate to it.46 The mind, Descartes argued, had to be afforded its own dispensation. None of this resorting to sight or touch or any of the other senses would do. The authority of the philosopher’s own words made the message for his future disciples clear: thought had to be sealed unto itself—it needed “engravings” of its own. Rohault could hardly ignore such rules for the direction of the mind. ( 84 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

So if combining new pictures alongside Descartes’s would not do and if Descartes’s pictures alone threatened to evoke a troubling interpretation of the Catholic Eucharist, Rohault would have to seek out a different visual language. His eyes did not have to wander very far: Clerselier had given Descartes’s argument for the intellect a new set of pictures. Clerselier’s authority on the new philosophy was not easily dismissed: he had been Descartes’s trusted correspondent and, upon the philosopher’s death, became his literary executor. Acting as the guarantor of Descartes’s legacy was largely administrative: he fished Descartes’s papers out of the Seine after their journey from Stockholm to Paris had ended in shipwreck, he arbitrated the publication of the philosopher’s correspondence, he chose which of Descartes’s manuscripts to publish and when, and he closely tracked—one might even say policed—the philosophy’s reception.47 (Being a parliamentary lawyer proved useful for such work.48) But this did not mean Clerselier himself lacked compelling ideas about the new philosophy. Indeed, his most direct epistemic intervention had been identifying an alternative means of picturing it. When commissioning woodcuts for his edition of L’homme (1664)—Descartes’s physiological explanation for the mind processing the sensations of the body—he had not looked to the woodcuts for the Essais and Principia. Instead, he had chosen an assiduous reduction of the body’s contours, taking this sensibility to cross-​sections of single organs and the diagramming of the body in relationship to the world (fig. 37). He had argued that these simple outlines, sometimes made more elaborate by sight lines, pictured the world as the philosopher had intended: as the mind’s abstraction of the visible world. Clerselier’s argument was reactionary—a wish to purge the new philosophy of description and observation. It certainly did not help that Schuyl had promoted these activities in his detailed engravings for Tractatus de homine (1662), a Latin translation of L’homme. Schuyl’s edition had been an unauthorized nuisance; not only had Schuyl never contacted Clerselier about his translation, his edition had also taken on the look of priority because he had published it while Clerselier was waiting for his illustrators to send their drawings for L’homme.49 However much bitterness he may have harbored— which scholars like Wilkin and Zittel describe—Clerselier’s diatribe, enshrined in the preface to L’homme, still argues for a set of semiotic imperatives. First, he decried De homine’s engravings as being “less intelligible than those I have incorporated into this text, and less appropriate to the intelligence of Descartes’s texts.”50 And though he could acknowledge the beauty of Schuyl’s engravings,51 he elaborated on the form of intelligence the new philosophy required, with high-​minded, faithful references to Augustine: “There is nothing more natural than putting things back into their Natures and conceiving them as they are after having considered them other than what they are.”52 Clerselier’s criterion was complete and total transformation. Consider how radical this was. Ostensibly, any two-​dimensional representation of a three-​dimensional object changes that object entirely; the picture maker’s mimetic work reduces a tactile matters of replacement  ( 85 )

Fig. 37  Claude Clerselier and unknown engraver, page 79 from René Descartes, L’homme de René Descartes . . . (Paris: C. Angot, 1664). Woodcut. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RESP-​R-651. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

object to lines and marks on a thin piece of paper. Descartes himself had explained this in his Essais, reminding readers that a printed landscape was nothing more than ink on a page (see chapter 1). Clerselier, for his part, fixed upon the nuance of Descartes’s argument: that pictorial realism resembled nothing so much as the mind making sense of a world. For just as in contemplating a landscape or a portrait, the mind encountering the world’s objects was tasked with processing tiny bits of matter, resolving them into identifiable objects, and then reasoning them out. L’homme’s figures stripped away the tedium of this process. They traded pictorial realism’s illusions for abstraction— that graphic idiom capable of depicting objects “other than what they are” and fit for depicting reason to itself. Setting the prints from De homine and L’homme side by side intensifies Clerselier’s logic. Take how significantly their illustrations of depth perception diverge.53 Schuyl’s plate is a landscape suffused with Dutch realist detail (fig. 38). It depicts two phenomena: a hilltop ablaze and a squat turret further afield. But Schuyl’s illustrator relishes in the particular: the lamp that hangs gallows-​like over the turret, the flora that echoes the lamp as it spills over the turret’s side, the town whose buildings are packed tight, ( 86 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 38  Florent Schuyl, page 98 from René Descartes and Florent Schuyl, De homine (Lugduni Batavorum: apud Franciscum Moyardum & Petrum Leffen, 1662). Etching. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RES P-​R-918. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

the clouds that puff up and spread darkness above and brightness below, and even the caked mud that seems to make the flaming molehill into something more like a mountain. The picture’s diagrammatic eye is so out of body, so out of scale, so out of joint, and so overwhelmed by the engraving’s scene setting that it serves as little more than a distraction—or, worse, an eyesore. It is as though the apparatus taking in the world is offensive to the act of perception. Exercising the powers of observation, the illustration argues for the solidity of the world beyond the eye. Thinking the world sits uneasily with observing it. Now put this panoply of visible detail, this diminishment of the mind’s work, against Clerselier’s sharp abbreviations (fig. 39).54 His woodcut reduces depth perception to the mind’s circuitry and the objects it contemplates. His illustrator makes no room for anything that might locate the act in any particular body, let alone any particular corner of the world. The illustration is almost entirely constructed with the same bold line, submitting the act of looking, the shadow of the apple, and the brain’s crenulations to unyielding reduction. On the left, the illustrator prioritizes the pineal gland, imagining it as the catalyst from which all thought must emanate and as the hub that receives all information from the outside world. The apparatus is reminiscent of Guidobaldo dal Monte’s pulleys, where the motion of one part of an apparatus sets off the motion of all other parts.55 It is an example of humankind’s ineffable machine.56 But here, too, is a picture where thought holds the world’s objects together. Line and white matters of replacement  ( 87 )

Fig. 39  Claude Clerselier and unknown engraver, page 71 from René Descartes, L’homme de René Descartes . . . (Paris: C. Angot, 1664). Woodcut. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RESP-​R-651. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

space sum up the body as a relationship of discrete parts rather than an intricate web of joints and fibers. This is an antidote to the mind’s misguided attentions to the body: a picture of thought having processed matter’s unruly shapes. Remarkable, even audacious, Clerselier’s reinterpretation of Descartes’s figures invoked Descartes’s words more than his pictures. Clerselier had reassured his readers that L’homme’s figures were based on a single drawing in Descartes’s hand—one he had discovered in the original manuscript.57 But these woodcuts borrowed little from the graphic languages of the Essias and Principia; they even departed substantially from that lone extant picture drafted by Descartes himself. Rohault may have initially puzzled over this. For the philosopher’s woodcuts—with all their dispelling of illusion and their crafting of novelty out of visual convention—were so legible that men on the Parisian salon circuit had praised Descartes’s pictures for their clarity: “Mathematical figures stir the eyes and explain a number of demonstrations. These kinds of figures can be seen in the Books of M. Descartes and are presumed to contain the pure truth. Thus, curious men who do not want to be thoroughly absorbed are strongly disposed to availing themselves of any help these Books contain. Some men may be attracted to the figures that stud this gallant man’s work because they are good and beautiful; others, due to laziness, may look to them in their wish to avoid tiresome abstraction.”58 Against all this, Clerselier proved eager to compress the new philosophy even further—to make “tiresome abstraction” its graphic signature. The woodcuts Clerselier commissioned for L’homme eliminated illusory figuration almost entirely. The print capturing movement and its causes is a good example (see fig. 37). It features only the most minimal outline of the body and its parts. (No one would mistake this thinker for a woman ( 88 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

who could leap off the page and walk into the world.) And it merges multiple strategies of representation at once—a contour line that marks out the edges of that pointing finger, a diagrammatic explanation of the pineal gland and the stereoscopy of the eyes, abstract striations of muscle and nerve, and even basic shadow for the back of the arm and the hair pulled back atop the head. This is the body ruthlessly bent by the mind, not described or inventoried through its appearances. Clerselier seems to have grown impatient with even the minor illusions of Descartes’s own woodcuts. Better for the new philosophy’s pictures to approximate Descartes’s polemic against Regius and decisively split thought from observation. The result was that thinking could, at last, look at pictures of itself. I think Rohault had looked carefully at the pictorial options available to him. (He also had special reason to listen to Descartes’s literary executor since Clerselier was his father-​in-​law.59) By 1667, he chose an economical form with a similar presence of mind. As he flattened glass tears out to their basic shapes (see fig. 35), he created a visual program reminiscent of other depictions of the same apparatuses, whether in Balthasar de Monconys’s Voyages (1665–66) or Blaise Pascal’s Traictez des liqueurs équilibres (1663). This helped him assert the familiarity of these forms and their eschewing of metaphysical commitments. Additionally, those who had encountered Clerselier’s work saw that such basic forms of representation privileged thought over tangible things. In forgoing chiaroscuro, in refusing the intercalation of description and abstraction, Rohault’s figures acted as surrogates for the mind making sense of material transformation. The final twist, however, was that these rude figures also made them open-​ended and noncommittal. They created boundaries for thinking change through. But without Rohault’s words, they did nothing to enforce one explanation over another. Instead, they were entirely beholden to their text and liable to accommodate multiple interpretations, whether Aristotle and Thomas’s substantial forms or Descartes’s particles in constant motion. By design, they could not be read unto themselves; their equivocations were primed to serve many masters at once.

Changing Suggestions Distilling his conference practice into a book created new pressures for Rohault. The format would deprive readers of bearing witness to a materialized version of the new physics. It would replace his ritualized community with, yes, readerly absorption but also with the reader’s wandering mind. More concretely, Rohault would have to procure a royal privilege to publish his version of the new philosophy. He had plenty of evidence that his bid would succeed. Before 1671, seven editions of Principes had already been published in Paris.60 The rejection of book privileges was the province of royal censors matters of replacement  ( 89 )

rather than university theologians.61 By the end of the 1660s, as Rohault was preparing his manuscript, the French debate over the new philosophy had largely remained confined to the schools. In 1665, Jesuits at the Collège de Clermont had declared Descartes’s matter in motion “distasteful to . . . theology . . . because it seems to follow from the hypothesis that there can be no conversion of bread and wine in the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ, nor can it be determined what is destroyed in that conversion, which favors heretics.”62 Perhaps they were taking cues from the Vatican, whose own censors had put Descartes’s Opera on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of prohibited books) without any indication of what in the text required correcting before the book could be removed.63 Up until 1671, the French crown, which considered itself well independent of Rome and the protector of the Catholic Church in France, had yet to make any pronouncements for or against the new philosophy. Still, Rohault exercised caution when it came to publishing Traité. He was careful to align his text with Aristotle, asserting that his version of the new philosophy stood in opposition to Aristotle’s unruly commentators.64 He also revised a few figures of his experiments for Traité. Because he was no longer conjuring matter exclusively on the new philosophy’s behalf or using his charms on live audiences, it seemed that the fixity of print required avoiding any controversy that his figures might incite.65 Across Rohault’s culture, thought about pictures converged on the extent of their representational capacities, the spectrum of signification in which a picture or a representation could engage. Pascal himself had noted the semiotic force that powerful tableaux could distribute across people, places, and things in close proximity to a powerful figure: “The custom of seeing kings accompanied by guards, drums, officers, and all those things that bend the machine toward respect and terror, causes their face to imprint on their subjects respect and terror even when they appear by themselves, because one does not separate in thought their persons from the retinues with which they are ordinarily seen. And the world, which does not know that the effect comes from this custom, thinks that it comes from a natural force; and from that come these words: ‘The character of Divinity is imprinted on his face, etc.’ ”66 I believe Rohault detected such representational power at a more modest scale. The two instances from Traité I analyze here amounted to an oblique effort to protect his version of the new philosophy from undue malice. In other words, they answer the following questions: How could Rohault attempt to exert some measure of control over his figures’ signification? And how, in revising his figures for his book, could his version of the new philosophy offer reconciliation to those who had taken offense at Descartes’s matter in motion and the figures that embodied it? One method was to discard any religious symbolism and, thus, foreclose the question of the new philosophy’s commitment to any one Christian denomination. During his conférences, Rohault had used a blocky cross to explain how mirrors reflect and ( 90 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 40 Unknown engraver, page 320 from Jacques Rohault, Physique de M. Rohault (1667). Pen on paper. Collection of Sylvain Matton, Paris. Photo: Fabien Marche.

refract light, and his audiences repeatedly took note (fig. 40). In Rohault’s culture, it would seem that this ubiquitous symbol could be little weaponized since it was employed by numerous Christian believers to commemorate Christ’s sacrifice. For Jesuits, it supported royal power when an ancient Christogram emanated, sunlike, from the clouds, illuminating a medallion portrait of Louis XIV that lorded over a map of Paris (fig. 41). It spoke to orderly piety at the ascetic cloister of Port-​Royal—the convent for the sect that Sorbonne theologians had declared no better than Protestants—where the symbol created a spiritual, repetitive geometry (fig. 42). And the king’s Catholics brought crosses like this to allegorical contests that taught how to ward away unruly sects, like the Jansenists, as seen in a print by Abraham Bosse, where Religion holds the cross in her left as she raises the Eucharistic chalice in her right (fig. 43). The abstract cross was a symbol available to all who proclaimed their Christian faith.67 But matters of replacement  ( 91 )

Fig. 41 (left)  Unknown engraver, Ville, Citté, Université de Paris, 1666. Engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RESERVE FOL-​QB-201 (48). Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Fig. 42 (below)  Louise-​ Magdeleine Horthemels, Cloistre de Port-​Royal des Champs, n.d. Engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RESERVE FOL-​QB-201 (48). Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Fig. 43 Abraham Bosse, La déroute et confusion des Janssenistes, n.d. Engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RESERVE QB-201 (41)-FOL. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

its freedom from any single confessional position also made it liable to invite questions about Rohault’s own confessional commitments and, thus, the compromises he was bringing to the new philosophy. So in Traité, Rohault described the reflections and refractions of a mirror with an arrow rather than a cross (fig. 44). Some gimlet-​eyed seventeenth-​century readers may have seen an echo of Clerselier’s L’homme woodcuts (see figs. 37, 39)—and thus another bid to align Traité with the work of Rohault’s father-​in-​law. But by making this object of contemplation less obviously religious, the stanching of strictly religious signification was done. Another way to avoid dispute was to add a figure unequivocally sanctioned by scholastic theology and reinterpret it. This was the function of Traité’s very first figure (fig. 45). It looks everything like a basic geometric construction, with its pair of parallel lines (AB and CD) joined by a perpendicular line segment (EF), and outfitted with three diagonal lines (AD, AH, and AG) that fan out toward CD and cross the line segment EF at points M, L, and I, respectively. But it also borrowed the logic from a figure Jesuit philosopher Pierre Gautruche had incorporated into his Philosophiae ac mathematicae totius . . . institutio (1665), a primer for collège students (and perhaps even those at university) (fig. 46, item 14).68 Gautruche’s figure had unlocked a Thomistic Aristotelian interpretation of matter as indivisible and finite. When Rohault turned it upside down, it explained a Cartesian understanding of matter’s indefinite divisibility. In Traité, the most efficacious reading of the figure started with point A and then imagined “an indefinite number of different points, each one different from the next, which would approach closer and closer the extremity E.”69 From there, Rohault applied this

matters of replacement  ( 93 )

Fig. 44  Jacques Rohault and unknown engraver, page 366 from Traité de physique de Jacques Rohault (Paris: Jean Cusson, 1671). Woodcut. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 4-S-1021. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

iterative logic to matter in general: “We can assign an indefinite number of points to some determined portion of matter; consequently, matter is indefinitely divisible.”70 Rohault was essentially upholding Descartes’s articulation of all objects being made of small parts (and indefinitely small ones at that). In his Institutio, Gautruche used this figure to toy with the concept of divisibility (under the heading “Quantity, or the Composition of the Continuum”). He began by describing the line segment ef as “a pure line in which new and newer parts still can be traced out, ad infinitum.”71 Gautruche then noted that with parallel lines ab and cd, a thread or line could be drawn from point g on cd, thereby demarcating an infinite succession of points on line ab.72 But in the end, he rejected the very idea he had entertained: “We must hold fast to the doctrine of Aristotle; that, indeed, number or continuum, cannot be comprised of numbers, or lengths; that it cannot actually ( 94 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 45 (above)  Jacques Rohault and unknown engraver, page 348 from Traité de physique de Jacques Rohault (Paris: Jean Cusson, 1671). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB709133. Photo: The Huntington Library. Fig. 46 (right)  Pierre Gautruche and unknown engraver, from Philosophiae ac mathematicae totius . . . institutio, vol. 2 (Caen: J. Cavelier, 1665), n.p. Engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, R-9733. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

hold any other parts; nor can it be divided into parts, which are themselves always divisible; in fact, put another way, if the continuous unraveling [of something] makes for indivisibles, it follows that the thing itself is composed of indivisibles, which we have kept saying is impossible.”73 Like his fellow Jesuit Clavius before him,74 Gautruche was expanding on the traditional textbook, integrating mathematics into his treatment of Aristotelian matter. Even more consequential, for both Gautruche and Rohault, their figures were springboards for understanding matter as divinely inspired. For Gautruche, the figure held fast to “the doctrine of Aristotle” and resonated with the traditional description of the Eucharist: matters of replacement  ( 95 )

In the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the Blood of Christ is entirely in one place, and all of the blood of Christ our Lord is in the same place. The blood is not mixed, whether with the blood of the head or any other part; because such mixing is only possible in the absence of indivisibility, or, some similar delimiting modification. Take the blood of Christ in one state, and therefore keep it in the same place, such that it still preserves its arrangement with all parts of His body. Having been enclosed by a vessel, it is not possible for it to be mixed in some other way; just as the blood in an artery cannot be the same blood as that which is in some part of a vein.75 Though the diagram depicted neither the chalice nor the host, Gautruche had claimed its indivisibility for the Catholic sacrament. He had invested it with the traditional explanation. For Rohault, six years later, the figure was the perfect totem of divinely granted indivisibility. Given God’s omnipotence, the physicien wondered, how could mere men assume that matter could only ever be indivisible? When we represent the power of God, and his absolute empire over all worldly things, we know not to doubt that he alone can make certain parts of matter of such a nature that, in all the universe, no other Agent is capable of dividing them. From there, it follows that each of these parts would in no way differ from the little bodies Epicurus calls Atoms. However, this property of being indivisible by any external agent would only be arbitrary, and a pure supposition, and would not be based on any natural principle. This does not change these parts’ true nature. We must take for granted that all the matter of this world is divisible. The only difficulty we now face is knowing into how many parts a certain portion of matter can be divided.76 Surely an all-​powerful God could divide objects as he wished. Rohault’s words reoriented Gautruche’s figure against the Jesuit teacher’s original purpose. They solved the theological conundrum with which the new philosophy had wrestled for so long, rearranging the standard thinking about matter when encountering the host and chalice. By extension, a Traité reader could also look at the instruments of the Eucharist and take a new physical explanation to their transfiguration. Everything looked the same: the sacrament’s miracle was still dependable, and Rohault’s figure was Gautruche’s, but the physical explanation of their undetectable physical changes had been altered. New wine; same old bottles. Rohault had reason to believe that these subtle, oblique concessions could create a version of the new philosophy that would pose no threat. Natural philosophy—even in the uppermost reaches of the schools—had long been subject to a slow transformation. ( 96 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 47 François de Poilly, Charles Le Brun, Jean-​Baptiste Colbert de Seignelay, Jean Richet, Conclusiones ex universa philosophia . . . , 1668. Engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, AA-6 (POILLY, François de). Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

This grand broadsheet, for instance, makes the point by being, let us say, beside the point. It is the lavish engraving Charles Le Brun designed on behalf of Jean-​Baptiste Colbert’s eldest son, Jean-​Baptiste Colbert de Seignelay, on the occasion of his 1668 thesis disputation at the Collège de Clermont (fig. 47). Like most students, Colbert de Seignelay had commissioned the artist to typeset his argument as a large-​scale print, which he could then distribute to announce his thesis presentation and commemorate his academic achievement. It was de rigueur for such prints to rehearse official, and therefore acceptable, natural-​philosophical arguments.77 But Colbert de Seignelay’s went well beyond the workaday examples of his classmates, amounting to a vibrant exegesis on the construction of royal power in relation to natural philosophy. Flanked by Minerva, Louis XIV leads a mythical entourage with Hercules steering a chariot to bring up the rear. Deep in the background, three stonemasons take their mallets to an obelisk that immortalizes the sovereign’s victories from east to west, north to south. Workers hoist matters of replacement  ( 97 )

family shields up Corinthian columns. Below, chubby putti elevate painting, sculpture, tapestry, and metalwork. While the print’s iconography glorifies the king and, in turn, the student whose father works on behalf of His Grace, it also establishes the mutual dependence of natural-​philosophical epistemology and royal power. When the principles of knowledge are sound, king and kingdom flourish. When the king operates with due glory, appropriate knowledge is displayed for all. (The print was so remarkable a commentary on the Crown-​as-​final-​cause that Jesuit professor of rhetoric Antoine de La Bretonnière could not resist crafting an ekphrastic poem in praise of it.78) Amid all this stateliness, it makes a surprising argument for the ability of natural philosophy to adapt to epistemic change—and for the Crown to sanction it. Note Louis’s finger, pointing to the two natural-​philosophical categories—“de Physicis” and “de Affectionibus Corporis Naturalis”—of the thesis, as though to index the most important of epistemic domains (and thus, those that uphold his dominion). A little further below is standard language denying divisibility: “In created things, nothing infinite is given by potentia; however, [in God’s hands] the infinite is given by potentia. Nothing prevents God from putting two bodies in one place, nor having one body in two places. But the world cannot be in this one place nor can God be in imaginary spaces.”79 The statement acts as a pivot around which the print’s many other activities hinge. However, neither the statement alone nor its inscription ensures the endurance of one kind of knowledge over another. Look how the collection of theses is presented on a flimsy piece of paper whose edges curl off a wooden support. Not only is the paper itself depicted as replaceable, even provisional,80 this cartouche invokes the fact that thesis engravings were a genre inherently subject to change. Most thesis broadsheets were designed with elaborate pictures that framed a blank space into which less acceptable versions of natural philosophy could be rubbed out and more acceptable versions etched in.81 Likewise, the surface onto which the printmaker had inscribed Colbert de Seigneley’s philosophical truths could easily be readied to absorb a new set of principles—or, in this instance, a new approach to the divisibility of matter. More than any other of Rohault’s moment, this print affirmed the dependence of knowledge on royal approval, theological rectitude, and scholastic propriety. But, at the same time, it was a reminder that the receptacles of knowledge were open and flexible, ready to take on philosophical arguments that helped those in power maintain their power, all the while looking exactly like they always had. Rohault’s version of the new philosophy was steeped in this ethos.

Knives and Planks In publishing Traité, Rohault created a visual field for the new philosophy that stressed adjustment. His figures deviated significantly from Descartes’s, but they borrowed ( 98 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

from the graphic language of French experimenters, like Pascal, and even more so from Clerselier’s graphic variations on Descartes’s dictum of mind over matter. They attended to the dynamics of a scholastic philosophy approved by Crown and Church. All this shifting about may have rendered Rohault’s figural program inconsistent. But he practiced this changeableness with so much conviction that he was compelled to theorize it in the Traité’s preface: The most particular, natural use that practitioners of Physics can glean from Mathematics is that discipline’s custom of considering figures and making them more fitting for understanding different properties. I know there are those who claim we cannot stop at figures, because they cannot move. Even though they are inert, it is nonetheless certain that their differences can give the bodies they describe certain effects that cannot be produced without them. [These figures] are like knives which, after sharpening, become capable of cutting in ways they had not been able to before. Likewise, the artisan uses many different tools whose varying sizes produce different effects. So, if the figure of a body, which our senses detect through its size, also offers the effects that body produces, then reason encourages us to believe that the figures of matter’s most imperceptible parts are capable of certain effects in proportion to their size, and similar to those that we see as the products of largest bodies.82 In Rohault’s hands, the natural-​philosophical figure becomes a touchstone for meaningful, proportional differences between the world sensed and thinking about the world sensed. It is because the figure is limited in its mobility that it helps the physicien analyze the behavior of the object it describes; it is because it has its own powers of persuasion (akin to all those sharp artisanal blades) and sits alongside so many other kinds of figures that it can create new knowledge. Though Rohault may have been a ham-​fisted wielder of metaphor, we might consider the passage’s movement from mathematics to the comparison of figures with the bodies they describe to the recently sharpened artisanal knife as reflective of his own zigzagging practice. For Rohault, natural philosophy was about the oscillation between mind and matter and about the application of lessons from the smallest scale to the largest and vice versa.83 The power of the natural-​philosophical figure, therefore, derived from its ability to both transform and be transformed. Rohault’s attentions to so many types of change did not pay immediate dividends in France. Descartes’s physics was still perceived to be at odds with the Catholic Eucharist. It did not help that the year Traité was published was the same year that Robert Desgabets, a Benedictine theologian, published Considérations sur l’état present, a defense of Descartes’s positions that proved much more vigorous than Rohault’s.84 matters of replacement  ( 99 )

By August of 1671, François de Harlay, archbishop of Paris, intervened on behalf of the Crown: The King—having learned that certain opinions that the Faculty of Theology once censored and that the Parlement had decreed could not be taught in public are now being spread not only at the University but also in the rest of the city, and elsewhere throughout the Kingdom, whether by foreigners or men native to this soil—wishes to prevent the trajectory of this opinion, which could bring some confusion to the explanation of our Mysteries. Impelled by his zeal and his usual piety, he has commanded me to tell you his intensions. The King exhorts you, Messieurs, to teach no other doctrine in the universities than the one set forth by the rules and statutes of the university, and that nothing of these doctrines be put into theses, and leaves to your prudence and your wisdom the supervision of taking the necessary steps for putting this into action. He also commands me to charge his Monsieur le Procurer General to see to this too, and yesterday I told him that the King wishes for Parlement to play its part in this affair, & if such things happen somewhere else for which he cannot resort to Parlement, His Majesty holds himself back to do what is appropriate to him. Having read this, the Deacon read out those dogmas which negate prime matter and substantial forms.85 Nevertheless, Rohault had crafted an open-​ended version of the new philosophy, fit for being spread throughout Europe. Though the archbishop had implicitly barred Descartes’s matter in motion from the classroom and forbidden professors from slipping it into student theses, royal censors put no restrictions upon Rohault’s book. In France, Traité de physique kept getting read and kept getting printed. By 1730, it had gone through ten separate editions in Paris alone. Latin translations, which first appeared in 1674 and would continue being printed until 1750, helped Rohault’s version of the new philosophy spread across the Continent. And Samuel Clarke’s celebrated edition, Jacobi Rohaulti physica (1697), demonstrated the permeability of Rohault’s text. Throughout his footnotes, Clarke critiqued Traité’s Cartesianism and introduced Isaac Newton’s physics in its place.86 The flexibility Rohault had lent to the new philosophy had, up until that point, ensured its longevity. All of this is to say that subversive substitution was a feature of seventeenth-​century natural philosophy rather than a defect. The French physicien and his successors were not the only ones who had taken up this creed. Sixteenth-​century Aristotelian commentary had already set the stage for such operations. As medievalist Edward Grant explains, “In  the process of multiplying and absorbing new ideas from whatever sources, ( 100 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Aristotelians failed to notice the growing incoherence of the substructure.”87 Change was integral to natural philosophy—indeed, physical change was one of its primary subjects. Transforming natural-​philosophical discourse—and altering the figures that would explain it—extended the shelf life of the ancients; incorporating novelty into well-​worn discourse ensured that new ideas could be embraced by more conservative knowledge makers. Gautruche himself had practiced change making by integrating a geometric construction into his Aristotelian, Thomistic explanation of matter. Such subtle, gentle editing maintained an industry of problemata Aristotelis.88 It was a method worth elaborating on throughout the Republic of Letters. One of Rohault’s contemporaries, physician and man of letters Samuel Sorbière, received a letter from no less than Thomas Hobbes, where the English philosopher discussed the individuation of natural -philosophical objects in relation to a familiar paradox: the ship of Theseus: Two Bodies existing both at once, would be one and the same Numerical Body; for if (for example) that Ship of Theseus (concerning the Difference whereof, made by continual reparation, in taking out the old Planks, and putting in new, the Sophisters of Athens were wont to dispute) were, after all the Planks were changed, the same Numerical Ship it was at the beginning; and if some Man had kept the Old Planks as they were taken out, and by putting them afterwards together in the same order, had again made a Ship of them, this without doubt had also been the same Numerical Ship with that which was at the beginning; and so there would have been two Ships Numerically the same, which is absurd.89 Natural-​philosophical objects needed to be understood in terms of change. And the seventeenth-​century’s emergent natural philosophy demanded new interpretations. Rohault’s figures were a ready means of supplying the mind with new planks. To visually represent physical transformation, however, was to employ figures that themselves would remain fixed on the page. Still, the unassuming insertion of those figures was poised to change the philosophy they were asked to explain.

matters of replacement  ( 101 )

4 Twists of Realism

The real is contour, aspiration, tyrant. —James Wood, The Broken Estate (1999)

Sine qua non During the last decades of the seventeenth century, Descartes’s figures were contested natural-​philosophical objects. For all of his earlier efforts to make the new philosophy look like the product of his mind alone and for all his encouraging of readers to do the same, his pictures were always already contingent. Their graphic forms—drawn from the woodcuts, etchings, and engravings that poured from seventeenth-​century Northern European presses—were read by seventeenth-​century Northern European minds. And these minds were steeped in cultures animated by contests over allegiances to monarch or stadthouder, commitments to sola scriptura or visits to the confessional box.1 This meant that natural-​philosophical forms were legible to viewers familiar with the truth claims attached to prints of all kinds, whether descriptive landscapes, sumptuous allegories of philosophy, lavish almanacs, celestial cartography, or quiet still lifes. In the previous chapter, I was concerned with locating Rohault’s figures in relation to other pictures and identifying sources of tension—from concerns that Descartes’s matter-​in-​motion undermined the Catholic Eucharist to the challenges of interpreting the mind of a dead philosopher—that prompted that first-​generation Paris Cartesian to modify Descartes’s woodcuts. I also introduced the tendency on the part of Dutch Cartesians—as evidenced by Schuyls’s Latinized Tractatus de homine (1662)—to put the new philosophy in realism’s clothes (a technique that Descartes’s literary executor would not and could not abide). This chapter picks up the question of Dutch realism with another example—one that altered Descartes’s visual program with

Fig. 48 (above)  Wolferd Senguerd and Adrian Schoonebeek, page 40 from Philosophia naturalis . . . (Leiden: Danielem A. Gaesbeeck, 1680). Etching. Wellcome Collection, London. Photo: Wellcome Collection. Fig. 49 (left)  Wolferd Senguerd and Adrian Schoonebeek, page 51 from Philosophia naturalis . . . (Leiden: Danielem A. Gaesbeeck, 1680). Etching. Wellcome Collection, London. Photo: Wellcome Collection.

both surprising dexterity and irrepressible paradox: Senguerd’s Philosophia naturalis, a natural-​philosophical primer first published in 1680. Compared with other natural-​philosophical summaries of the period, Philosophia naturalis is a treasury of pictures. Among its thirty-​six etchings are ships that sail across placid seas (fig. 48), men observing the closing of a sluice (fig. 49), and still lifes aspiring to the neglectable peace of the everyday (fig. 50). All of Philosophia’s images were most likely produced by Adriaen Schoonebeek,2 an artist who had trained in famed Dutch printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe’s workshop (and who, shortly thereafter, enrolled as a student of natural philosophy at Leiden). Schoonebeek’s liberal use of what Alpers calls the “art of describing” warrants attention because it was such a significant departure from Descartes’s own visual methods.3 In three etchings in particular, he and Senguerd claimed that fundamental elements of Descartes’s philosophy were to be discovered in ( 104 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 50 (above)  Wolferd Senguerd and Adrian Schoonebeek, page 125 from Philosophia naturalis . . . (Leiden: Danielem A. Gaesbeeck, 1680). Etching. Wellcome Collection, London. Photo: Wellcome Collection. Fig. 51 (right)  René Descartes and unknown engraver, page 128 from Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam: Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1644). Woodcut. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RES-​R-974. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

the Dutch Golden Age’s favorite pictorial idiom. What had once been a fantastic swirl of dotted lines and rotating ellipses (see chapter 2) was now but water and waves; what had previously been inserted between text and margin (fig. 51) had become the bits and bobs strewn about a Dutch tabletop—the kind of literal stuff that might be cleared away before supper. Each picture made this imaginary stuff out to be available to any observer and gave it the look of a stubborn, unremarkable presence in the world. This was no accident. As I argue in this chapter, Senguerd and Schoonebeek’s pictures were countering the long-​held charge that Cartesianism was empty and meaningless, specious and untrustworthy—the disquieting product of a Frenchman’s phantasia. My argument depends on answers to some crucial questions: How had Descartes’s natural philosophy elicited so much enmity in the United Provinces? And why did Senguerd assume that a set of etchings—produced in the manner of so many twists of realism  ( 105 )

other Dutch pictures—could supply the philosophy with an acceptable tangibleness it was not perceived to have? One answer might begin with the earliest rejoinder to the philosophy, issued by Gijsbert Voetius, a staunchly conservative Calvinist theologian in Utrecht. Voetius had feared that Descartes’s misinterpretations of God’s word were lapses into Pelagian free will and, thus, affronts to predestination. That analysis might, then, extend to Senguerd’s early training in Aristotelianism and emphasize his awareness of how Descartes’s novelties needed to be framed in relation to the ancient philosopher’s form and substance.4 It would, in turn, make sense to emphasize the premium that Dutch merchant culture, thriving in its Golden Age, placed on empiricism, objecthood, and an accumulation of things.5 So, too, might one gesture to the increasingly experimental natural-​philosophical program at Leiden.6 And finally, it would be hard to resist calling on Dutch masters of the realist picture—those who were particularly concerned with describing all that could be seen and theorized picturing as a combination of naer het leven and uyt den gheest.7 While this laundry list of factors would be generally correct for explaining some of the conditions that led to Senguerd and Schoonebeek’s etchings, it feels diffuse. It does not quite explain why Senguerd and Schoonebeek neutralized the new philosophy with a seascape, a landscape, and a still life. In an effort to offer a more robust explanation, each section below focuses on one of three Philosophia etchings and its epistemic theme: the ship that made the vortices observable, the surveying of a sluice that turned the vortex into an experimental object, and the still life that underscored both realism and natural knowledge’s dependence on the invisible. Observation, experience, and the inversion of the visible: these were the practices that had epistemic value in the seventeenth-​century North, and they made Dutch realist pictures into engines of avid religiosity and natural inquiry, often with political consequences. Senguerd and Schoonebeek’s etchings participated in this economy of contingent knowledge. Throughout this chapter, I pay careful attention to each picture’s composition and seek to connect it to the operations of the culture that shaped it. This treatment is not meant to argue for Dutch exceptionalism (although, exceptional circumstances are acknowledged as such). Rather, it is an account driven by specificity. I have discovered that it is only through the particulars of each print that one can find, at the center of Senguerd and Schoonebeek’s capacious art, the fragility of representing nature as the seventeenth century was drawing to a close. Realism is a strange envelope, an unruly companion. One need only look once again to Koerner’s exquisite interpretation of Bosch’s extraordinary hybridities to be reminded of the games of deception that make realism possible: “[His impossible objects] affirm the thing-​ness of what—profoundly—is not a thing, and they do partly to assert the vacuity, or nothing-​ness, of reality as it is commonly understood. That which in ordinary life appears solid, natural, and true gets unmasked as unstable, monstrous, and ( 106 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

false, while meanwhile another reality is posited.”8 Though Senguerd and Schoonebeek’s pictures owed much to the pictorial tradition unleashed by Bosch almost two hundred years earlier, they were not Bosch’s impossibilities. Neither hellscapes full of monsters nor the heavens incandescent, Philosophia naturalis’s pictures enlisted realism as a bid to minimize the otherness that Cartesianism had come to inhabit, to assimilate the new natural philosophy into the world as seventeenth-​century Dutch academicians knew it to be. Their knowledge was hard-​won through observation, experiment, and picturing the invisible into existence. So embedded were these practices that the line between their objects and nature’s was blurry. Consequently, like Bosch’s orderly, reflexive chaos, Senguerd and Schoonebeek’s etchings remind us that realism showed reality’s flexible uncertainties. This was not simply due to the dissembling that allowed for such an easy smuggling of foreign objects into the picture plane. Employing realism’s devices was also to acknowledge the irony of distorting three-​dimensional objects into paint, stretching them across two-​dimensional surfaces, and calling the representation of objects reality rather than illusion. Realism taught that to know the world was not a matter of remaking it.9 Realism’s purpose was to represent what could be seen so as to alter how it could be understood.

Picturing Observation What did it mean to depict observation circa 1680? In one of Philosophia’s first etchings, Senguerd and Schoonebeek tested the question not by portraying any single observer but by placing the onus of observation onto their book’s readers (see fig. 48). Here, a ship makes its way through placid waters. A fine wind billows into the ship’s sail, tugging at its ties but not quite disturbing its mast. The vessel’s gentleman-​captain lounges back, wafts of smoke coming off his pipe. His first mate raises a hand to determine the ship’s course. Details situate the captain in time and place. The intricate wooden volutes that make for the back of the ship speak to fine craftsmanship and a possibly well-​off captain. The flag flapping from side to side points to a crew always on the right side of Dutch history (since the flag could either be a Prinsenvlag or the Hollandsche Vlag).10 Perhaps the undulating windsock is fraying because of the many skirmishes it has weathered. There is also much beyond the ship. Birds circle overhead. Clouds stretch out across the sky and settle off into the distance. And on the horizon, steeples rise and fall back into the water. If not for the tiny A, B, C, and D in the lower right-​hand corner of the etching, it would be all but impossible to know that the ship’s wake is the picture’s object of analysis. Senguerd explains it as a prime example of circular motion: “When a body is moved by a continuous series of propelled bodies, a circle must be described; one may see this in the water moved from B, [which is] the front part of the ship [labeled] twists of realism  ( 107 )

A. The water [from B then] propels the water which is at side C toward the submerged rudder D, from which [comes] circle A.B.C.D.”11 Senguerd’s text echoed the circular displacement and replacement that Descartes had explained in part II, passage 33 of Principia, but Schoonebeek’s print hearkened back to a figure of the isolated vortex that had been inserted into part III, passage 61.12 In Descartes and his illustrator’s woodcut, each dot represented a bit of matter posited to be in constant motion, replacing matter ahead of it and being replaced by matter behind it. All this activity amalgamated what could be seen into a vision never before seen, ultimately creating a self-​perpetuating whirl.13 The Principia woodcut, though, refused to refer to objects in the three-​dimensional world (see chapter 2). By contrast, Senguerd and Schoonebeek were taking pains to construct a vignette that immersed circular motion in a breezy everyday scene. Their picture accumulated details that, together, produced a set of conditions out of which the object of their analysis was mere consequence. Crucially, Senguerd noted that this was a visible phenomenon that “experience may teach.”14 His subjunctive mood underscored how, within the context of the etching, this circular motion would be unremarkable. The ship’s captain and his skipper are positioned squarely away from the phenomenon; the birds seem to fly away from it. This was exactly Senguerd and Schoonebeek’s point. Observation requires viewers who are alert to what others might take for granted. Philosopher and illustrator thus arranged an etching whose lessons were dependent on a triangular relationship: the observer of an otherwise overlooked phenomenon (Philosophia’s reader), the observed object (circular motion), and the circumstances that generated the observed object (a ship sailing toward the horizon, sure, but also the configuration of a good picture). Here were instructions on where and how to look—to be educated in the habit of seeing what might otherwise not be seen. Senguerd had learned this lesson early in his youth. His father, Arnold, had been a prominent professor of natural philosophy at Utrecht and a surprisingly vocal promoter of observation’s virtues. In his own Introductionis ad physicam libri sex, which saw three editions between 1644 and 1666, Senguerd senior had accorded privileges to eye-​witnessing in his preface: “If I conceive of something that agrees with and is appropriate to Aristotle’s doctrine, I am justified in drawing upon it; but if I see something consistent with reason, I conclude it to be a certain truth. Accordingly, in Natural Science I first judge with the extensive experience of my senses, I then test with diligent observation, and only after [my] reasoning has been confirmed, I submit it to the authority of the Philosophers.”15 In Senguerd senior’s formulation, experience had primacy over old dusty books. It could be raised above ancient pronouncements and outmoded precepts. But he refrained from characterizing the result of the “extensive experience of my senses” as a collective process. It was an “I” who saw and an “I” who tested, with little more than “my senses” alone. Independence, possibly inflected by Descartes’s cogito, was ( 108 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

built into the autopsia he described—as though what he saw was not necessarily that which was seen by others. What is more, reason served as a screen in the process. The observed object in and of itself could not simply be deemed knowledge. Observation could not be an unalloyed undertaking (what modern art historians call indexicality did not apply).16 It was instead funneled into what Lorraine Daston articulates as “the practices of synthesis [that] confronted the individual observer: how to glue all these fragments back together again into a coherent mosaic—but not in order to reconstitute the actual object of observation. Instead, the result was a general object.”17 For the older Senguerd, reason and “the authority of the Philosophers” kept the eye in check. But the younger Senguerd directed attention to this Philosophia etching’s most noteworthy features—in this case, features worth lettering, which intervened as markers of reason. The general object emerged from the picture plane’s well-​observed specificity. This was a reversal of the steadfast category of Aristotelian form to which Senguerd senior subscribed. “Although form in reality is not previous to generation,” the elder wrote, “it is called the principle of generation because, although in reality it is not previous to generation, substantial generation strives intrinsically toward a form as toward an end, and it is this form from which it takes its appearance.”18 It was the underlying constitution of an object—its essential identity—that endowed, say, an oak tree with its soft-​edged leaves, its sturdy bark, or its first appearance as an acorn; it was the underlying form that ultimately dictated all of an object’s qualities. This meant that motion was defined through a body’s behavior as it moved (entis) and the potential of a body to move (potentia). Or, as Senguerd senior put it, “Just as a thing was changeable so that it had the potential to be moved before motion, so a thing in motion—while it had the potential of moving and when it may be moved—has moved partly from the action, partly because it was able to move more. In the same way, a moveable thing is moved partly from the act itself and is able to be moved more.”19 The younger Senguerd was endorsing entirely different terms from his father’s. Descartes had taught him to conceive of the world as comprised of little bits of particulate matter constantly displacing one another, producing circular movement, and filling the universe’s plenum. There was no such thing as water’s potential or even small particles that could make water and nothing else. Senguerd and Schoonebeek were inviting their readers to extrapolate from their etching—from those liquid swirls in the ship’s wake standing in for all matter in motion—and apply its lessons to the wider world. Senguerd the younger understood that, in the Netherlands, observation, physics, faith, and pictures were not so easily disentangled from one another. Among strict Calvinist theologians, Cartesianism was an epistemology not just entirely uninterested in traditional Aristotelianism but willfully ignoring restrictions on image making— which spilled over into the act of conceiving of God. In 1641, the Senguerds’ Universiteit Utrecht was an early arena for these disputes. That spring, Regius, a professor on twists of realism  ( 109 )

Utrecht’s medical faculty (and, at that moment, Descartes’s favorite acolyte), presided over public disputations that introduced the new philosophy, even though he was not sanctioned to do so. Voetius, the firebrand of the Dutch Reformed movement who had just been named rector at Utrecht in March, worried that Senguerd senior would be offended by Regius’s maverick disputation and demanded that the physician stick strictly to medicine. Regius responded with caution, calling his series a seemingly neutral Physiologia sive cognitio sanitatis. But then came the bolder affront. Regius would not limit himself to matters of health and, beginning in late November, held yet another series of disputations, which asserted from the start that all that was seen, tasted, and touched were qualities derived from the mechanical motion of insensible parts. His second disputation pursued the idea of forms as accidental qualities—that is, they were not the essences of any given object but consequences of a configuration of subvisible parts. And in a third disputation, on 8 December, Regius declared that all movement is circular and that forms were constantly changing because of the circles in which matter ran. For Dutch audiences, he was attempting more than a revision of the bodies that each person inhabits; his was a complete renovation of the constitution of the visible world. The audience in the stands would have none of this. They saw the theological consequences of such a claim: if, as Regius contended, the union of the body and soul were accidental, Christ’s Resurrection and its salvatory effects were at risk. At stake, too, was causation itself and, by implication, God’s powers.20 In the days that followed, Voetius, having developed a strong distaste for this newfangled physics, seized the energy of his crowd and began to dismantle Regius’s spurious claims. Cartesianism was taken as a rebuke to a long-held certainty about nature’s objects and, thus, explanations of the sacred: Descartes threatened the enduring principle that visible changes to an object’s contours—and its perdurance or degradation—were predicated on essential forms and laws of potential. Regius’s interpretation of the new philosophy seemed poised to torch all that undergirded nature’s behavior and, thus, all that supported faith in the divine. The new philosophy was troubling the delicate relationship between observation, pictures, and belief. In the Dutch Calvinist Aristotelian worldview, what was available to the eye was key to the observable object’s essence; it was part of the very definition of that object. And that was what could be pictured. Likewise, God, whose infinite powers were wholly unobservable, was unimaginable. Or so went Voetius’s argument. In addition to Regius’s stunts, the minister had grown suspicious of Descartes’s out-​and-​out dependence on the cognitive powers of the self—and, specifically, his supposed argument about the mind’s ability to generate images of nothing less than the Creator. Voetius would have none of this. Any such image belittled God’s omnipotence. Man, being merely man, could never begin to know the divine maker in all his infinite totality.21 To stake everything on images produced by the mind was not only an exercise in hubris. It was to base the world and its faith on an inaccessible and, ( 110 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

ultimately, unmakeable image. Cartesianism, with its subterfuge and imagination run wild, threatened to dissolve what seemed an unbreakable communion of image, holy text, sight, and understanding of the world. What did all this mean for pictures and their production? To make a picture of a holy figure was to run the risk of inviting viewers to conflate representations of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Trinity, and even God for the substance of their subjects. Such images—which poured from Antwerp’s presses, especially—were capsules of volatility. As Els Stronks notes, they shifted worshippers’ attention and piety away from God’s unknowability, his infinite powers, and his incandescent grace and toward the untrustworthy image.22 Within months of Regius’s final disputation, Voetius voiced his fear about such deceptive knowledge in a lengthy volume he called De idolatria indirecta et participata. There, he claimed to lay bare the unacceptable idols whose illusions would lead their viewers astray. “Emblems of Christ,” he declared, “are strictly speaking not forbidden if they are just symbolic representations of the truth, and the same can be said of emblems of Mary. But when these representations are constituted by a picture, they, properly speaking, turn into hieroglyphs, and one should abstain from them, because of their illusory nature and the dangers of idolatry.”23 Over the course of these two sentences, Voetius retracted an initial permissiveness. At first, he seemed to accommodate, say, the single lamb that might stand in for Jesus as the Lamb of God. But then anxiety took hold. Such filled-​out “pictures” were liable to leave viewers with a mysterious, symbolic, and pagan language (“hieroglyphs”), ripe for heretical misinterpretation. It would be just as well for Christ to be entirely erased from any and all pictures. This was exactly what Voetius prescribed.24 Better to do away with any picture and any symbol of God; better to clear idols from every altar and every painting. With idolatry as enemy, the destruction and discontinuation of vile and polluting images were of primary importance. Such iconoclasm had already been enacted during the previous century, well before Voetius issued his full-​throated takedowns of Cartesianism. During the summer and fall of 1555, Dutch image breakers had moved through city and country to expunge the Catholic opulence that King Philip II of Spain had forced upon Dutch churches, clearing away offensive symbols and showy religiosity. John Calvin’s clarion call in Institutio christinae religionis (1541) had spurred the iconoclasts on: “Since the whole world has been seized with such brutal stupidity, as to be desirous of visible representations of the Deity, and thus to fabricate gods of wood, stone, gold, silver, and other inanimate and corruptible materials, we ought to hold this as a certain principle, that, whenever any image is made as a representation of God, the Divine glory is corrupted by an impious falsehood.”25 During that next decade’s iconoclasm, statues of the apostles were toppled from the choir of Leiden’s Pieterskerk. In Amsterdam, the precious altarpiece by Jan van Scorel and Maarten van Heemskerck twists of realism  ( 111 )

was battered and crushed. The iconoclasts’ fury and their material insistence on meting out right faith inspired such dread that some sanctuaries quietly capitulated. Haarlem’s St. Bavo replaced their miracle-​working rood screen with a somber painted text of the Ten Commandments, deciding that the word of God would have to suffice in a world where saints, relics, and their pictures had become so reprobate they had to be disappeared.26 The purification was far-​reaching enough that, by the time Voetius was delivering his screeds against Cartesianism, Utrecht’s Domkerk had been cleansed of all altars and religious imagery; statues such as the tomb effigy of Bishop Guy of Avesnes had been defaced; and the church’s exterior had been stripped of the fripperies of Gothic ornament.27 But out of this image breaking emerged a different type of pictorial culture that converted disgust for Catholic symbolism into hallowed attention to description. During the last decades of the sixteenth century, as painters surveyed defaced statues and shredded pictures, they recognized that too many of their most reliable patrons— Catholic churches—were barred from restoring their pictures of, say, the Madonna and Child, let alone commissioning new ones. The steadiest sources of painters’ income were no more.28 So they took their talents to more proximate and less antagonistic things in the world—the farmer’s field, the dinner table, the sitting room, the hallway, the shore, the port. Describing the ordinary and therefore the most visible became the purpose of their craft. Toward midcentury, this handiwork reached its apogee in Willem Claesz Heda’s curls of lemon peels and broken crusts of blackberry tarts; Jacob van Ruisdael’s fluffy clouds, wily roots, and weathered bricks; Pieter de Hooch’s checkered floors and sturdy wooden buckets; and even the Van de Veldes’ storm-​tossed ships, dinghies, and minuscule paddles. Faith was offered through a trust in what the eye could take in—indeed, a reveling in the parts of the world that God had chosen to make visible rather than a wish to image what he had ordered into obscurity. By 1678, Samuel van Hoogstraten went so far as to insist on the meaninglessness of that which delighted the eye: “The majesty of God, which is far beyond the reach of any eye, must not be dishonored by unbecoming representations. The only things, therefore, which ought to be sculpted or painted are things that the eye may comprehend. Such may be Histories, which are of some use for instruction or admonition; or physical things, which signify nothing and consequently serve no purpose other than to please the eye.”29 The passage pries the descriptive picture away from any attempt to picture the divine. Van Hoogstraten echoes the iconoclast’s disapproval of images that seek to limn God or to capture, and thereby contain, the divine. The antidote for such impermissible images is, of course, to make pictures that traffic in historia or the realm of the visible and recordable and thereby transmit the seen and the experienced. But these pictures of “physical things,” which “signif[ied] nothing” and “serve[d] no purpose,” were the enduring memory of iconoclasm’s sound and fury; they were the servants of a ( 112 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

compulsion to forget.30 Or, to put it more positively, such pictures practiced modesty in the face of God’s unknowable reach. They radiated piety precisely because they did not announce their faithfulness. In securing the virtues of eyewitness and observation, in making the visible world their primary occupation, they swelled with an obverse spirituality. Pictures like these showed the distance between the visible, knowable world and the unknowable realms of the divine. For Voetius and those who took his side throughout the 1640s and beyond, Cartesianism’s hubris resided in the God-​making mind. How could all knowledge and its images be secure if they sprang from such a desecrated crucible? The philosophy could only become acceptable once the mind was rid of its icons, once it had itself undergone iconoclasm’s purifying rites. These fears had not been far from Senguerd’s own mind when he read Principia philosophia. After buying his copy and knowing full well that he would need more than the margins to make an adequate record of his impressions of the philosopher’s ideas, he had instructed his bookbinder to interleave blank pages between Descartes’s text. His annotations, now held at the Special Collections of the Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden, reveal a thorough engagement with what were considered Cartesianism’s most outlandish claims—and their entanglement with idolatry. When Descartes wrote of his infamous proof of God and his split between body and mind, Senguerd could not help pulling the thread: As the author puts it here, . . . he who thinks that the mind is flesh is of the same sort as he who generates images of God. This is the cause of idolatry. But, in fact, [Descartes’s] arguments reveal that all men have such an idea in them, to which is added a natural knowledge of God by the common man. Of course, from the consensus of all men, from a kind of cult of God, or religion, whether good or evil, I take this to be what idolatry itself proves. He who makes an idol and adores it supposes a thing most knowing and most powerful. Just as when the reason for worshipping [the idol] is neither wood nor stone (each of which is a substance comprising the [idol] itself ) but that which is added to these things; so it is with us: our understanding is added to our flesh and bones.31 Senguerd’s annotation compresses theology and the new philosophy together. First, he summarizes what he believes Descartes has written: that anyone who confuses body with mind is liable to begin the heretical task of making images of God and therefore participating in idolatry. Then, Senguerd identifies a hole in Descartes’s reasoning. Popular wisdom—as expounded by religions of all kinds—has an entirely different understanding of the practice. What causes idolatry is not the matter out of which the twists of realism  ( 113 )

idol is made (whether wood or stone) but the idea of God, Jesus, or Mary that is grafted onto that basic material. He concludes by inverting Descartes’s equation all together: it is not the melding of mind and body that begets idolatry but rather their separation. Most noteworthy about Senguerd’s comment is that the paragraph to which it refers— the fifteenth section of book I of Descartes’s Principia—makes no mention of idolatry. And, yet, Senguerd could not help but think about the text in Voetius’s anxious terms. His marginalia register the discursive indissociability of Cartesianism, image making, idolatry, and representation in the Netherlandish context. Schoonebeek’s etching responds to this conundrum. His ship for Senguerd—and its wake—do more than render the formerly invisible visible. The picture as a whole borrows a critical element from the tradition of maritime pictures: the observer as a recorder abstaining from action. Simon de Vlieger’s estuaries, Willem van de Velde the Younger’s harbor full of warships passing through Amsterdam, or, especially, Willem van de Velde the Elder’s monochromatic pictures of fleets waging war stressed the artist’s removal from, but presumed witnessing of, intense activity. For instance, enough importance was accorded to their observations-​turned-​pictures that Van de Velde the Elder was named the Dutch artist of record during the Anglo-​Dutch War (between 1672 and 1674). This meant that Van de Velde would float in a little skiff next to each battle, dodging canons as they fired from one ship to another, enumerating Dutch ships as they filed into defensive formation. It meant that his pictures had the special imprimatur of the trusted eyewitness.32 Schoonebeek’s etching calls on this sort of authority, using a wide-​angle frame to make it appear as though one is on the water viewing a ship passing by. The picture’s seeming detachment from its subject places Cartesianism’s principle of circular motion on a continuum of nature’s observable objects. Reinforcing vision as the source for all knowledge, Senguerd and Schoonebeek thus separate the thought of circular motion from a mind so inward (Descartes’s) that it had purported to fashion God himself. The etching launches Cartesianism into a pictorial economy in which description serves as spiritual and epistemic solution: as a pious answer to iconophilia and as trustworthy fulfillment of the requirements of Northern empiricism. In the United Provinces, Cartesianism could only begin to be made acceptable through a picture that represented an unseen observer witnessing the visible world.

Skewed Experience The relationship between realism’s pictures, the visible world, and observers of both was marred by a troubling flexibility. As we have learned from Peter Parshall, Claudia Swan, and Sachiko Kusukawa, picturing naer het leven (after the life) or contra facta (facing the things given) did not guarantee that makers had directly witnessed an event ( 114 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

or ever been in close proximity to what they described. Instead, many an early modern picture of a beached whale, pert sunflower, exotic rhinoceros, paw-​licking cat, or glistening beetle began with a picture that had been seen, which was then stretched by the imagination, and so on and so on as successive makers strove to re-​present what had been imaged by others.33 Pictures mediated other pictures, which meant that straightforward, unadulterated copying was nearly impossible. Some, like Van Hoogstraten, theorized painting as a mirror of the world, as though an exact reflection of it.34 But naturalism’s insistence on things seen also created what Alpers describes as “a perceptual model of the knowledge of the world,” where an understanding of perception or the instruments of perception shaped how the world could be pictured. Accordingly, Senguerd and Schoonebeek’s etchings tell us that their picture planes were less the equivalents of microscopes or telescopes and more instruments complementing the eye—mechanisms through which one could—again, in Alpers words—“press experience.”35 They provided the ground on which to present objects alongside that which had been pictured elsewhere, to allow for the interaction between objects that might never hope to be placed on the same three-​dimensional table, and to incorporate them into a variegated but robust visual field. This shaped what could be seen and, thus, what could be known. On page 51 of Philosophia naturalis, Senguerd and Schoonebeek created an equivalence between the experience of pictures and experimentation with the landscape (see fig. 49). This etching features three men, likely burgermeesters, in well-​draped garb, upturned hats, and side-​swords; one points to the mechanics of the sluice while the others listen intently, as though marveling at the ingenuity with which their fellow Nederlanders had marshaled their land. It seems that the sluice has just closed, giving rise to the three whirlpools in the foreground. However, according to Senguerd’s text, these whirlpools are more than just whirlpools: “[The vortex] that is shaped from water violently escaping from sluice A, which, having been propelled by a subsequent [rushing of water], is impeded more by the water at B than from the water which is reflected against at D. From there the vortex BCDE originates from the repetition of the ebbing [of the water].”36 The philosopher and his illustrator have smuggled the most iconic of Cartesian propositions into the fabric of Holland: vortices full of matter in motion (see chapter 2). However, Senguerd and Schoonebeek have done away with the concentric dotted ellipses featured in Principia and brought Descartes’s liquid skies down to sea level. They brought an imaginary phenomenon that had only ever materialized as a picture into the world, making it an everyday consequence of the way the Dutch moved around. The etching’s argument depended on a keen familiarity with the Dutch landscape. Between 1632 and 1665, 658 kilometers of trekvaarten (towing canals) had been built to crisscross the United Provinces. These liquid superhighways allowed women and twists of realism  ( 115 )

men to travel from, say, Amsterdam to Rotterdam in thirteen hours in the same ship for the entirety of their journey rather than having to hoist their luggage out from a ship’s hull and walk to the next port.37 This new time-​saving innovation was the result of multiple municipalities working together and putting up nearly five million guilders,38 but it was attributed, first and foremost, to Dutch mastery over water and land. Netherlanders were well familiar with the interventions—one might even call them the experiments—that engineers were constantly performing on their landscape, whether the creation of lock gates or the building of bridges. Senguerd and Schoonebeek’s picture, like the numerous examples of ferryboats and rivers that preceded it, displays the labor such work required.39 It does this by comparing the parcels of land on either side of the sluice. To the left is a flat, relatively manageable plain. The wall in the lower left corner slumps into the ground it is meant to support, as though the earth has succumbed to it. To the right is much more densely packed soil, pressing and bulging up against its wall, as though the land has been stopped short. Every which way, the etching celebrates a Dutch proverb whose history is yet to be written but whose origins are likely to be found during this seventeenth-​century surge in water management: “God schiep de aarde, behalve Nederland, want dat deden de Nederlanders zelf ” (God made the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands).40 All around the United Provinces, human-​made things that improved upon God’s works were sources of pride. But Senguerd and Schoonebeek had to be cautious; their descriptive strategy risked conflating God’s work and human craftsmanship. Cartesianism had brought this issue to the fore. Whereas Voetius had complained about Descartes’s idolatrous mind—and the God making it encouraged—Jacob Revius, a professor of theology based in Leiden, interpreted the new philosophy’s world making as a rejection of divine grace. Nowhere did this become more apparent than in his Statera philosophiae cartesianae (1650), where the vortex fast became a symbol of Cartesianism’s Pelagian echoes. Revius reminded readers that God was the ultimate maker: that nothing could come from nothing; that “the objective reality of our ideas requires a cause.”41 Accordingly, Descartes’s philosophy posited a set of probabilities and imaginings run amok with little reference to God. These, he noted, were “possibilities for what may be, rather than what is.” One of the book’s most damning passages is soaked in irony: Here in innumerable ways, according to Descartes’s imagination, God will let us assume what we want and, although He himself clearly formed man from mud, as expressed in the sacred book, [Descartes] will let us take little account of this, and assume that men come from oak trees. And all things follow in that fashion, for man may be made from mud or from an oak tree; whatever about him is said, man remains in and of his nature, though we know he is ( 116 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

made from mud. The same thing can be said of Descartes, who paints whatever it is, however it’s been shaped, as having been formed from an oak tree.42 Revius was parodying Descartes’s willy-​nilly God. In this formulation, anything could be made from anything. This rendered the vortex into an emblem of the fantasies Descartes peddled. In another section of Statera called “Imaginary Things, Fictitious Things, Probable Things,” Revius let Descartes’s ridiculous imaginings speak for themselves. Here was the philosopher painting the universe (“Fingere non possumus illorum omnium siderum axes versus easdem partes fuisse conversos”); there he could foolishly conjure the heavens (“Idem esse acsi id credibilius fingi dixisset”); he was a know-​it-​all without the faintest idea where all the world’s matter had come from (“Sed valde credibile est materiam primi elementi, quae in terrae sidus confluebat”).43 The vortex was, like the rest of Descartes’s natural philosophy, a fiction, and the philosopher’s mind could not be trusted. Small wonder that Senguerd and Schoonebeek responded with their etching— and, indeed, a suite of etchings—predicated on a form of representation that aspired to mime the visible world. No longer “imagined” or “probable,” such phenomena now arose from the physical and real Dutch expertise with water. Moreover, it underscored a clear difference between managing water and making water. The Book of Genesis had cast God as the creator who, first and foremost, gave water with all its properties to the world. In Senguerd and Schoonebeek’s etching, experience also entailed familiarity with the very first lines of the Bible and the faithful arguments a theologian like Revius had made against the new philosophy. And there was still more with which to experiment: the picture plane.44 To revisit Senguerd and Schoonebeek’s picture is to see a concatenation of perspectival views that stretch from foreground to background. The foreground, where the vortices are so prominently on display, appears to widen out into the space of the viewer. In the middle ground, the sluice seems to tip upward and tilt toward the viewer. And then, in the distance, the body of water spreads out, rising up as though the water were filling a bowl. (Schoonebeek has given this three-​part hydraulic system a kind of hourglass shape.) One may be tempted to dismiss such disjointedness as off-​kilter, unskilled draughtsmanship. But the other pictures in Philosophia naturalis testify to Schoonebeek’s dexterity with composition. It is worth thus considering that these seemingly wonky choices help the picture express the difficulty of seeing certain things—like the vortices—from, say, the angle of the inspectors on the left. Rather, a shift in perspective is required to notice what may be hiding in plain sight; seeing as much as possible requires experimentation with perspective itself. Schoonebeek was not alone in testing the effects of perspective. As Celeste Brusati reminds us, this was an active practice in seventeenth-​century Holland, where artists twists of realism  ( 117 )

could perform perspectival experiments as they compressed town squares, skies, roads, and the interiors of Dutch churches into two dimensions. City views, such as Johannes Vermeer’s View of Delft (1660–61), to take the most famous example, were also results of this work.45 Van Hoogstraten’s perspective boxes, in particular, were experiments more akin to our modern sense of the term, for they were three-​dimensional apparatuses that then tested how vision itself operated, depending on where a viewer was oriented and the angle at which she looked through an aperture.46 These practitioners were preoccupied with the boundaries of illusory description that translated into oblique shifts in focus or modifications to the viewer’s line of sight. Saenredam’s exquisite paintings of church interiors put these techniques to new purpose, collating various points of view— like straight-​on views of columns coupled with low-​angled peeks of the ground that exposed light-​filled naves—to render Catholic churches leveled by Calvinist iconoclasm as sites of collective memory and civic pride, transmuting loss into shared experience.47 Constituting all these pictorial experiments were efforts at turning what had been seen and experienced to new purpose and revised understanding. Cartesianism had been subject to such tactics before. In his Latin translation of De l’homme, Schuyl had laid similar stress on differently aligned points of view to positive effect. Take his highly described etching of viewing the distant and the near (see fig. 38). (I discuss this picture from the point of view of Descartes’s literary executor—and to somewhat different effects—in the previous chapter.) Schuyl’s illustrator pictures a landscape at once wide open and dense: the fluff of the clouds in the gently gradated sky is unbothered by the pleasant collection of adjoined buildings to the left and the variegated mound of dirt in the foreground. The point of the picture, though, is not to revel in the landscape but to focus on an entirely disembodied and abstracted eye, which toggles between a fire blazing right before it and a squat watchtower off in the distance. What Schuyl did for Descartes’s analysis was unlike what Van Schooten Jr. had done for the philosopher’s original books. In the Essais, Descartes’s depiction of sight had been metaphorical (the camera obscura, the toga-​donning blind man with sticks) or anatomical (a careful delineation of the brain’s folds and connections to the eyes, the lines of sight from there). Schuyl embedded his objects of analysis into the landscape, making them features among other features rather than items plucked from their native environment. Then, by taking the eye out of the body and further abstracting it, he ensured that his readers could identify the instrument of vision—the eye—but not necessarily identify with it, thus encouraging the observer to stand apart from the picture. (Schuyl also emphasized this in his translation of Descartes’s French text, referring to the abstraction as an “oculus.”48) Critically, he positioned his readers perpendicular to the abstract eye’s lines of sight. This looking-​at-​looking ensured that the very nature of experiential understanding might require distance from any

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appointed observer; indeed, that multiple observers might simultaneously orient themselves around the same scene. Though the extant historical record leaves us guessing about what Schuyl’s readers thought of this picture in particular, at the very least we know that these formal choices came from a culture of description and observation. A few years earlier, Schuyl had been a student of Francis de la Boe, or Sylvius, who had been appointed professor of practical medicine at Leiden in 1658. Sylvius was a lively investigator. He built a physiological laboratory whose marquee experiment consisted of the ligation of dogs’ duodenums. Sylvius had taught Schuyl to speak the language of experience, even as the latter flirted with Descartes’s natural philosophy. As Pamela Smith shows, this medical professor sought to integrate the world of things into his knowledge about the world. His “artisanal epistemology” (to use Smith’s term) championed hands-​on making in order to know and mimic nature. Schuyl’s work points to an adjacent though less three-​dimensional form of experimentation. During the latter half of the seventeenth century, the observation of things and the experimentation with perspective on the page could make Cartesianism an acceptable proposition. Schuyl’s effort was to show that Cartesian vision was not quite as tricked out as the philosopher’s own texts and images had made it out to be. The strategy of shifting perspectives had also been invoked by Dutch Cartesians in their attempts to reconcile the new philosophy with Aristotelianism. Recall, for example, Revius’s frustration with Descartes’s fanciful inventions. One counterargument could, as discussed above, identify the vortices as a phenomenal consequence of human hands working with God-​given stuff. But another might identify people not as makers but as observers called to reorient their perspectives, thus altering what could be experienced. In Clavis philosophiae naturalis, seu introductio ad naturae contemplationem Aristelico-​Cartesiana (1654), Leiden physics professor Joannes de Raey had eased his readership into the idea by demonstrating the parallels between sense and reason: “Indeed, just as a bright body placed before our eyes when they are open and looking in the right direction is necessarily perceived and recognized by us, so also that which is exposed to the understanding is understood and received without exertion when we regard it with due attention and are not blinded by preconceptions.”49 Among Cartesians, vision and its manipulation remained central themes. “Preconceptions” could pierce the eyes and render them useless. And all depended on “looking in the right direction.” Thus, point of view was a critical tool for defusing the new philosophy’s charge. And this is precisely what makes the perspectival shifts of Schoonebeek and Senguerd’s etching so noteworthy. With a bird’s-​eye view, they made the vortices available to their readers, “plac[ing them] before our eyes” (rather than those of the observers in the picture, off to the left), ensuring that the vortices were “received without exertion” (if, say, they were placed at the end of the horizon). Senguerd and Schoonebeek were

twists of realism  ( 119 )

Fig. 52  René Descartes and unknown engraver, page 244 from Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam: Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1644). Woodcut. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RES-​R-974. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

engaging in a host of experiments, answering the challenge to demonstrate the facticity—rather than fictionality—of Cartesianism’s objects. They inscribed the vortices within a rhetoric of nature seen. Whether through their appearance in a sluice or in the adept handling of perspectival shifts to describe a landscape, nature’s truths could be discovered (or, in early modern terms, “invented”) rather than imagined.

Deceptive Truths The efforts of the philosopher and his etcher also suggest that the picture plane was double-​edged: both guarantor for nature’s objects and arena of questionable novelties. This raises a pair of important questions: What, exactly had permitted Senguerd and Schoonebeek to remake such a volatile object with the vocabulary of realism? How, by 1680, had the Dutch realist picture become so pliable as to let the outside in and render the previously unknown and the heretofore unseen so irrevocably visible? Page 125 of Philosophia naturalis points to answers. This was where Senguerd and Schoonebeek pushed against the very limits of this descriptive project, threatening to break even its most experimental forms (see fig. 50). Here were all the trappings of a typical still life: a sturdy table, a quiet, unassuming room, a window with a view, a picture on the wall. But the objects spread across the tabletop were strangers to the visible world and especially alien to any cozy domestic interior. They were the celestial particles that, in Principia, Descartes had described as comprising the universe: the tiny spheres packed alongside one another, the triangular prism particles that were stuffed in between, and the cochlear bits that plugged in any remaining holes (figs. 51–53).50 Between 1644 and 1680, Dutch natural philosophers had scrutinized this micromatter, assessing whether it fit into the right mix of observation, experiment, and traditional Aristotelian texts. But many had decided that all this small stuff was evidence of the philosopher’s outsized independence of mind—a mind that exhibited a problematic lack of faith in the God-​given visible world. So Senguerd tasked Schoonebeek with rendering these intangible concepts with what Alpers calls “the art of describing” and situating them in the Dutch Golden Age’s ( 120 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 53  René Descartes and unknown engraver, page 271 from Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam: Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1644). Woodcut. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RES-​R-974. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

“world of things.” Realism’s contours were meant to give the new philosophy what it appeared to lack: a theological preference for visible objects, a natural-​philosophical emphasis on autopsia, and an emergent interest in experiment as the alteration of observation. But Philosophia’s still-​life etching was extraordinary in yet another sense. In placing overreactive stress on Cartesianism’s visibility, it showed Dutch realism to be a conflicted proposition. Indeed, by 1680, Dutch artists and natural philosophers alike could acknowledge—and even celebrate—the flexibility of this form. No longer a straightforward custodian of truth, it was a mechanism for putting disparate truths together, side by side. In that cultural moment, hyperfictionality, illusion, and even deception were critical means for apprehending a world ever harder to grasp. The second half of the century was rife with confusion. Throughout, Voetius’s admonitions against idolatry and the Cartesian heresy of thinking God into being had reverberated out from theology and into politics. The professor’s conservatism was comfort for the Orangists, so called because of their support for the princes of Orange. Broadly speaking, the Orangist faction represented traditional values and long-​standing order. For much of the second half of the seventeenth century, the Orangists continually squared off against the States Party, whose banner was “True Freedom.” The States Party hoped for a Republican collection of states, each with its own character—a total affront to the strictures that Orangists strove to maintain. The States Party had the chance to test their system when they seized power in 1650. In the traditional position of stadthouder—essentially the head of state that had long been occupied by the princes of Orange—they saw a tired, ridiculous relic of familial succession. The Grand Pensioner, defined as a civil servant of Holland, was to take the stadthouder’s place. His republican charge was to lead but not rule. Johann de Witt was the States Party star who would take on the role in 1653—but he was also known for his sympathies with Cartesianism. De Witt had studied and published mathematics with none other than Van Schooten Jr., Descartes’s illustrator for the Essais and, eventually, translator twists of realism  ( 121 )

of Géometrie. Though De Witt was not a full-​throated advocate of the new physics, he had no interest in suppressing anyone who wanted to teach it. In 1656, when Revius wished to eliminate the new philosophy from the theological classroom, the Grand Pensiner responded by holding a synod before the States of Holland on 30 September. That assembly “established limits and boundaries within which [the respective faculties] must remain to avoid all confusion.”51 This was a soft win for Leiden’s Cartesians: its theologians would have to stifle their enthusiasm for philosophy—a small price to pay for the general freedom to philosophize as they wished. In order to avoid unrest, Descartes’s philosophometa were not to be broadcast, but, because only the most inflammatory parts of the philosophometa were known, Cartesians could still slip the new philosophy’s lesser offenses through subtler channels. De Witt had given the philosophy some room to breathe.52 Having an ally in De Witt, however, did not protect the new philosophy forever. In 1672, De Witt found himself under attack. Of course, the charges stemmed from more than just his natural-​philosophical predilections. Political pressures were being exacted on the Dutch Republic from all sides. The Third Dutch War had raged since April. France, allied with England, had noticed the teetering of Nederland and marched north, seizing Gelderland and Utrecht. By midsummer, Louis XIV’s forces had gained so much momentum that even Leiden was on the brink of submitting to their will. This exacerbated internal strife. Orangists, who sought the restoration of the monarchy, believed that De Witt’s States Party had fractured the Republic with their programs of provincial sovereignty, religious tolerance, and philosophical eclecticism. These now-​fissured and vulnerable provinces needed to be reined in. Order would come by beating back French and English forces, Voetian conservatism, and the unity of a recognizable (read: Aristotelian) worldview. But, first, someone had to pay the price for all this chaos. An initial Orangist solution was to make an attempt on De Witt’s life on 21 June. Recognizing that he could no longer lead the Republic, De Witt resigned as Grand Pensioner of Holland, and on 4 July, the States of Holland appointed Willem III as stadhouder. The House of Orange waved the Prince’s Flag once more. But more radical Orangists still had anger left to vent. On 20 August, a crowd got word that De Witt was headed to the prison in The Hague in order to pay a visit to his brother Cornelis, who had been captured and incarcerated by Orangist forces. Upon De Witt’s arrival, the mob seized the brothers, lynched them, and dragged their bodies to the Groene Zoodje, the city’s storied execution platform, hanging them upside down to die. As if that had not been enough, enterprising marauders then engaged in dissection, ripping off the brothers’ toes and fingers and hocking them as souvenirs to the crowd below.53 Within days, details of the desecration became the subjects of pictures repeated again and again. Such images of gouged-out torsos, feet bound to the scaffold were not coupled with texts of regret. They were the emblems of Orangist triumph—visible ( 122 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 54  Romeyn de Hooghe, De Doot van het Eeuwige Edict, 1674. Etching, 537 × 350 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Rijksmuseum.

proof that the right bodies had been humiliated, records of eyewitness that proclaimed justice had been done. The enmity that this so-​called rampjaar (year of disaster) had bred was figured two years later by famed printmaker De Hooghe in a 1674 broadsheet called De Doot van het Eeuwige Edict (Death of the perpetual edit) (fig. 54). A dark political cartoon, the print features a parade celebrating the Orangist restoration of the stadhouder outside a dilapidated States Party house. States delegates, whose labels endorsed “Seclusion,” “The Price of Preferring France,” and even “Machiavelli,” mourned the death of one of their greatest achievements: De Witt’s Perpetual Edict, which had fully eliminated the stadthouder in 1667. Now its hat of Freedom (“Vryheyt”), topped with a death mask, was about to fall to the floor. And seeping out from all these ruins were the basest elements of the whole States Party enterprise. On the right was the devil himself and, on the left, a band of schemers who fraternized with lion-​footed, Janus-​headed monsters and more French fleurs-​de-​lis. The schemers held their affiliations close, waving banners of “Free Will” (Vrygeest) and “French-​mindedness” (Frans-​gesinden) and reading books written by none other than the Pelegian Socinius, advocator of free will. All these figures—darkened by shadow, crouching to conspire, or turning their misanthropic backs entirely—assembled to demonstrate the worst sort of collusion. twists of realism  ( 123 )

And right there, supporting all this suspicion, was a book labeled “Cartesius,” indicating Descartes. By now, the very image of the new philosophy was yoked to falsehood; it had been woven into a culture of deceit. All this was of a piece with the so-​called Cartesian deception that had been raging in the schools. First was the case of infighting among Cartesians at Leiden. In 1666, Lodewijk Meijer, a recent graduate of Leiden’s philosophy and medical faculties, wrote a provocative tract declaring Descartes’s method of clear, distinct, and invisible ideas to be the only path toward undoing the confusion of theological interpretation. Cartesians of more moderate temperament decided Meijer had taken the concept of independence of mind much too far. And the same year that De Hooghe published his cartoon, two theologians, Abraham Heidanus and Johannes Cocceius, brought charges against Meijer before the States of Holland. Meijer’s text was quickly banned. But this did little to tamp down teachings on the new philosophy. Instead, the skirmish demonstrated that Descartes’s adherents were so convinced of free will that they would keep instructing willing students in whatever they wanted to teach, even if they had to do so outside university walls.54 The year 1675 brought yet another case of a duplicitous Cartesian. Cornelis Bontekoe, another Leiden graduate, had been hanging around town in the months after graduating. He set up shop as a tutor, giving students lessons in the new philosophy without the university’s permission. The curators forbade Bontekoe’s unruly antics in short order.55 Cartesianism, again, had to be plucked from the underground and disciplined in broad daylight. But traditionalists still sensed a Cartesian conspiracy afoot. Despite the banning of Meijer’s book and the prohibition of Bontekoe’s teaching, rumor had it that the philosophy had so possessed and infected a substantial portion of the student body—and even some members of the faculty—that they were crafting a plot to overturn the entire university administration. Paranoia ran high enough that stalwart philosophy professors with little more than neutral feelings toward the new philosophy—including Gerard de Vries and Wilhelm Wilhelmius—were forced to “desert their posts.”56 To prevent any further misrule, the old-​g uard Voetian Friedrich Spanheim and fellow theologian and Voetian Anthonie Hulsius drafted a list of twenty wrongheaded Cartesian claims. Yet again, free will, the hubris of man creating the Creator, and the notion that the world was organized on principles derived from the cogito’s certainty figured prominently.57 By 7 January 1677, the curators turned Spanheim and Hulsius’s document into an official Resolutie of the university, and the suppression of Cartesianism was renewed.58 Commentary on these resolutions elaborated on the new philosophy as shadowy vice. In his anti-​Cartesian pamphlet, Utrecht preacher Leonard Ryssenius—a former student of Voetius59—continued to link Cartesianism with the brothers De Witt, the

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States Party, and the banner of theological falsehood. He held the new philosophy up to the light, revealing a hellish landscape rife with uncertainty and darkness: I smelled a foul odor and saw in all of its constitution a base and evil temperament. It was all seeping sand, where, on the grounds of man’s ingenuity, so many empty pools stood. Here truth was but a shadow, the shadow a wicked deception that every man leads to God. Oh!60 The darkest corners of De Hooghe’s print had spread. Other anti-​Cartesian commentators focused on the cluelessness of the new philosophy’s advocates and how they missed everything in plain sight. An anonymous pamphlet—printed multiple times throughout the 1670s—pitted a Latinizing Cartesian scholar against a simple farmer. The latter—a boer—was drawn as a plain-​speaking son, whose common sense was piety itself. The farmer poked and prodded the Cartesian’s principia and notiones, revealing that, when compared with the truths of the Bible and the evidence of the land, they shriveled to nothing.61 Placing excessive stock in thought, “the philosophers” had cut the visible world off from its divine making. The boer stressed that “the skies, the stars, the sea, the soil, light, etc.: these are things man can notice no part of by himself, nor are they a doctrine investigated by movement.”62 The lone thinker was no match for the bounty of the natural, visible, and tactile landscape. First, the antisocial philosopher ostensibly ignored the God who made him. Then there was the spurious principle of Descartes’s particulate matter. For any simple farmer, solidity and mass could be gauged by the eyes and hands; they were not derived from some unsubstantial “doctrine.” Any presumption that the world was all matter in motion had to be seen to be believed. The boer was a loyal subject of the Orangist state and an excellent student of Voetian orthodoxy. Nature, in all its God-​given wonder, was meant to be comprehended by scanning its surfaces and digging into its soil.63 Invisible and undetectable, Descartes’s little bits of matter could not be tolerated. Toward the end of the 1670s, then, the checklist of Cartesianism’s doctrinal offenses was long, and it had assumed a few specific shapes in the Republic’s cultural imaginary. It was a book that ne’er-​do-​wells held close as they conspired with Janus-​faced, French-​loving friends. It haunted learned culture like the flayed bodies of the brothers De Witt. It was fast-​running quicksand. It was shadow and shade. It was a crooked path that strayed from God. It had such reckless confidence that it believed in humankind’s ability to picture God. In the United Provinces, Cartesianism had been cast as a dialectical web of images, printed and imagined, whose villainy was juxtaposed to a

twists of realism  ( 125 )

virtuous but complex identification of the natural world with the visible and the godly, with the empirical and the true, with common sense and right faith. The new philosophy was a willful misapprehension of what was evident to the eyes. Senguerd was not so sure. His path had been eclectic. In 1667, Senguerd had begun studying law and philosophy at Leiden. Just a few months later, he submitted a dissertation on the anatomy and physiology of the tarantula. In 1675, he was appointed full professor in natural philosophy. And, soon, he had the distinction of being one of the first on the Continent to perform experimental demonstrations for his students. When Senguerd annotated his copy of Principia, he was likely in a comfortable enough position to keep an open mind. Grappling with Descartes’s three kinds of matter, he concluded “words do not signify things as they are, but as they are conceived.”64 But what did that conceiving require? In Senguerd’s own annotations, it was best won through pictures: “Just as with a picture, every idea is borne of three causes: the subject, which is just as with any given painting; the cause, which is its painter; and the exemplar, which is the thing depicted. Thus, ideas are expressed in our minds, as though they were painted, making the pattern of other things which have impressed themselves on us. In this argument consists the truth of all perceptions, or even of simple apprehension.”65 Senguerd’s note was in the spirit of an old Aristotelian saw.66 Nonetheless, it demonstrates his basic sense of the long-​standing kinship between ideas and pictures. Each could be better illuminated by the other. So when it came time for Senguerd to set Cartesianism’s ideas right, what better way than to offer them new kinds of pictures? Circa 1680, there was no kind of picture more adequate to the task than the Dutch still life. The most decadent examples of the genre could accommodate any number of foreign wares and foodstuffs, and they even seemed to transcend time itself. Bumblebees hovered above cherries and grapes, even though these fruits never bloomed at the same time. Lobsters gleamed next to wine-​colored brocades, parrots pecked away at lavishly tooled gold plates. Nineteenth-​century critics retrospectively called these pictures pronkstillleven—a label whose first syllable, pronk (showiness), drew attention to the flamboyant splaying of lemon peels across nautilus cups or the near-​impossibility of silver ewers resting against the fingerboards and necks of silent lutes.67 Of course, this breathtaking array of goods, as Julie Berger Hochstrasser and Elizabeth Honig observe, were the prizes for a United Provinces steeped in colonization. During this dawn of mercantile capitalism, nutmeg, pepper, porcelain, tulips, and so many other goods flowed into the harbors at Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or Delft (among others) and were spread efficiently across the Republic’s trekvaarten (canals).68 Makers of still-​life pictures responded in kind by combining items at once exotic and ephemeral. They gave their canvases over to wondrous things that, by dint of the market, hungry bellies, or the passage of time, would not remain on tables at Gouda, Haarlem, or Leiden for long. What is more, these still lifes so prodigiously integrated never-​before-​seen items so ( 126 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

that they would not be considered out of place. Parakeets and Chinese porcelain could be easily assimilated into these overflowing bounties of blackberries and figs, golden platters, and swaths of brocade, all surveyed by the occasional half-​shaved Cotonese pup. Take, for instance, one of the most complex paintings produced in Leiden, which now hangs in that city’s Lakenhal: David Bailly’s Vanitas Still Life with a Self-​Portrait of the Young Painter (1651).69 The picture features a painter alongside a number of pictures— oil portraits, black-​and-​white drawings, a delicate chalk image on the wall, and even reflections of windows on mirrored jewel boxes—as well as props like coins, a tipped goblet, a knife, strands of pearls, a rolled-​up sheet of paper, a skull, books, a pipe, folded paper, curling pages, an hourglass with a bit more time left, a putto-​supported candelabrum, peonies in their vase and out, a statuette, a little sculpted bust, a stately glass of wine, a snuffed-​out candle, a painter’s palette, and delicate tassels, all strewn on a creased tablecloth, all charmed by the several bubbles hovering above the table. These objects testify to the variety of materials, techniques, and objects that would have been at the disposal of a midcentury artist. It is the painterly equivalent of an echo chamber, where all these images on all these various surfaces reflect the painter’s skill. Bailly establishes the painter generally and himself specifically as a master of vision—a keen observer of objects thick and thin, able to trick and delight viewers by transforming what is seen into paint and inscribing that which is painted into what is seen. (There is not enough room to go into it here, but given all the discourse around picture making at the Universiteit Leiden at this moment, one wonders what kind of contact Bailly had with natural philosophers, for it was near them that he lived out his last days as a servant.70) Bailly’s realism seems to make tangible every painted pearl and every painted goblet; the picture’s convincing visuality almost trespasses into the three-​dimensional world. Hanneke Grootenboer has written of a similar phenomenon in a still life by Heda: “I cannot possibly argue that in Claesz. [Heda]’s painting we can observe the thingness of the things presented—precisely because they have been represented; they have become objects whose essence cannot be materialized—but we do perceive, I believe, the bringing near. Not only are the objects proximate, but we have to come near ourselves, and it is in the process of bringing near that we become aware of the fact that these objects, and this painting, are within reach of our own body.”71 Such pictures attend to the blurry distinction between objecthood and three-​dimensionality. They make us almost forget that we are looking at a picture. The success of this handiwork resulted in what literary critic Harry Berger Jr. calls the ruse that was the Dutch still life: “Still life proudly pretends, but only pretends, that its absolute unreality is the simulacrum of real presence. It parades the completely fake as the copy of a completely real original. But it lets us suspect it may be lying. Its emphasis is on the completeness, the conspicuousness, of its fakery.”72 The still life was twists of realism  ( 127 )

a pictorial category made for working out the meaning of making; it was a visual field where painters could best show off their craft. Still lifes traded on their artists’ power to reconfigure the physical world in order to create a better picture. As such, each still life was also an invitation to consider pictures as separate from the visible world. Very fine depictions of things were not at all the things themselves. Going beyond the impulse to document, such pictures announced their constructedness. And yet, it was the mastery of such constructedness that seemed to merge the objects in a picture with objects in the world. Artists thus had a very different attitude toward the natural world than natural philosophers, especially Cartesian ones. By 1680, they had picked up on De Raey’s mission statement about the new natural philosophers’ duty to probe beneath visible surfaces. None other than Van Hoogstraten had concluded that picture-​making and the new physics as entirely antithetical to each other: “The special characteristics of all things demonstrate themselves first to us in their form and extension, not as is described by natural philosophers, but more like the shell around an egg that determines the extension of the external form. And the bodies that circumscribe them, as if through an outer limit, mark them off from other things. Just as the wine closed in a bottle takes on the extension of the container, so the form of the bottle becomes the object of the thing that a painter mirrors and thereby he understands all natural things, and each one in particular.”73 Van Hoogstraten was paying mind to Cartesianism here, citing the phrase “form and extension,” but he then entirely rejected it. He turned the picture maker into a meticulous Aristotelian whose concern was the qualitative form of each object. Hidden interiors—comprised of all those particles that pushed each object into the outer reaches of the world—were not for the painter to scrutinize. Playing against surfaces, mimicking contours, bent or ragged, that were made available to their eyes: this was the ambit of the picture maker. All this would seem to have put Senguerd and Schoonebeek’s etching for Philosophia naturalis in a serious bind. The picture had snuck the invisible, at best, and the imaginary, at worst, into a field defined by visible things. It violated the very premise of natural philosophy—which endeavored to drill beneath every surface to understand physical change—just as it violated the basic principles of the still-​life picture—which strove to describe visible contour after visible contour. Here, possibly, was an enactment of the decades-​old charge that Cartesianism was the philosophy of subterfuge and deceit. But, in the years after Voetius, in the semesters before De Witt’s ill-​fated execution, scholasticism itself had made room for truths that could be derived from pictures, no matter how jumbled those pictures were. A notebook kept by a student of De Raey’s, compiled between 1653 to 1668, explained the clarity of Cartesian cognition through a striking treatment of the imago contra facta: “When the intellect rightly comprehends, ( 128 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

we know nothing falsely. Similarly, if some painter in Holland, where Donkeys are rarely seen, were to paint an Ass, and added in ears and hooves, etc. more suitable to a horse, those parts which he painted, which would be deemed erroneous, are not in and of themselves deceptive—because of that to which [their representation] is owed, not what it expresses.”74 First, De Raey draws a critical analogy between the clear and distinct ideas borne of the Cartesian mind, on the one hand, and the painter culling together source material for a mimetic picture, on the other. This was akin to what Senguerd had done in his Principia. But then, the professor goes further, focusing on the truth-​giving power of parts, much as the advocates of naer het leven and the imago contra factum that had come before him.75 The picture plane (as much as the mind) becomes a field upon which incongruous things can be brought together, with the proviso that each part ought to be understood as truthful. Even if these parts cannot ultimately resolve into a whole aggregate truth, they still stand as elements that “are not in and of themselves deceptive.” De Raey’s permissive, relativist, and pragmatic approach to the making of images speaks to the powers of description that were so prized and refined throughout the seventeenth-​century Netherlands—powers upon which the still life depended. Here, also, was a formula for what a descriptive Cartesian picture might look like: a picture whose elements each have a basis in that which has been experienced or that which has been clearly and distinctly thought but which may not, all together, produce a picture that mirrors the visible world. This is exactly what Senguerd and Schoonebeek put to work in their etching of celestial matter. They gather all the general ingredients of still life to destigmatize objects imported from a philosopher’s mind. They make the clear and distinct ideas that comprise the world’s plenum—screw-​shaped particles alongside oblong prism-​shaped bits and next to a pyramid of matter’s tiny pearls—available to the eye through deft chiaroscuro and a prodigious sculpting of form that approximates visual convention. Sure, there is an awkwardness with which Schoonebeek stacks these pearls on the table. They teeter toward the table’s edge and seem to pop up off of it, as though they have little relationship to its surface. Berger Jr. might call this the picture’s “sense of vertige” in which the precariousness of a painted thing instills a wish in the viewer to rescue it from an inevitable fall, thereby emphasizing the three-​dimensionality of the item depicted and, thus, the skill of the painter who made amorphous and flat pigment into solid, three-​dimensional things.76 What is more, Schoonebeek has put this still life in the strangest of rooms, where, just as Van Hoogstraten had advised, each surface seems to play off against the next. The table tilts upward at an impractical forty-​five-​degree angle. The walls are difficult to relate to one another: Is the one that gleams on the left perpendicular to the shadowed wall on the right or behind it? And what to make of the window and its ledge? The ledge appears to jut out into the open air just beyond the room, but, then again, the construction of its frame indicates a kind of curvature that twists of realism  ( 129 )

seems to bend in toward the room’s interior. I have come to believe that these passages are not merely the products of a clumsy hand. Instead, they add up to a reminder of the difficulty of crafting a picture that mimicked the three-​dimensionality of the physical (and visible) world. Or, better put, the picture enacts the seventeenth-​century Dutch paradox of knowing by representing the visible world. In the back of this room, Senguerd and Schoonebeek have hung a tiny picture on the left-​hand wall—a rectangle that seems to feature a map of the world in two hemispheres—and this near the window that looks out onto trees and rocks on the other side of the room’s walls. Together, picture and window form a study in contrasts: the flattened map that schematically interprets the world and the visible world meant to be directly accessible to the eye. Ultimately, however, both are pictures within a picture. Together, they amount to an argument that images, over and against words and even over and against direct experience, rendered the world knowable in Leiden during the seventeenth century. Realism’s easy assimilation of foreign substances, its commitments to pictorial convention, its dependence on the eye as an experiential, theological, and political guarantee—all these capacities gave seventeenth-​century Dutch pictures both epistemic power and epistemic volatility. Senguerd and Schoonebeek attempted to draw on this ambiguity, animating Cartesian truths at a charged moment in the history of the new philosophy’s transmission. They revealed what realism’s practitioners already knew so well: its knowing unknowing and its dependence on that which could not be seen.

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5 Ironic Copies Every copy has adhesive properties, by holding together the present and the past. —George Kubler, The Shape of Time

T

ell me if you’ve seen this picture before (fig. 55). In almost every respect, it’s identical to this picture (fig. 56). Both are woodcuts. Both testify to patient, attentive craftsmanship. Both feature tiny black dots that appear to churn and undulate forward and back and beyond the page but are bound by bolder dotted lines differentiating one bubble from the next. At the center of both pictures is a small gray circle marked S. This circle, the pictures’ respective texts tell us, represents the sun, which means that both woodcuts depict the earth surrounded by so many other worlds. Thus, the two prints describe the same thing: Descartes’s interstellar vortices, all whirring with countless bits of particulate matter. And yet, these pictures work at cross-​purposes. The earlier picture debuted in 1644 in Descartes’s Principia philosophiae. The other, a copy, appeared forty-​six years later in Voiage du monde de Descartes, a polemical satire of the new philosophy written by French Jesuit priest Gabriel Daniel. Voiage aimed at denigrating Descartes’s new philosophy in general and his vortices in particular. Daniel’s copy parodied its predecessor; it was a reproduction oriented against itself. Irony is a practice of mutual exchange. In visual terms, it forges a bond between picture maker and picture viewer, for the artist must depend on the viewer’s knowledge; she must trust the viewer to identify her picture as—in the words of literary critic Cleanth Brooks—a “part modified by the pressure of context.”1 In Voiage, Daniel made this phenomenon literal. His fantastic voyage put new stress on an eminently recognizable part of Descartes’s natural philosophy. Joining audacity to exquisite humor, the Jesuit priest demanded that this picture—which for decades had laid claim to truth— be taken for a fiction. The historical wonder lies in how Daniel’s lampooning could do

Fig. 55  Gabriel Daniel and unknown engraver, page 316 from Voiage du monde de Descartes (Paris: La Veuve de Simon Bénard, 1690). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB487000:0138, Mt. Wilson Observatory Collection. Photo: The Huntington Library.

Fig. 56  René Descartes and unknown engraver, page 110 from Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam: Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1644). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB 700392. Photo: The Huntington Library.

credible damage to the new philosophy—that is, how and why, at the fin de siècle, the fantastic voyage was an appropriate genre for discrediting Descartes’s natural philosophy, especially its vortices theory. That inquiry animates this last chapter. Even by the standards of seventeenth-​century illustrated books, Voiage’s copying of the Principia illustration was singular. As I detail below, rollicking romans à clef did include pictures, but those pictures had little to do with natural philosophy. When fiction’s illustrations made mischief, they amplified written descriptions. For instance, Charles Sorel’s “La belle Charité,” a print for his novel Le berger extravagant (1627), literalized Petrarchian metaphors for female beauty to comic effect: this is how you would look if you had suns for eyes; this is the unpleasant effect of mistaking rosy cheeks for roses themselves.2 For their part, early modern naturalists took an altogether different ironic copies  ( 133 )

approach to picturing. Disagreement with earlier depictions of, say, a walrus did not involve reproducing the incorrect walrus and casting it as a fiction. Under such circumstances, natural historians and their collaborators mainly drew corrective pictures and incorporated those into the books they were publishing.3 In copying an illustration from one book into another, they endorsed the original, eager to spread hard-​won knowledge.4 Daniel’s strategy of copying to make fun was singular. I have yet to find another early modern example. Despite its peculiarity, the Jesuit priest’s deliberate misconstruing of Descartes’s woodcut offers a fierce object lesson in the meaning of the copy. The Voiage reproduction serves as a reminder, contra Benjamin’s aura, of how copies make the reputations of that which they reproduce. (And, of course, book illustrations, by virtue of being made to be reproduced from the moment they appear, have always thwarted the very idea of aura.) Daniel’s satirical copy depends on the decades-​long reception of the vortices woodcut— and all the other instances in which that picture had been copied. So if this is where Benjamin’s critique of reproduction finds its limits, it is worth exploring the concept of the copy put forth by Erwin Panofsky. In a letter rediscovered by Maria Loh, Panofsky defined the reproduction of a work of art not as some lesser degraded version of the original. Over and against the copy as a stabilizing force, an information-​affirming act, or a martyr rescuing an idea from oblivion,5 Panofsky’s philosophy of the copy effects a unique and ineluctably historical triangulation between the original maker’s intentions, that which the reader brings to the work, and the historical vagaries to which the original work is subject.6 The moment a copy is brought into view, it lays a picture open to new interpretations.7 Daniel’s willful, “wicked” misunderstanding was thus not owed exclusively to the print’s inherent qualities.8 What the Jesuit priest knew— and what he hoped his readers would know too—was crucial to stimulating collective confusion over, and possibly exasperation with, what Descartes’s natural philosophy had wrought. Though my focus on the pictorial conundrum of Daniel’s copy differs somewhat from those who have mined Voiage before, it could hardly exist without their work. Earlier scholarship has largely fallen into two camps: philosophy or history of philosophy that characterizes Daniel’s work as a popular, anti-​Cartesian satire; and literary criticism that interrogates the book as an instance of popular, late seventeenth-​century French otherworldly philosophical literature. Among philosophers, Daniel’s work has largely hung in the background, second to better-​known detractors like Moore who debated the new philosophy with hard-​won theological depth.9 Recently, scholars like Justin E. H. Smith have revisited Daniel’s text, reframing it as an effective satire that borrowed from the Lucianic tradition of making fun.10 But even these newer interventions have lingered over Voiage’s implications for the splitting of mind and body, whether as a critique of human difference and inequality11 or as an entertaining narrative;12 ( 134 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

they have left to the side Daniel’s attack on the vortices theory and the woodcut copy untouched. Literary critics have deemed Daniel’s parody a work of fictive and natural-​ philosophical mimicry. For Ralph Heyndels, Voiage’s mixture of descriptive verisimilitude, narrative, and polemical discourse all amount to a futile search for epistemic coherence.13 Jeremy Sabol wonders at the author’s commitment to a seventeenth-​century French definition of vraisemblance, assessing whether the text was “consonant with public opinion” and represented things “as they ought to be”; for him, a pressing question is whether or not Daniel achieved Descartes’s voice.14 Of all these scholars, Sabol is the only one who mentions Daniel’s reproduction of Descartes’s woodcut, but he does so only in passing.15 Building on this work, I argue that Daniel’s copy critically effectuated Voiage’s satire. It refused to let Descartes’s woodcut stand on the terms Descartes originally bestowed to it. The very act of copying—the picture’s mere inclusion—reveals how dramatically the circumstances for engaging the new philosophy had shifted since 1644. Daniel’s parody proved a most extraordinary—and successful—last-​gasp stunt for rebuking it. Legal historian Ronan Deazley offers a general theory for why: “Successful parody will almost invariably require the copying of more than a trivial or insignificant part of the underlying work such that audience recognition of the work is assured.”16 The vortices illustration possessed an enduring relevance, even almost half a century after its initial publication. But for Daniel’s copy to have been legible to late seventeenth-​century readers, it had to be primed to operate on multiple epistemic levels. The seventeenth-​century French fictional voyage had to be believed as a truth-​telling device, the accommodations Descartes’s acolytes had made on behalf of the new philosophy had to have won some credibility, and seventeenth-​century pictures had to have produced knowledge in so many ways that their epistemic capacities had achieved some measure of precarity. And there is still more that Daniel’s copy can teach us. Perhaps most striking for anyone inured to the effects of mechanical—or digital—reproduction, Voiage unmasks the difference an all-​too-​familiar picture can make. Daniel’s copy of the vortices woodcut asks whether or not a picture we have seen, time and again, is the same picture we first encountered. It encourages us to consider how new words and new circumstances change pictures we think we already know. Today, 330 years after its initial publication, Voiage has fallen into oblivion; enough so that its looping, circuitous, seemingly catch-​all fiction requires an introduction. In the book’s prefatory “L’idée de l’ouvrage,” Daniel identifies the new philosophy’s greatest offense: “Few have interrogated the Vortices hypothesis, which is nevertheless the foundation of all that [Descartes] teaches about the movement of the planets, the tides of the oceans, lightness, the weight of bodies, and his entire system of light, about which ironic copies  ( 135 )

he has been so indulged.”17 He promises that his fiction will fill a lacuna and right an undue wrong. The vortices hypothesis will be dissected, and his accounting of the ways Descartes’s matter in motion has been discussed will be thorough. But this entertaining romp through the firmament will put all this “indulgence” to an end. It will level Descartes’s shambolic philosophy to its defective parts. In practice, Daniel devotes only a few key passages to directly refuting the vortices illustration. The bulk of his narrative involves a series of disjointed conversations about the new philosophy’s general spuriousness—all of which conspire to minimize the new philosophy in general and dwarf the vortices illustration in particular. The story begins with a chance encounter in an unidentified place: Voiage’s unnamed narrator meets an octogenarian man. As the two develop quick bonhomie, the older gent waxes nostalgic about his friendship with the late lamented René Descartes. He then reveals some rather interesting information: Descartes’s distinction between soul and body was not mere philosophy but an actual physical, ontological fact. The philosopher had discovered a mysterious herb from the Orient, that, when snuffed with tobacco, effectively unhoused souls from their bodies, letting them come and go from their flesh as they pleased. In 1650, while experimenting with the drug (the philosopher goes psychedelic!), a doctor had checked in on Descartes’s restful body only to pronounce him dead, forcing the expiration of the philosopher on earth. But his soul lives on, reports the octogenarian. He calls the “Espaces Imaginaires” home and welcomes visitors anytime.18 So the octogenarian issues the narrator an invitation: Would he like to visit the old philosopher? Would he like to watch as Descartes builds his world? The narrator leaps at the chance. As the trip—in many senses of the word—ensues, the narrator is introduced to more souls in Descartes’s circle of trust. At nightfall, when departure is imminent, the octogenarian visits his new friend at home, and the pair are joined by Mersenne’s soul, who, just as on earth, remains Descartes’s closest confidant. Suddenly, a Black apparition comes into view. This, the octogenarian explains, is Descartes’s valet, who was a former servant to the philosopher’s acolyte-​turned-​rival Regius. (The figure serves as a puzzlement about the splitting of soul and body, for if souls are not shaped by their bodies, how could the servant’s skin color on earth still mark his soul?19) The servant-​soul supplies the narrator with the herb-​laced tobacco and flies back to his master. Once the narrator’s soul makes its temporary exit from his body, the philosophizing trio make for the stars. Their first stop is the moon. By Daniel’s lights, that glowing orb is rife with philosophers who, at worst, care little for Descartes’s philosophy and, at best, seek some middle ground between the new philosophy and their own. Most are somewhere in between, and with good reason, for Voiage’s lunatics are nothing less than the jolly souls of dead philosophers. The three travelers watch as Plato’s soul establishes his Republic in the ( 136 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

afterlife, and Aristotle’s presides over his posthumous Lyceum. The soul of Giordano Cardano stops to have a nice little chat, as does that of one of the narrator’s University of Paris professors. But Voetius’s soul engages them in their most extensive conversation. He recounts his vociferous opposition to the new philosophy during his long tenure as Utrecht’s prime Calvinist theologian. He wistfully recounts going so far as convincing his fellow faculty to condemn the new philosophy for offending Scripture and punishing Descartes for his atheistic hubris, scoffing at the belief that humans recognizing their own existence—and their own minds—was the key to God (as I discuss in chapter 4). But Voetius’s soul admits that the afterlife has relaxed him. He now seeks earnest reconciliation with his lifelong enemy. He has even developed a treatise that outlines key points through which to foster the harmonious coexistence of his beloved Aristotelianism and Descartes’s philosophy. Among the moon dwellers, Voetius’s soul is not alone; other formerly unbending Aristotelians also seek a truce. The trio are heartened. As they move toward outer territories, they are waylaid by the soul of a Chinese mandarin. Pouring over a book, their new friend looks as though he might be engrossed in Principia or the Essais, but, alas, he is enthusing over Thomas Aquinas. The trio conclude that widespread global conversion to the new philosophy will require a good deal more work as they wave goodbye to their friend from the East. When the trio enter the “espaces imaginaires” and make their way to Descartes’s soul’s own personal vortex, the chance to speak with Descartes himself has finally arrived. Warm at first, Descartes’s soul soon turns humorless and trivial. He desperately pursues updates about his earthly reputation. The narrator gamely reports that Descartes’s philosophy has spread to Holland, Germany, and England. Nevertheless, Descartes seethes with resentment and goes on to catalogue the disappointing impediments his philosophy has faced: the Jesuits’ lazy excuses for not including the new philosophy in their curriculum because it would have required a uniform change to their entire educational program; the pain it caused him to win over the Jansenists and fashionable ladies; the promises unkept by Minim friars because of petty theological debates and fighting among members of related denominations. The venting does Descartes’s soul good, and his impatience softens to hospitality. He declares the narrator and the octogenarian’s visit a special occasion, and, undoubtedly, the best welcome he could possibly give them would be to make his world (le monde) right there, before their (souls’) very eyes. The narrator notices that the philosopher has nothing to make the world from, but this disembodied Descartes waves away the concern, explaining that, just as the central dictum of his new philosophy teaches, his mind will supply all he needs. Hours pass, and no hint of the world has appeared. But Descartes’s soul has filled the time explaining the principles of this not-​yet-​existent world—and here the vortices woodcut is reproduced for the first time (p. 316). When the narrator’s departure is nigh, Descartes proclaims that his world has been created. He insists on its existence ironic copies  ( 137 )

even though the narrator sees nothing, smells nothing, and hears nothing. Aristotle’s emissaries suddenly appear to collect the narrator. Sighing at Descartes’s usual antics, they whisk the earthling back home and back to his body. The narrator spends the final part of the book as the new philosophy’s newest skeptical zealot. Despite Descartes’s world never materializing, the narrator announces himself a full convert to the new philosophy. He deaccessions his old scholastic tomes. He readies himself for a life of Cartesian faith. But his newfound commitment is accompanied by some lingering questions about the new philosophy. The narrator decides that his best hope for answers is to send a letter to Descartes’s soul. Voiage then goes epistolary, offering the narrator a space to describe his confusion about everything from the new philosophy’s principles to light’s trajectory through a world full of matter in motion. But, most of all, the narrator wonders whether the vortices theory could result in the night sky—that beautiful star-​studded canopy seen by everyone, every night, everywhere on earth. Another reproduction of the Principia woodcut appears here. The narrator puzzles through his inquiry, making several other woodcuts that ask how an observer, caught in different places in a vortex, could possibly look out into the skies (pp. 391–402). The narrator remains unsatisfied as he grasps at answers. Still, both the letter and the entire book close with an expectant valediction: “Your very humble & very obedient servant & very zealous Disciple.”20 Of course, Descartes’s response never comes.21 But all of Voiage’s imaginary conversations have done the work Daniel promised: “[They] demonstrate that [Descartes’s] system is full of contradictions that do not follow one from the next, where one supposi­ tion destroys another—all this will be to attack [the vortices theory] where it hurts, and pierce its greatest weakness. Over the course of this Story, we will see how we must think about [what Descartes has proposed].”22 The philosopher has been proved unreliable; his vortices and its pictures have shown themselves far too incredible to be believed. Voiage lays the new philosophy bare, leaving it as the open-​ended question it has always been.

Useful Fictions Voiage’s plot could hardly rebuke the vortices all by itself. Drawing out the fictionality of Descartes’s claims required a thorough understanding of the philosopher’s oeuvre— one that was attuned equally to Descartes’s own language about imagination and the cultural reception of the new philosophy. It demanded familiarity with the strictures of seventeenth-​century natural philosophy, in general, and the extent to which philosophy had been aided by fiction. All this had to be matched with knowledge of the pictorial strategies that invigorated seventeenth-​century French fiction, especially those whereby ( 138 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

reality disturbed imagined worlds and vice versa. Accordingly, Daniel ensured that his text functioned as a reference-​making machine. His education and his station had prepared him to weave all these seemingly disparate elements together.23 Daniel had been tutored in taking umbrage with the new philosophy. Born in 1649, he entered the Noviciat of Paris in 1667.24 Aristotelian explanation, pious order, and prayer built him for the priesthood. Once frocked, Daniel was assigned to teach philosophy and rhetoric at the Jesuit collèges at Arras and Amiens, which meant teaching his students about the power of a well-​constructed argument and affirming Aquinas’s reasoning of Christ’s sacrifice with Aristotle’s philosophy of substantial forms.25 He enrolled at the University of Paris a few years later to study for his bachelor’s degree,26 just as Oratorian Nicholas Malebranche’s De la recherche de la vérité (1674)—a paean to Descartes’s clear and distinct ideas and their illumination of God-​given truth—was coming off the presses. On campus, the new philosophy’s inadequate explanation of the Eucharist, though no longer new, still rankled clergy and crown. The Sun King’s 1671 decree against the teaching of any anti-​Aristotelian views at the university still held (see chapter 3). And Daniel—whose eventual appointment as royal historiographer suggests a long-​standing and dependable conservatism27—had little reason not to trust the wisdom of the institutions through which his mind had been made. In France, as Daniel turned from student to instructor, the list of the new philosophy’s transgressions was no longer limited to its destabilizing explanation of the Eucharist. The 1680s had begun with Louis La Ville drawing familiar parallels between the new philosophy’s explanation of matter and the Calvinist interpretation of transubstantiation. But by the decade’s end, Pierre-​Daniel Huet would catalogue a whole host of the new philosophy’s deficiencies in Censura philosophiae Cartesiana (1689). Huet undid the logic Descartes had applied to the cogito; he questioned his intellectual proof of God’s existence once more; he queried the separation of body and mind. In a single chapter, he gainsaid Descartes’s explanation of the universe as “silly,” “inconsistent,” and “undignified.”28 By the year Daniel published Voiage, French censors had refused to grant Pierre-​Sylvain Régis permission to publish Système de philosophie—a manuscript based on the writing of Descartes and Rohault—because transubstantiation remained at issue.29 Fictionality was not yet a feature to hold against the new philosophy. But once Daniel was installed as bibliothècaire of the Maison Professe library,30 he was well positioned to underscore the fictions on which the new philosophy depended. A simple curatorial appointment may not have ensured that Daniel would have had the resources that Voiage would require. But serving as head of the esteemed library meant overseeing one of the largest collections of books in the city of Paris. That library was stocked with all the ingredients one needed to understand Descartes’s own writing, the decades-​long Continental debate about the new philosophy, and numerous fictions ironic copies  ( 139 )

that spoke directly to a fin de siècle audience.31 If and when Daniel needed a book that even he himself had deemed too heretical for the library’s collection, a half hour on foot took him to the bookstalls and publishers’ shops in the rue St. Jacques, which were stocked with resources for engaging the new philosophy’s distortions.32 This ready availability of books of all kinds made possible—and likelier—the detection of the philosopher’s own confusion between truth and fiction. Consider, for instance, Principia and Le monde and their respective publication histories. When publishing Principia in 1644, Descartes had submitted a grand system of natural knowledge to his readers. Replete with vortices engravings and a description of a “visible world” full of matter in motion, the book had enacted a radical top-​to-​bottom overhaul of natural knowledge. It seemed that the philosopher had presented his new physics in all seriousness. But, after his death, Descartes’s world became fictitious when an anonymous editor published Le monde de Descartes (1664). A self-​proclaimed fable, Le monde had been structured as both a philosophical takedown and an origin story about the universe. It dissolved Aristotelian explanations of form and substance only to tell a tale about the creation of a sun and a moon—and a new world—full of matter in motion. The book’s narrative ended abruptly, in the midst of an explanation of how a world governed by such strange physics could possibly look like the one that we experience from earth.33 The unfinishedness of the text seemed to render Descartes’s universe, and all its matter in motion, into an imaginary detour. Moreover, the book’s editor—still unknown34—assured readers of its authority: “Save for chapter titles, the Latin version of some words, & those little mistakes that can slip in and out of a picture, this treatise is Monsieur Descartes’s.”35 Close followers of Descartes’s work could point to a reasonable explanation for the mix-​up. The second volume of Lettres de Descartes (1663–66) featured a missive in which Descartes explained writing Le monde years before Principia. Fearful of the consequences Galileo had faced for Systeme du monde, Descartes had squirreled away his fable hoping it would never see the light of day.36 Clearly, Le monde’s editor believed the 1660s were a different climate. But for those without the benefit of Lettres, the damage was done. Le monde had made Principia into speculation. When the fable urged readers to “allow your thought to wander beyond this world to view another unfolding in imaginary spaces,”37 Descartes’s exhortations to Principia readers—“let us suppose”38 and “let us assume,”39 all that subjunctive mood— looked far less tangible. Everywhere in his books, fictions could be found. But for connoisseurs of the day’s literature, Descartes’s fictions hardly possessed the usual trappings of a fable or a novel, nor did they exhibit narrative mastery. Le monde had tossed aside the workaday features of a typical seventeenth-​century tale. It had no plot, and hardly a beginning, and hardly a middle, and its ending was so sudden as to be nonexistent. Neither protagonists nor antagonists populated this increasingly unreal world. Aristotle’s prescriptions for dramatic structure had been summarily ignored. ( 140 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Descartes had done little scene setting for his fiction, and sensorial description was entirely beside the point of the manuscript. All the philosopher’s reasoning resisted any imaginative inhabiting his new world.40 Moreover, the book had little to do with the favorite parables of that moment. Not only did Le monde offer no moral lesson. It shared little of the humor or irony that had become the signature of a Fontaine or an Aesop.41 Descartes (or, Descartes as propped up by this anonymous editor) had claimed a genre for his book that it had far from fulfilled. Daniel intensified these deficiencies with his ingenious title, Voiage du monde de Descartes. The phrase promised a travel narrative that would plot a beginning, middle, and end. It also invited vicious deconstruction, laying into the ambiguities of Descartes’s Le monde manuscript and thereby questioning that posthumous title’s credibility. It was a tactic that even Newton himself had deployed against Descartes a few years before when he published Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687). By adding two simple words, the English polymath had reinforced his own principles as mathematical rather than merely conjured by Descartes’s uncertain cogito, and instead of vague, various philosophizing, he was emphatic about his narrower, but no less consequential, treatment of natural-​philosophical patterns.42 Daniel’s title worked in a similar fashion but to fictionalizing ends. Voiage du monde de Descartes interrogated the very possibility of traveling to the world Descartes had proposed in Le monde and Principia. The title asked how Descartes’s world held up to empirical scrutiny: Would travel to this place look like the voyages Frenchmen had taken to England, New France, Siam, or the West Indies? Would it involve the close observation of new landscapes, new flora and fauna, and new peoples? Once the reader discovered Daniel was dealing in fiction, his title depended on philosophies of the imagination, and that awakened still more questions: Had Descartes’s fiction created the conditions for discovering philosophical truth? Were the philosopher’s texts nothing more than a pack of lies? Voiage itself was a peculiar entry into the fantastic voyage genre. The seventeenth century had offered numerous examples of this kind of narrative, inviting readers to question—and even reject—the assumptions that underpinned their world. Nicolas Perrot d’Albancourt’s translation of Lucian’s True History had recently reminded readers that lying could operate as a form of truth:43 “My lying is far more honest than [the philosophers’], for though I tell the truth in nothing else, I shall at least be truthful in saying that I am a liar.”44 In L’autre monde (1657), Cyrano de Bergerac had compounded his famous perspective-​altering statement—“The moon is a World like ours, to which this of ours serves likewise for a Moon”45—by populating the lunar surface with musical four-​legged creatures and the ghost of Socrates, and, at every turn, he encouraged sociable readers to consider how they took their bodies and the organization of their cultures for granted.46 Such fantasies gestured toward new ontologies; they sought altered definitions of human being.47 Kepler’s Somnium (1634) provided an important ironic copies  ( 141 )

example of fiction delivering the conditions for transporting readers to an as-​of-​yet physically impossible position in order to generate reliable truths about nature. Kepler’s dream had wondered what the heavens would look like from the moon and transported his protagonists there, allowing him to calculate that the sun would rise 235 times per lunar year and that a single moon year would be the equivalent of nineteen earth years.48 The astronomer had revealed that the moon, though unreachable and unseeable, could be mathematically experienced. In Voiage, the narrator’s encounters resembled nothing so much as browsing a very fine library. Daniel’s roster of lunatics was indistinguishable from the names Italian Jesuit astronomers Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Francesco Maria Grimaldi had taken to their celebrated selenograph for Almagestum novum (1651)—to which I will return below. The narrator’s conversations were essentially dialogues with the dead, akin to a genre invented by Lucian and recently revived by Fontenelle.49 Ever the helpful bibliothècaire, Daniel included marginalia to direct readers to the books he had in mind.50 Fiction, in Voiage’s formulation, was not displacement; it was recapitulation. Contra Lucian, Daniel’s fictional narrative confirmed that lies were lies, and truths were truths. Indeed, any mind-​bending made Daniel bristle: The Philosopher always speaks or imagines himself to speak the truth; or, at least, wants always to seem to speak the truth. To merrily go from there, and pretend to do so in order to imitate the greatest enemy Philosophers have ever had, would have been in poor taste—and I take great pride in my taste. Thus I would have been careful never to have used a beginning like Lucian’s, making my readers understand that all that I have said to them was false. I warn them now that my intention is quite the contrary. I profess to giving my Story an air of truth, which should be able to persuade the most incredulous; I assure my readers that all I recount is true.51 Revising the human condition or undoing the traditional epistemic order would not do. Those exercises risked making Descartes’s misanthropy, his philosophy, and his fictions look reasonable, thereby giving truth to his lies. Daniel chose instead to mimic the self that Descartes had written into existence. For instance, the very idea of Descartes’s soul’s “espaces imaginaires” invoked the philosopher’s famed self-​imposed isolation— his sequestration in a Bavarian cabin only to dream about a melon and an encyclopedia and, poof, to generate an entirely new epistemology.52 The fiction not only recalled Descartes’s earthly anomie to point toward his unreliability. It reinforced the hubris with which Descartes had promoted his philosophy. Satire provided the key ingredients with which to level the philosopher’s arrogance. Grounded in the contemporary moment, its exaggerations were dictated by ( 142 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

expectations of the world as it should be so as to express humorous shock at deviation from those norms. The French seventeenth century was rife with famous examples, whether Nicholas Boileaux’s Satires (1666) or Molière’s incendiary Tartuffe (1664) and Malade imaginaire (1673). But Daniel may have been most attentive to another example whose way with pictures and contemporary politics was unmatched: Zacharie de Lisieux’s Relation du pays de Jansénie (1660). A fictional voyage, Relation cultivated an acidic polemic, reimagining animus toward Jansenism as an inhospitable dystopia. While other satires sent up the mores of the salon set or the literary fashions of the period, Relation took aim at erroneous religious belief—and, in particular, a sect that had perturbed the French Catholic church for almost as long as the new philosophy. In the years before Relation’s publication, the archbishop of Paris had escalated his attacks on Jansenism and its perceived proximity to Calvinism. Throughout the 1640s, Catholics had slapped Jansenism on the wrist: the Pope had issued a bull condemning Jansen’s own interpretation of grace, and the Sorbonne’s faculty of theology had sacked self-​proclaimed Jansenist Arnauld. In 1657, the assaults had turned prohibitive. The French Assembly of the Clergy condemned Jansenism, and the archbishop, Jean François Paul de Gondi, barred the sect’s convent, Port-​Royal, from receiving the sacraments. These systemic restrictions only heightened as that year wore on: the convent was forced to shutter its elementary school and forbidden to accept novices into their fold.53 In other words, Lisieux’s satire was just as timely as Daniel hoped his would be. And, like Voiage, Relation degraded a novelty ( Jansenism) in order to preserve tradition (the French Catholic order). Lisieux had saved Relation’s most vehement derision for a finely engraved, made-​up map (fig. 57). Its elaborate topography summarized all that Capuchins, Oratorians, and Jesuits found intolerable about Jansenism—and, thus, the threat it posed to the French Catholic Church. At first deceptively inviting and lush, Jansénie was flanked by the realms of “Libertinage” and “Despair.” Its rivers were were strewn with boats sinking from the weight of mistaken belief. Its equivocating half-​monks secluded themselves in the “Forest of Little Anchorites.” A frothing sea alongside an untamed landscape was the ideal place for those who resisted papal bulls and clerical decrees—mongrels who had let themselves be “lost to Jansenism.” And there they should remain with the owls and donkeys that wandered aimlessly on its fallow, uselessness land.54 Lisieux’s hyperbole crackled with so much contempt that René Rapin, one of the most reputable of Daniel’s Jesuit contemporaries, praised Lisieux for “a stroke of vengeance [that] has found the means to mortify the Jansenists.”55 But even Relation did not provide Voiage with its most critical mechanism: reflexive pictorial irony. Lisieux’s map had depicted Capuchin, Oratorian, and Jesuit scorn against Jansenist faith. But critical to Voiage would be a kind of picture that took aim at its own constitution and, in the process, mortified itself and its predecessors. Such a ironic copies  ( 143 )

Fig. 57  Zacharie de Lisieux and unknown engraver, Relation du pays de Jansénie, 1660. Engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, GE D-17759. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

picture was owed to another seventeenth-​century literary enterprise: referential meditations on literary cartography. Since the 1650s, authors had included imaginary maps in numerous fictions. Madame de Scudéry had introduced the practice with her Carte de tendresse, which had been fashioned for her novel Clélie (1654–1661). Her map asked readers to navigate the topography of courtship alongside her novel’s eponymous protagonist. The appearance of this imagined map—and so many afterward, including Relation’s—had posed a number of questions about the nature of literary representation: Could a picture, purportedly made by a fictional character but appearing in an actual book, dislodge the boundary between fiction and the real world? How could writers without the typical markers of literary authority jostle fiction’s conception of itself ?56 By 1678, Fontenelle, exasperated with these questions, threw his hands in the air. His predecessors had compounded all this confusion with a surfeit of imaginary ( 144 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 58 Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle and unknown engraver, La description de l’empire de la poésie, from Mercure galant, January 1678, facing p. 46. Engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 8-Lc2-33. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

maps that expressly took the literary landscape as their subject. Chief among them was Antoine Furetière’s Carte de la bataille des romans—made for La nouvelle allégorique ou histoire des derniers troubles arrivez au royaume d’eloquence (1658)—which imagined a battle between regiments of literary genres (novels, moral and political rhetorical treatises, histories, and sermons) and battalions representing figures of speech (description, antithesis, and even allegory itself ). The map, which strived to demonstrate its creator’s mastery by parodying Scudéry’s Carte de tendresse,57 formed Furetière’s bid to win a seat at the Académie française.58 Sorel, in turn, had questioned Furetière with a map of his own for Relation veritable de ce qui s’est passé au royaume de Sophie (1659). The back-​and-​forth had gone on. When Fontenelle turned his cleverness to these matters in the Mercure de France, he drafted an imaginary map that turned in on itself (fig. 58). In his La description de l’empire de la poésie, literature was no longer a clash between warring factions. Literary agreement was made so blank that it could be read as nothing more than a desert. Avoiding so many false notes required a drastic solution: marooning oneself on the Isle de la Satire. Exhausted by all this infighting, Fontenelle’s map showed men of letters to themselves. His accompanying text begged fellow authors to do away with blind, unimaginative imitation and to question whether a picture could ironic copies  ( 145 )

possibly tell literature—whose prime building blocks were words—how to go about its art.59 All this may look like internecine warfare between late seventeenth-​century French men of letters, but Fontenelle was asking questions of his literary contemporaries that were highly transferrable. His words did not merely affect the one essay he had written; they operated with fine intertextuality. When it came to his interrogation of literary cartography, he was cross-​examining the imagined map with an imagined map. His picture was neither commendation nor ratification but counterargument. The strategy was ripe for any who disagreed with a picture and wished to make it into a fiction. And it opened the way for questions Daniel could pose to the new philosophy’s reception: Why had so many of Descartes’s followers so unthinkingly copied his work? And how could a hypothesis, largely explained through a picture, possibly describe the world in which Daniel and his readers lived?

The Threatening Picture Ironically, it was a fantastic voyage that had first poked and prodded at Descartes’s vortices woodcut (though it did not reproduce it). Early in L’autre monde, Cyrano had made the full-​page picture into the object of profound confusion. Cyrano’s Dyrcona, his impishly named alter ego protagonist, is traveling along backcountry roads when an angry mob recognizes him as the author of an infamous journey to the moon. Soon, he is in the mob’s clutches, and they rifle through his knapsack for any further evidence of wrongdoing, only to discover a book they call Descartes’s Physique. The pages of the volume fall open, and the rabble are aghast: “When they saw the Circles whereby that Philosopher distinguishes the Motions of several Planets, all of them with one voice roared out, that they were the Conjuring Lines I [Dyrcona] used to draw for [the] raising of Beelzebub.”60 So much in this sentence implicates Descartes’s depiction of the vortices. True, the philosopher had included a heliocentric diagram in Principia that was made up of many concentric circles.61 But by the 1650s, that diagrammatic framework had become an imminently recognizable description of the universe—and it was nearly indistinguishable at a quick glance from the Copernican or even the Ptolemaic model.62 The vortices’ dotted lines fit the confusion of Cyrano’s description best. For their “circles” implied so many “Motions,” and their alien forms were liable to be interpreted as “Conjuring Lines” and devil’s play. What is more, the ambiguity of that picture was the source of Cyrano’s comedy. As Sabol argues, L’autre monde reflected a real-​life Paris where everyone agreed that no one could agree on what the depiction of the vortices depicted. The sanctimonious salon goer might have considered it silly that these simple townspeople could not identify so famous a picture. And the country ( 146 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

bumpkin could not be blamed for considering it ridiculous that the women and men of the salon were so taken with a picture—and a concept—whose confusions could only ever make sense to a lunatic.63 Cyrano’s passage also thrived on synecdoche, where the vortices illustration stood as the emblem of Descartes’s Physique—and the representation of all the new philosophy’s heresies. In 1657, when L’autre monde was posthumously published, this was new. Until then, critique of Descartes’s physics centered on its theory of matter as menace to the Thomistic-​Aristotelian interpretation of the Eucharist, and there was not much mentioning of the vortices theory (see chapter 3). But in the years that followed, the catalogue of the new philosophy’s ills had grown ever longer. When Descartes’s Opera was added to the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1663 or when the Collège de Clermont condemned a thesis whose Cartesian claims were “distasteful to mathematics, philosophy, and theology,” Cyrano’s ekphrasis gave critics a visual target.64 No matter the charge leveled against Discours, Meditationes, or Principia, the vortices woodcut, with all its flimflam, had the potential to serve as the perfect representative of the new philosophy’s utter confusion, as well as the embodiment of its offensive theory of matter. This is precisely what Sorel, historiographer to the king, wrote in 1667: “The pictures of the imaginary Vortices, and other similar things, may, at first, surprise readers. No man who sees them without reading the Discourse can ever understand what they are. Nevertheless, these Figures and many others are full of tiny, little-​known Bodies which are represented with the conviction of one who had seen them clearly.”65 Funny how Sorel mistook the vortices as a feature of Discours. This only confirmed Cyrano’s point: the offending vortices were as reprehensible as anything Descartes had ever committed to the page; the picture summarized all the new philosophy had gotten wrong. Meanwhile, Descartes’s French acolytes attempted to defang the offensive picture. Le monde’s full-​page woodcut was an early instance of their efforts (fig. 59). Blunt and hard-​edged, this variation flattened Descartes’s universe. Dots and dashes stood in for a comet traveling between vortices, and Descartes’s liquid skies were transformed into sharp polygons containing concentric arrays of little dots. Sapping the picture of its illusionism was a means of corroborating Le monde’s text: the vortices became little more than an imagined fiction and, thus, nothing to worry over. Others were willing to entertain the new philosophy so long as its unruly matter in motion could be contained. An instructor at the Jesuit collège at Amiens put Descartes’s proposal alongside Copernicus’s and Tycho’s models, just so long as it was centered on its predecessors’ concentric circles.66 One of his students recorded the lesson (fig. 60). Here, Descartes’s universe no longer implicitly spills out beyond the picture’s boundaries. All his matter in motion is confined to the edges of the solar system, and the planets chart their paths on a recognizable, predictable, and fixed set of orbits. At the picture’s center, two ironic copies  ( 147 )

Fig. 59 Unknown engraver, page 116 from René Descartes, Le monde (Paris: M. Bobin and N. Le Gras, 1664). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB487000:0629, Mt. Wilson Observatory Collection. Photo: The Huntington Library.

planets are influenced by the sun, but this in no way interrupts the model of motion that astronomers had come to insist upon for millennia. Save for the sun, little about this diagram deviated from long-​held belief. In fact, the picture’s composition also hinted that Descartes’s novelty had already turned stale. The student had begun his drawing with diligence and care, striving to place each celestial particle evenly, rhythmically across the page. But halfway down, he grew impatient, and the rest of his dots look as though they could not have been made quickly enough. For that one student, and perhaps his classmates, too, the new philosophy was old news; its matter as tiresome as any Aristotelian commentary. In 1686, a grander variation on Descartes’s celestial matter reshaped the vortices into their most agreeable form: the frontispiece engraved by Jean Dolivar and commissioned by none other than Fontenelle for Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) (fig. 61). Gone were the Principia woodcut’s dotted lines, its stippling, and the black ( 148 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 60 Antoine Fournier, Cours de sciences, seventeenth century. Pen on paper. Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, ms 3638. Photo: Bibliothèque Mazarine.

frame that could barely contain Descartes’s indefinite world. Clouds puffed and radiated in their place. Each vortex begat a solar system unto itself, around which planets traveled, and moons gleamed. Entretiens’s author and engraver had refined Descartes’s matter in motion, turning it into tapestry, domesticating the new physics for the maison particulière.67 The decorative flourish, if considered a mere appendage to the dialogue of a gentleman educating and seducing a marquise, might be read as passive, effeminate, and ultimately nonthreatening—a clever attempt to serve the new philosophy up to the educated elite.68 But Dolivar’s engraving did even more by reimagining the vortices according to the king’s visual vocabulary. First, it strategically depicted the vortices as a tapestry, one of the principal mediums through which the Sun King exercised his power. The “preeminent expression of princely status and courtly taste,”69 tapestries were lavish productions that required Le Brun, the royal painter and designer, to coordinate armies of workers ironic copies  ( 149 )

Fig. 61  Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Jean Dolivar, and Israel Silvestre, page 318 from Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Paris: La Veuve C. Blageart, 1686). San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB381966. Photo: The Huntington Library.

Fig. 62  Israel Silvestre, Design for a theater set created by Giacomo Torelli da Fano for the ballet “Les Noces de Thétis,” 1654. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1951. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

at the Gobelins Manufactory. They initiated viewers into the accoutrements of royal mythmaking, whether Louis XIV played Alexander the Great or winged Victory greeted the monarch by chariot.70 But Fontenelle and Dolivar were not content to cram a mythologically festooned Louis into their print. They instead participated in a more subtle, strategic, and enthusiastic instance of the king’s iconography. Situating the vortices in a billowing starburst recalled nothing less than the renewal of royal power as engraved by Israel Silvestre thirty years before (fig. 62). Silvestre’s print commemorated the spring 1656 performance of Les noces de Pelée et de Thétis. The timing of the ballet had been significant: Cardinal Jules Mazarin had just returned to Paris, the Fronde of the Princes (1650–53) was dying down, and France was a few months away from Louis XIV’s coronation.71 The night of Les noces’s premiere, an eighteen-​year-​old Louis not only applauded the performance from his box but also came to the stage and put his balletic discipline to work. When Silvestre went about recording the timely event, his print’s clouds were opening up never-​before-​seen heavenly depth, signaling an imminent and ultimately divine transfer of power. Though Fontenelle had built theatricality into Entretiens and described the behind-​the-​scenes ropes and pulleys ironic copies  ( 151 )

that lent nature its appearances,72 his frontispiece exposed a different illusory mechanism: the appropriation of the Sun King’s image making tactics to lend credibility to an otherwise unacceptable interpretation of nature.73 A new philosophy was ready to receive its place in the sun. Some four years later, when Daniel sat down to compose Voiage, he chafed at such overtures. Voiage would avoid Descartes’s sympathizer’s words and pictures and hold the philosopher himself responsible. “I am determined,” declared Daniel’s narrator, “to educate myself in the foundations of M. Descartes’s Philosophy, of which I now possess a somewhat confused understanding, having never studied it [directly], and only having unmethodically looked through the Books of his Disciples.”74 Accordingly, Daniel built Voiage around quotations directly from the philosopher.75 Because Descartes had consistently used the first person throughout his oeuvre,76 in Voiage, nothing was amiss when Daniel put the new philosophy’s claims in the mouth of Descartes’s fictional soul. And nothing was more appropriate than copying—and effectively quoting—Descartes’s most notorious picture. By 1690, Voiage readers would hardly have mistaken the woodcut for anything but a reproduction of Principia’s most famous illustration. Though Daniel had incorporated it into his fiction, the picture, all by itself, stood as the unambiguous product of Descartes’s mind. But in order to destroy the vortices, Daniel had to choose the most effective version of the picture to copy. This was no easy task, for the philosopher himself had subjected the vortices to changes many times over, having cleaved the vortex woodcut into “multiple originals” throughout Principia.77 Along with an introductory full-​page print (see fig. 16), Descartes and his illustrator had included five variations. One version scaled the vortices down, giving them a modest rectangular frame and a central vortex that pivoted around the sun.78 Another concentrated on two starlight swirls and a comparison of each vortex’s patterns of movement.79 Yet another featured a half-​page bird’s-​eye view of one vortex in relation to seven of its neighbors.80 A fourth concentrated on a miniature cluster of seven overlapping vortices, each no larger than a fingerprint.81 Most puzzling of all was a second full-​page illustration, which Descartes reproduced eleven times throughout Principia (see fig. 56). This woodcut did similar work to its predecessor, but it put the sun at its center and did away with the comet. Stippling and dotted lines again created dynamic vortices whose expansion and contraction explained the speed of primary matter’s movement and the activities of the second element, among other celestial issues.82 But closer comparison revealed that the two woodcuts were hardly identical. In the first illustration, the solar system was a seven-​sided polygon; in the second, it was eight-​sided. The vortices that surrounded the first solar system took all manner of shapes and sizes; some, like the one marked PQRO, even encroached upon the polygon. In the second, though some surrounding vortices overlapped with the solar system, their shapes signaled they had been made without reference to the ( 152 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

first. In Principia’s text, Descartes did not comment on these differences. Instead, taken together, these woodcuts pointed to a universe as kinetic as Descartes had proposed. His was a vision of the world always in flux, and the book’s suite of illustrations were an embodiment of the world’s restless vortices. Daniel ultimately reproduced the woodcut most prone to fictionality and thus most vulnerable to ridicule. Unlike Principia’s first full-​page illustration, the second looked like a map. The bird’s-​eye view, the letters that refer to an explanation in the text, even the stippling that had come to stand for the empyrean realm—all these factors recalled the many star charts in Hevelius’s Uranographia (see chapter 2).83 This version of the vortices also invited readers to situate themselves within the world it described. The S at its center clarified the cosmology to which the new philosophy subscribed. This made for easier measurement against the visions of the universe proposed by others, like Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Tycho. And, more important, it situated the reader herself within the picture’s celestial eddies: its sun gave a rough estimate of the earth’s position and, thus, offered her another opportunity for considering where she stood in relation to this version of the heavens. An important kind of thought experiment might ensue: If the reader were plopped down into this world and compelled to look up at its skies, would her stargazing experience match what was illustrated? Which was to ask: Did le monde de Descartes bear any resemblance to the world she herself inhabited? Daniel’s copy had to serve as a litmus test for the new philosophy’s claims to verisimilitude. This second version of the vortices illustration was built for such scrutiny. Not only did it save Daniel from straining to fit a comet into Voiage’s plot, but reproducing the woodcut also questioned whether its vortices were equipped to describe the known world. It forced readers to look beyond Voiage to still-more credible texts that detailed how the world had come to be known.

Comparing Unsparing Put differently, Daniel presented this vortices woodcut as a foil for other, more trustworthy epistemic pictures. In particular, evoking strategies in astronomical illustrations helped him underscore Descartes’s lack of empiricism and claptrap flouting of expertise. Throughout Voiage, Daniel sang the praises of Riccioli and Grimaldi’s impressive moon map for Almagestum novum (1655), the period’s most advanced selenograph (fig. 63).84 Known the Continent over as a product of patient months-​long observation and mathematical prowess,85 that map represented important, earth-​shattering work. The Italian Jesuits’ effort had well surpassed Galileo’s initial, if evocative, lunar engraving for Sidereus nuncius (1610), making what, from earth, appeared no larger than a button into an enormous world unto itself—pockmarked, mountainous, veined ironic copies  ( 153 )

Fig. 63  Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Francesco Maria Grimaldi, “Figura pro nomenclatura et libratione lunari,” figure 6, from Almagestum novum (Bologna: heirs of Vittorio Benatio, 1651), 204. Engraving. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB750690, Vito Volterra Collection. Photo: The Huntington Library.

with canyons. The Almagest moon had given specific form to a real place, testifying on behalf of the best telescopes of the age and the most diligent observation the seventeenth century had to offer. In his woodcut, Descartes had done nothing of the sort. Granted, his was not an attempt to map the moon. But had the philosopher, like Riccioli and Grimaldi, used the period’s best telescopes? Had he poured hours into his observations, charting the appearance of the stars, as Riccioli and Grimaldi had done for the phases of the moon? Was he equipped to distinguish regularity from aberration? How could Descartes’s picture, which looked nothing like the night sky, possibly compare ( 154 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

with a map whose sheer density of description had redefined the moon for the seventeenth century? With only a dot for a sun, the woodcut’s illusory realism pointed to vague, disappointing answers. Moreover, when Daniel referred to the Almagest, he was endorsing collaborative, intergenerational astronomical expertise. Among Grimaldi and Riccioli’s signal achievements was their complete renovation of lunar nomenclature. In earlier maps, astronomers had named the moon’s hills and valleys for the great houses of Europe. But the Italian Jesuits opted to transform the heavenly body into a pantheon of astronomy, lauding all notable contributors to the field, ancient as much as modern.86 Craters named Aristotle and Plato occupied the second octans; in the eighth, a pit called Cardanus stood near a depression called Galileo and another named after Hevelius. Upon Mersenne, who, throughout his lifetime, had corresponded with many astronomers but had never published his own astronomical research, was bestowed a little volcano in the seventh octans. With perhaps some degree of mischievous self-​congratulation, Riccioli and Griamldi even rechristened two little pockmarks after themselves. Most pointedly, the astronomers had left Descartes entirely off their map, rejecting the very notion that Descartes’s vortices theory—or his philosophy in general—had contributed anything to astronomy. When Daniel referred to “Grimaldi Senelogr.” [sic] in Voiage’s margins, he was intensifying his arguments against the philosopher.87 The citation also made clear that in parts 2 and 3 of Voiage, when its characters made several stops on the moon, Daniel had effectively crafted an ekphrasis of the Almagest map. His dialogues with the dead corresponded to names, like Aristotle and Cardano, that were featured on the Jesuits’ selenograph.88 But this was more than a neat literary trick. The strategy widened the distance between millennia of trusted astronomical expertise and Descartes’s proposal for the universe. Reference to the map explained why, in Voiage, Descartes’s soul was stationed three to four thousand leagues away from the moon in its very own “espaces imaginaires.”89 It helped maintain Descartes’s mythic self-​isolation—the one that he himself had described in Discours so many decades earlier.90 But it was also a way for Daniel to corner Descartes and his vortices. Not only was the philosopher’s world bunk because he had isolated himself from all other astronomers, but the astronomers, who had built their work on centuries’ worth of expertise and hundreds of hours of observation to produce the most substantive description of the heavens in the seventeenth century, had rejected his folly. Descartes’s very conception of the vortices had been banished from the map of worthies. His vortices illustration could only be understood as having nothing to do with the universe that the field of astronomy had built. At least one Voiage reader found Daniel’s citation so irresistible that they made it tangible. Between pages 150 and 151 of their book, they inserted an abbreviated, quarter-​sized version of the lunar map (fig. 64). The comparison offers, first, a lesson ironic copies  ( 155 )

Fig. 64  Unknown engraver, insert between pages 150 and 151 from Gabriel Daniel, Voiage du monde de Descartes (Paris: La Veuve de Simon Bénard, 1690). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB487000:0138, Mt. Wilson Observatory Collection. Photo: The Huntington Library.

in the absurdity of Descartes’s illustration: against Grimaldi and Riccioli’s topographic specificity, the vortices woodcut’s cartographic aspirations liquefy into a soup of desultory mark making. Second, it reifies the distance between the new philosophy and trusted epistemologies, for here, the three thousand leagues that separate Voiage’s moon from Descartes’s “espaces imaginaires” are now manifest in 150 real-​life pages.91 The gesture leaves the vortices picture—and, thus, both Descartes’s “soul” and the philosopher’s legacy—to dwell further in isolation and emptiness. It underscores the vortices as a fiction made, as the narrator describes, from “nothing I could see.”92 In Daniel’s vernacular parody, then, Descartes’s insufficient veneration of the experts was cause for suspicion. But Daniel devoted even more space to whether ( 156 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 65  Gabriel Daniel and unknown engraver, page 323 from Voiage du monde de Descartes (Paris: La Veuve de Simon Bénard, 1690). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB487000:0138, Mt. Wilson Observatory Collection. Photo: The Huntington Library.

the philosopher’s vortices corresponded to anything that anyone, anywhere, could see in the skies. This appeal to common sense began with breaking the vortices illustration down into a series of pictorial thought experiments. In parts 3 and 4, he crafted new variations derived from the vortices illustration copy, each of which played with the vortices’ positions, disaggregating and isolating some while expanding or shrinking others. If, for instance, one were to travel to the lower left-​hand corner of a vortex, the undue pressure of particles on the eyes would result in “nothing more than a rigmarole of the first, second, or third Element [of celestial matter]” (fig. 65).93 Putting an eye in the upper-​left hand corner of a large central vortex, in the hopes of seeing the stars and planets of its closest neighbor, would yield nothing but darkness (“The eye cannot see Star B”94) (fig. 66). Rotating a single vortex by fifteen degrees brought similarly unrealistic results: because of the haze of celestial particles, “the impression of the Sun cannot reach our eyes.”95 Each of these pictures reveled in excoriating the vortices from multiple perspectives—and, importantly, from multiple locations. They assessed the vortices in relation to the viewer’s own experience of the night sky. With every turn, with every change in position, Daniel’s modifications pointed toward the same answer: Descartes’s world “is not at all ours, but something else entirely.”96 The world to which Daniel’s “our” referred was clear as the stars, as dependable as the night sky. As Daniel turned the vortices over, as he tilted and expanded and squeezed them together, he asked his readers to perform a two-​step evaluation: first, ironic copies  ( 157 )

Fig. 66  Gabriel Daniel and unknown engraver, page 394 from Voiage du monde de Descartes (Paris: La Veuve de Simon Bénard, 1690). Woodcut. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB487000:0138, Mt. Wilson Observatory Collection. Photo: The Huntington Library.

to imagine what they would see if they were positioned in different parts of Descartes’s world, and second, to assess whether or not those imaginings squared with their daily experiences and that of peoples elsewhere on earth. As any of Daniel’s armchair-​traveler readers knew, the night sky was clear and studded with stars, whether observing from Paris or Luovo. French readers could look to travelogues like Voiage du Siam (1686), written by Daniel’s fellow Jesuit brother Guy Tachard, to confirm that nary a celestial haze had ever obstructed their views of the skies. In one of the book’s most exquisite engravings, missionaries and Siamese courtiers have installed themselves at the Luovo summer palace to observe the lunar eclipse on 11 December 1685 (fig. 67). To the left, the Phra Narai’s courtiers genuflect before the heavens. To the right, missionaries hold open a book, adjust one of four telescopes, and tinker with a clock. In a central pagoda, the Phra Narai has given Jean de Fontenay, the Parisian mathematics professor entrusted to lead the royal expedition’s astronomical efforts, the honor of standing, so they can better focus their telescope.97 For all these men, stars gleam overhead against the velvet black night. Not one flurrying particle stands in the way of the exquisite view. Daniel thus extrapolates that Descartes’s woodcut leaves no room for such a view and, therefore, bears no relationship to this world of “ours.” The deficiencies of Descartes’s logic have left Voiage readers with two important lessons. First, they offer a cautionary tale: the philosopher’s lack of common sense had forced him to abruptly end Le monde, right in the middle of a convoluted explanation detailing how matter in motion created the ( 158 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 67  Guy Tachard and unknown engraver, figure 26, “Palais de Luovo,” from Voyage de Siam (1686; reprint, Amsterdam: P. Mortier, 1687–89). Engraving. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, RB15637. Photo: The Huntington Library.

clear skies and twinkling stars. He had failed to complete his manuscript because matter in motion could not possibly comprise the heavens.98 Daniel’s comparisons confirmed it. The second lesson was that, fundamentally, the French philosopher himself “could not see.”99 All he did was “envelop the question in new darkness, through which he wishes to save himself.”100 To believe him was to mistrust one’s own eyes. Given Descartes’s blindness, given all his selfishness, what exactly was the vortices picture a picture of ? If neither a tableaux of the night sky nor a celestial map, was it little more than nonsense? An unusual spelling of a word hinted at an answer. “This is not a world,” Daniel declared, “but a cahos: everything is in disarray and confusion. One cannot move here. Nor is there light, color, hot, cold, dryness, or humidity. Neither plants nor animals live here. One not only has the right but the duty to doubt everything.”101 Note the “cahos” in place of “chaos.” The perpetuation of this atypical spelling of the word in edition after edition not only called out Descartes’s world as chaotic but also designated it as an incoherent form of pandemonium—an association that accrued ironic copies  ( 159 )

to his picture.102 Seventeenth-​century Paris had a more reliable version of chaos in a mezzotint produced for a 1655 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (fig. 68). In this mayhem, gods wrestled with flames, and men tumbled with bulls, everything twisting out of darkness into light. A chthonic beginning, it was a crucible out of which an abundant, enduring, legibly incipient world had sprung. That was the sociable chaos produced and approved by the seventeenth-​century Parisian salon set.103 By contrast, Descartes’s fictional vortices amounted to an antisocial mess. Seeping to the edges of the picture’s frame, obstinate celestial matter appeared to upend chaos’s proper boundaries. Like Descartes himself, the woodcut had turned away from the world and the epistemic communities to which it was indebted. It had no respect for the wisdom of the ancients. It was a fiction so unbelievable that it could not even stick to the conventions of imaginary chaos—or fiction itself. For such indiscretions, punishment was the only appropriate response. Compare the Principia woodcut with the Voiage copy once more (figs. 56, 55). At the bottom of Descartes’s woodcut, dotted lines describe a circle that tangles with a partial almond. Closer inspection reveals that in the Voiage copy, these two shapes are no longer at the bottom of the picture but at the top. Daniel had incorporated an upside-​down reproduction of Descartes’s woodcut. There is a small chance that this, too, was owed to a printer’s error. (The S is small, and it reads the same whether upside down or right-​side up), but printers were not usually so careless. In fact, the history of early modern print offers up surprisingly few instances of pictures mistakenly printed upside down.104 Given Daniel’s predilection for attacking the picture, this turning around may be most profitably read in light of a culture where inversion amounted to rejection. As Rudolph Wittkower explains, “Criminals were hung by their feet . . . Thumbs down meant death to the victim in ancient Rome . . . early Christians placed the Cross over inverted Roman columns, and so forth.”105 Such denigrations still held true in seventeenth-​century France.106 Turning something on its head called public attention to an irredeemable wrong. Descartes’s picture had preyed on gullible readers; it had encouraged them to imagine far beyond the bounds of credible knowledge. Retaliation was imminent. Such resupination also helps explain Daniel’s choice to copy this woodcut in particular. No other picture in Descartes’s oeuvre would have supplied this form of retribution. No other picture could simultaneously summarize and confuse the unacceptable world Descartes had proposed. What to make of Daniel’s ironic facsimile? No exact prescription, no well-​circulated recipe in seventeenth-​century visual culture, compelled Daniel to approach his copy in this way. But discussions of the purpose of copying were active in his milieu. Some, like printmaker and theorist Bosse, sought a protoformalism, wishing for reproductions to be judged entirely independently of their contexts: “I say that . . . the most ( 160 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 68  Michel de Marolles and A. Diepenbeeck, “Le cahos,” before page 1 from Tableaux du temple des muses tirez du cabinet de feu Mr. Favereau (Paris: Antoine de Sommaville, 1655). Engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, RES-​J-852. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

beautiful Paintings, Designs, and Engravings can be identified by the bounty in and of themselves, and not by the reputation of their Maker, in knowing or recognizing on the whole that they were made according to the rules, or to the look of the eye.”107 Others held that copies were one and the same as the originals on which they were based. As Charles Perrault said in the first volume of his Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (1688), they should be celebrated as such: “When it was necessary to go to Rome to see the [statue] of Marcus Aurelius, nothing could rival that famous equestrian figure. One could not wish more for the joy of seeing it. Today, now that we have one in Paris, it is unbelievable how much we neglect it, even though it is moulded most exactly [as the original], and even though it is placed in one of the Courts of the Palais Royal and speaks with the same beauty and same grace as the Original.”108 Daniel’s vindictive reproduction needed its original, but definitely not because of its beauty. At base, the Voiage copy was the result of an attentive reader-​turned-​author who had amalgamated numerous examples from his bookish culture; a critic who practiced a twisted optimism about how an idea, a picture, a world could be changed simply by rearranging the words and pictures that supplemented it. His methods resonated with an analogy Jansenists Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole had offered in La logique de Port-​Royal, ou L’art de penser (1662)—though a Jesuit as staunch as Daniel (and therefore suspicious of Jansenists) may not have wished to admit it: “Knowledge can be organized as freely as letters in a printer’s shop. Each of us has the right to form different orders according to our needs, although in forming them we ought to arrange them in the most natural manner.”109 Daniel’s work had sought to stem the growing acceptance of the new philosophy— and it succeeded. Despite, for instance, the Collège de Mazarin opening its doors to three Cartesians as chairs of mathematics and philosophy in 1688,110 French readers found Voiage’s form of ridicule delectable. A review in the Journal des sçavans anticipated Voiage’s long-​lasting appeal: “This book is written in a manner equally fit to instruct and divert. The author recounts the occasion of this voyage, with a style most agreeable to it and to the doctrine of this Philosopher, whose strengths and weaknesses are made known according to the materials which offer their respective occasions for doing so.”111 In the years that followed, the book proved wildly popular, with a reach that extended into England, the Netherlands, Austria, and even Spain. Christiaan Huygens urged even Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to publish his Aminadversiones ad Cartesii principia philosophie alongside a new edition of Daniel’s fiction.112 The Jesuit bibliothécaire wrote a sequel, Nouvelles difficultez proposées par un péripatéticien à l’auteur du “Voyage du monde de Descartes” (1693) and, in 1702, returned to the original, publishing an expanded, five-​part edition.113 The book would have its last gasp in a final edition in 1742, published in Salamanca eighteen years after Daniel’s death.114 All these editions, all this positive reception, required hundreds more parodic copies of ( 162 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 69  René Descartes and unknown engraver, page 78 from Opera philosophica (Amsterdam: Blaeu, 1692). Woodcut. Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, A 492249. Photo: Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon.

the vortices illustration to be disseminated across Europe (and perhaps even into the Americas). Voiage’s reception is best left for other scholars to pursue. Suffice it to say, the book’s widespread success afforded hundreds of new opportunities for the vortices picture to be seen anew—to be understood as fictional, absurd, and intolerable. Reading stimulates acts of interpretation that go well beyond a single text. What Barthes wrote in 1967 feels applicable to readers across time: “A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.”115 After reading Voiage, a seventeenth-​century reader may have been tempted to revisit Principia and rethink Descartes’s claims. More often than not, this was an intellectual rather than material exercise—one with intellectual rather than material consequences. Like a cloud hovering over Principia, Voiage’s narrative had the potential to distort the discourse around the new physics. But it could not change the vortices picture itself. Or so most copies of Principia might have suggested. There was, however, one edition that demanded a different interpretation. In  1692, the Blaeus compiled Descartes’s Opera and included Principia. Generous publishers, they decided that, even within the edited volume, the text should be printed with the entire suite of woodcuts from the original edition, including the repetition of both full-​page vortices pictures. (That same year, another, stingier publisher in Frankfurt had had patience to print only one copy of each.116) But opening the Blaeus’ edition, eagle-​eyed Voiage readers were instantly rewarded with a flash of recognition. On page 78, the vortices picture was— is—upside down (fig. 69). Though the reproduction is likely that rare printer’s mistake,117 it would have been difficult for Daniel’s readers to unsee the echo of Voiage’s fiction. This uncanny error points up how our interpretations of old pictures are bound to transform as we encounter more pictures—and more words about them. Daniel’s parody altered Principia at the turn of the seventeenth century. It exercised so fervent a belief that fictions could interrupt social realities that it used fiction to interrogate proposed truths about the natural world. Such was the nature of irony. Such was the puckishness of Daniel’s ironic woodcut. Trading in similarity, the copy asked questions it could submit only to itself. Voiage’s readers were equipped to take up those questions because, in the imbrication of text and image, likeness could make a world of difference.

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Epilogue Descartes Without Pictures

T

here was a time when the philosophy of René Descartes was full of pictures. The 1637 edition of the Essais was incomplete without woodcuts depicting hooded men peering into the pinholes of cameras obscuras or musketeers admiring rainbows. Principia philosophiae only made sense when its two full-​page vortices illustrations were reprinted ten and eleven times over. There was a time when Descartes’s followers supported the new philosophy with woodcuts and etchings of their own. Men like Rohault and Senguerd argued that the new philosophy could not hope to be understood without the help of visual idioms, whether the French abstractions of experiment or the epistemologies of observation imparted by Dutch realism. As late as four decades after Descartes had published Principia, its enemies, like Daniel, seized upon the paradigmatic vortices woodcut and copied it so it could be rejected as an illegible fantasy. Pictures were constitutive of Descartes’s physics. But when did the new philosophy’s visuality begin to fade from view? It would seem that 1687 was the beginning of the end. That year, Newton published Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, replete with diagrams that modeled a mathematically predictable universe. But Newton’s wholesale revision of natural philosophy did not mean a wholesale abandonment of Descartes’s visual language. New editions of Descartes’s Principia were still being published into the eighteenth century (prior to the nineteenth-​century rediscovery of the philosopher, the last French edition of the book was published in 1724).1 Rohault’s Traité would continue to enjoy its very popular run until 1750. All the while, Descartes’s vortices remained an important vehicle for describing otherworldly cosmologies. Engraver and learned amateur Sébastien LeClerc availed himself of them to depict universes of bubbles always in flux.2 Pierre Louis Moreau

de Maupertuis distilled them into radiant lines and elegant circles.3 In England, Thomas Wright let Principia’s visual legacy glow across every plate of An Original Theory of the Universe (1750), insisting on the universe’s multiplicity, its changeableness, and its sheer variability.4 Even in 1754, Leonard Euler could still declare that a modified version of this plurality of worlds was sapientissimi opus (work of the wisest) (fig. 70). Of course, Euler was referring to the universe as God’s work, but, given the diminished esteem for Descartes’s own wisdom by the mid-​eighteenth century, the engraving practiced a special irony.5 There is surely more to say about these variations—and not just as reinterpretations of Descartes’s iconic figure. As themselves products of the Enlightenment’s intellectual climate, where reason and sensation mixed with growing secularism and a mistrust of kings, these engravings and mezzotints would help us come to grips with the eighteenth century’s own crises of representation.6 But it is a corpus of pictures that awaits its own historian. My purpose in briefly surveying it now is to demonstrate the surprising endurance of Cartesianism’s visual proposals. For more than a century after it first appeared, the philosophy’s graphic language continued to offer relevant patterns of analysis. How, then, did Descartes’s graphesis recede from philosophy?7 Why, today, do so few of us associate the philosopher with the pictures he made for the Essais and Principia? This epilogue offers provisional answers to those questions. I believe the out-​and-​out rejection of Cartesianism’s pictures was a nineteenth-​century French phenomenon. Under the auspices of a new approach to philosophy—one that prized thought as transcendent from the senses—Descartes’s woodcuts were disappeared even as the philosopher was joyfully rehabilitated in the public imaginary. Indeed, making Descartes into a philosopher for the ages was predicated on bracketing, and thereby almost entirely erasing, the figures the philosopher had labored over and the visual language they inspired. It may seem strange to write about the waning of a pictorial idiom. Denouement feels like a passive historical phenomenon, especially compared to the vigorous, defiant novelties that each age offers and that beg for historical (and historiographical) sense making.8 Early modernists have tended to pursue the flourishing of sixteenththrough eighteenth-​century scientific visual culture rather than its obsolescence.9 (And, admittedly, that is precisely what I have done throughout most of this book.) But, some satisfaction may be had in following the decline of a once-​lively visual language. This is especially true for Descartes’s pictures in the nineteenth century. That era’s philosophical privileging of text over pictures and thought over sensation cannot be understood without overlapping cultural patterns, like the acceleration of scientific specialization, a skepticism—fostered by the increasingly exact sciences—about qualitative forms of evidence, emergent definitions of philosophy as a scholarly field, and the simple fact that pictures made during the seventeenth century were woefully out of step with the ( 166 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Fig. 70  Leonard Euler, F. H. Frisch, and Berot, Sapientissimi opus (frontispiece), from Theoria motuum planetarum et cometarum (Berolini: sumtibus Ambrosii Haude, 1744). Engraving. San Marino, California, The Burndy Library, The Huntington Library, RB701836. Photo: The Huntington Library.

nineteenth-​century pictorial conventions. That is a lot of overlap. But we might profit most from beginning with a single book: the first volume of Victor Cousin’s Oeuvres de Descartes, published in 1824. This volume’s impact went beyond introducing the first edition of Descartes’s complete works ever published in French.10 Cousin’s own stature in French letters was key to its healthy reception. The philosopher’s widespread influence on nineteenth-​century French society has been recorded prodigiously elsewhere.11 But it is worth recounting that, by the year Oeuvres was published, Cousin was a luminary in French philosophical circles and noted for a combination of intellectual commitment and political skill. Between 1815 and 1820, his lectures at the Sorbonne attracted as many as six hundred students. So commanding was his presence that even his enemies’ taunts read as praise. “Monsieur Cousin . . . speaks,” wrote his critic Armand Marrast, “like a high priest; his rich intonation, his mobile features, his weighty and cadenced diction, the painful childbirth of a thought that seems to have gestated in his gut—everything he does favors the impression that he makes on his audience.”12 Cousin’s popularity, his spiritual idealism, and his identification with the Left also made him a person of political interest. When the Restoration monarchy began to close ranks against the liberal opposition (this, following the 1820 assassination of the Duc de Berry), the government relieved Cousin of his duties at the École normale. The philosopher fled to Georg W. F. Hegel’s Berlin, where his eclectic philosophy took shape. Even from far away, he was able to play the influential French sage and issue a varied, conciliatory epistemology. (In addition to editing Descartes’s Oeuvres during this time, he oversaw an edition of the works of Proclus, began his thirteen-​volume translation of Plato, and sketched out his most noteworthy philosophical tract, Fragments philosophiques.) Cousin assumed titanic status in the decades that followed. In France, his stock rose again when his politics moved further right, and he aligned himself with the constitutional monarchy.13 Between 1830 and 1848, he served as the July Monarchy’s primary architect of national education. From that impressive vantage, Cousin could ensure that his Descartes had a central place in French philosophical and public discourse. Small wonder that the way he introduced Descartes would fix the (imageless) image of the seventeenth-​century philosopher’s thought for generations to come. Pictures were afterthoughts in Cousin’s Oeuvres de Descartes—if they could be considered thoughts at all. Where Descartes had interpolated them throughout the first editions of his Essais and Principia, Cousin privileged the philosopher’s words, using mere footnotes to direct readers to fold-​out plates at the end of applicable volumes.14 He shrunk the philosopher’s woodcuts so they would fit neatly and unobtrusively onto these fold-​out plates. And he watered the woodcuts down to light engravings, sapping them of their chiaroscuro and leaving their vividness behind. Perhaps most telling was how Cousin cleaved the Essais from the Discours. His organizing principle seemed to ( 168 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

favor publication chronology—that is, the Méditations were followed by the Objections et réponses to the Méditations, with Principia coming later.15 However, volume 1 included Discours de la méthode, Méditations, and the first three Objections et réponses to Méditations but not the Essais (he would make readers wait until volume 5 to read them). Cousin did not hide this: in front matter preceding the first paragraph of Discours, he noted that the treatise had originally been published in Leiden in 1637, with Dioptrique, Météores, and Géométrie.16 But he failed to acknowledge that the Discours and the Essais had always been published together as Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la verité dans les sciences, plus la dioptrique, les météores, et la géométrie qui sont essais de cette méthode. This version effectively removed the essays that made the science that Discours had wrought—and the way the pictures had toggled between deduction and induction, abstraction and description, and the philosopher’s critical interrogations of visuality itself. All of Descartes’s wielding of graphic representation to discern the volatile gap between what was seen and what could be known was effectively disqualified. Deracinating pictures from these texts was part and parcel of cleaving method from its application. Skepticism, Cousin seemed to say, was no more, and neither were its pictures. Outside of all this ruthless editing, Cousin had made symbols, pictures, and visual representation the enemies of clear and distinct ideas. He had signposted as much on the first page of volume 1 of the Oeuvres, when he dedicated the collection to Pierre Paul Royer-​Collard: “le  premier  . . . combattit la philosophie des sens.” Sensation: a philosophical watchword ensnared in postrevolutionary politics. Royer-​Collard had been Cousin’s foremost mentor and one of the July Monarchy’s primary philosopher-​politicians; along with his friends, he had discovered in Descartes’s texts a moi, which was the ultimate source of reason.17 They soon deemed sensation the culprit that would make the moi unreasonable, and there was no more offensive emissary of the sensual than Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, whose eighteenth-​century sensationalist philosophy had enjoyed wide reach across contemporary French philosophical pedagogy. Cousin, in particular, was troubled by Condillac’s insistence on a sensational continuum between world and man: “Does Condillac mean that our sensations are essentially effects caused by exterior objects? . . . [H]e supposes that exterior objects are known, and that the notion of exteriority is obtained without making seen how we have acquired it by sensation. Does [Condillac] mean that we deduce, that we draw conclusions about exterior objects and their qualities from our sensations? Not only has he not proved this; but he has recognized entirely that there is no reasoning that can help us cross this Rubicon.”18 In other words, for Cousin and Royer-​Collard, reason regulated sensation. In the years leading up to publishing Descartes’s Oeuvres, Cousin saw reason as the paradigmatic good that rose above mere sensation, matter, materials—and visual representation. During a lecture given in 1817, Cousin declared epilogue  ( 169 )

that reason was both beginning and end, whereas “signs . . . are nothing in and of themselves; they are only what the will makes of them.”19 If symbols and pictures could only lead to naught, then why include them at all? It was not as though they could do much to commemorate the philosopher as a thinker above thinkers. By Cousin’s lights, appropriate remembering meant loosening Descartes from the bonds of history—freeing him from the circumstances under which he had produced his work and doing away with anything that made his mind less than immaterial. When Cousin inaugurated his edition of Oeuvres with Antoine-​Léonard Thomas’s 1765 eloge to Descartes, he prioritized Descartes’s infallibility. Take the very premise of this eloge. Circa 1650, when Descartes’s body had been brought back to Paris from Sweden, the philosopher’s associates were barred from paying public tribute to their dead friend. So Thomas, a poet and literary critic, appointed himself the orator of what had been long overdue: After one hundred years, I have come to deliver this elegy. May it be worthy of those to whom it is offered, and of the wise who hear it! Perhaps during the age of Descartes we were too close to him to praise him well. Time alone judges philosophers as much as kings, and puts them in their place. Time has destroyed Descartes’s opinions, but his glory endures, similarly to kings dethroned, who, from their ruins as much from their empires, appear born to command their people. As long as there is philosophy and truth on earth, we will honor those who throw away the foundations of our knowledge, and recreate human understanding. We will praise Descartes with admiration, with recognition, with interest, too; for if the truth is a virtue, we must encourage those who seek it.20 Two features of Thomas’s homage benefitted Cousin. For the eclectic philosopher’s readers, here was historical proof that Descartes’s genius had endured. Not only had the philosopher been celebrated in his own time, he was also praised in the century that followed (Thomas’s eloge had won the 1765 Académie française prize). Cousin’s reprinting of the encomium reiterated the philosopher’s intellectual glories; his truths were nothing less than foundational, timeless. Only messages from the surest of minds could speak truth from beyond the grave. At the same time, Thomas provided Cousin with a lesson in historiographical revision. If Thomas, in the eighteenth century, had been able to rectify the omissions of the seventeenth, then the nineteenth century was just as much at liberty to alter the fundamental understanding of Descartes’s genius. For Cousin, that meant elevating Descartes’s words and ensuring that nothing impeded the image of the philosopher as a clear and distinct thinker, which meant he had to be a clear and distinct writer. ( 170 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Cousin was not working in a vacuum. The philosophical assumptions of the seventeenth-​century past were not the assumptions of the nineteenth-​century present. By the time Cousin had begun compiling the Oeuvres, natural philosophy was being irreversibly separated from philosophy. Nineteenth-​century philosophers still analyzed the epistemic categories of the sciences, but few of them were also scientific practitioners who spent their days in the laboratory or their nights mathematizing the night sky. This shift was powerfully conveyed through the work of Cousin’s contemporary, Auguste Comte. Comte—that firebrand of positivism and an adamant proponent of induction—had himself been trained at the École polytechnique, but he focused his landmark six-​volume Cours de la philosophie (1820–32) on the relationships between theory and observation, evaluating the scientia of the past in order to describe a dialectic that would bring humankind toward a more positive future. Such point-​counterpoint assessment required sifting through the old ways and breaking them down to categories familiar to nineteenth-​century readers. Comte summed up Descartes’s scientific contribution as a “fundamental insight about the mathematical relationship of concrete things to the abstract, proving that all qualitative ideas could be reduced to quantitative ideas.”21 In Comte’s hands, Descartes’s achievements were reduced to number and abstraction. This resonated with Cousin’s version of the seventeenth-​century philosopher. For though Comte’s followers could barely suppress their contempt for Cousin— Emil Littré, Comte’s star student, would eventually write that Cousin was “profoundly ignorant in all the natural sciences”22—both camps had expunged the messy hands of the artisan and the fripperies of anatomical observation. Nineteenth-​century French rationality demanded that Descartes’s figures—and those of his seventeenth-​century followers and critics—be left aside, if mentioned at all. Meanwhile contemporary scientific practitioners were making pictures that bore barely any relationship to those in the Essais or Principia. It is perhaps too obvious to mention, but, almost two hundred years later, physics had moved on from Descartes (Comte had made as much clear in his Cours). But let me be more specific: the natural knowledge Descartes depicted for the Essais and Principes had also become glaringly incompatible with nineteenth-​century scientific visual culture. Compared with the jagged barometric charts that comprised, say, Jean-​Baptiste Biot’s introductory Traité de physique expérimentale et mathématique (1816), Descartes’s grafting of a geometrical construction on top of a paddle-​wielding musketeer looked outdated. Consider one illustrated trope that had preoccupied Descartes and his contemporaries: the hand of the practitioner and the presence of the observer. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, those reminders of craftsmanship held little interest for nineteenth-​century investigators of newfangled phenomena, like energy, elasticity, and electricity. When Luigi Galvani stimulated his frogs’ legs to bend and convulse, his illustrations featured none of the fingers that had prepared the muscles and much less the aides who had epilogue  ( 171 )

checked the electrical circuitry.23 So powerful was this observerless march toward objectivity that it also informed Cousin’s reinterpretations of Descartes’s figures for Oeuvres. Gone was the hooded man peering into a camera obscura. Missing were the tennis players who helped define refraction and reflection of light. The exclusion of these visual bagatelles was regretful not only because the frisson of the past was being stripped away. Descartes’s pictures had exemplified his new philosophy. The imposition of geometries on mimetic figures enacted viewers’ intellectual procedures; the depiction of the observer served as a reminder of perception’s mirror-​maze of sensation and ideation. The philosopher had emphasized all these in his woodcuts because the distance between object and mind had been under scrutiny during his skeptical age. But by 1824, there was no need to make pictures of such questions. By then, so much of knowing the world consisted in the certainties of patterns that would never be available to the eye. Even Cousin’s weak updates to Descartes’s pictures—his attempts at neutralizing them—could not rescue them from disappearing from nineteenth-​century French visual culture in general. The woodcuts from 1637 and 1644 mainly lingered in dusty, three-​hundred-​year-​old books that most could not lay their hands on. Moreover, those seventeenth-​century woodcuts were qualitatively different from the nineteenth century’s tools for visualizing the world. This was not just a matter of style. To be somewhat general and reductive, Descartes’s prints shared little with the graphic tendencies of Empire and Restoration, where Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix’s furious romanticisms did battle with Jean-​Auguste-​Dominique Ingres and Antoine-​Jean Gros’s stately neoclassicisms—all of which eventually became fodder for Honoré Daumier to sharpen his cutting, boisterous exaggerations. Even paintings that grappled with the past—especially those with which Paul Delaroche invented the genre historique— did not thrive by borrowing the visual language the seventeenth century had used to describe itself. Rather, in Paris, early nineteenth-​century picture makers celebrated history’s famous women and men in order to allegorize the nineteenth-​century present. Delaroche’s moralizing painting of Thomas Cromwell, presented at the Salon of 1831, encouraged contemplation of the dangers of executing kings; his later portraits of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin affirmed the aristocracy’s righteous battles with absolute power.24 There were reasons for this. (Such irruptive history painting synchronized with a rabid political moderation called the juste milieu.25) But my point is that Descartes’s pictures could offer no such lessons. His words were being pressed into the service of philosophy rather than science or history. In the nineteenth century’s early decades, France’s women and men had little need for a science from the past or a form of knowing that had little to do with the terms on which they faced their world. 26 Cousin’s first volume of the Oeuvres set an abiding precedent for the interpretation of Descartes’s philosophy. His book imposed order on Descartes’s thought; his selections

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became central to generations of readers and their apprehension of the cogito. A quick search of the Bibliothèque nationale’s catalogue reveals that Cousin’s publication was the very first to bundle French translations of Discours de la méthode and Méditations. Over the course of the nineteenth century alone, philosophers like Jules Simon and Alfred Lorquet packaged fourteen more editions in the exact same combination. To exclude the Essais and Principia from this first volume of the Oeuvres meant severing them from the core of Descartes’s foundational texts. Principes de la philosophie would not be republished again as a stand-​alone volume until 1886,27 and even then, that edition would only feature the very first book of Principes and exclude its pictures altogether. No wonder Descartes’s woodcuts—even those signature vortices—fell into oblivion. I have not written this epilogue to mourn the degradation of the philosopher’s original work. Rather, my aim has been to expose a myth. Cousin’s editorial choices excluded the pictures from his century’s critical revival of Cartesianism and, more generally, from its conception of what philosophy ought to be. His image of Descartes’s intellectual mastery held pictures at arm’s length, creating a suspiciously unencumbered, unaided version of clear and distinct ideas. The pictures that had filled page after page of the philosopher’s work embodied what Cousin had hoped to sideline: a reliance on the senses, excessive historicity, and a now-​useless scientia. Cousin effectively eliminated the very materials through which other seventeenth-​century philosophers (and, indeed, eighteenth-​century philosophes) had grappled with Descartes’s epistemology. And to thousands of French readers, Cousin now offered a Descartes whose philosophy had been sanded down to complement a period-​specific idea of philosophy—and one aimed at transcending the religious tumult of his own time or any other. Inconvenient polemic was set aside in favor of what would soon become known as philosophy’s juste milieu.28 Cousin’s work, which stands alongside his contemporaries’ quest to invent a modern philosophy that loomed far above culture,29 continues to haunt our postmodern grappling with Descartes—and with philosophy. Here is the grand homme who split mind from matter, who made thinking the key to being, whose proof of God depended on the human intellect—and whose skull some still pursue, hoping to preserve a relic of a mind that refuted its connection to a body.30 The West’s collective idea of the first French modern is wrapped in—and even rapt by—a stubborn conception of what philosophy writ large ought to be: reason and logic, above all, supported everywhere by words and possibly some mathesis. Its truths must speak across the transoms of time. Pictures are all right for book covers, but contemporary philosophers must forego them in their texts. For many, though certainly not all, thinkers, philosophy and its attendant love of wisdom must stand separate from history, and pictures are too thick with the past, too bogged down by culture.

epilogue  ( 173 )

This makes for fascinating assumptions—themselves products of historical processes only partially illustrated above—about how we, as twenty-​first-​century scholars, interpret the subjects to which we return time and again. Often, a scholarly trend will reflect the world in which it was created. And many are partial to analytical modes that serve as mirrors, focusing on historical actors that behaved like us and events, circumstances, and objects that look like ours. But is that the only way philosophy can work? Is this the only method by which a history—of philosophy or of any other subject—can be written? Like all manner of cultural production, this book has been shaped by its historical circumstances. As its author, I have been the beneficiary of a highly privileged education. Loving family and friends, supportive mentors, generous colleagues, profligate resources, and decades’ worth of scholarship have all eased the challenge of taking up a philosophy that was once rife with pictures. The very possibility of this text and its images was afforded by a hyperbolic twenty-​first-​century visual culture suffused with hundreds of library digitization projects, where diligent technicians methodically photographed all the pictures that were reproduced in even the most marginalized seventeenth-​century books, leaving no engraving behind—even when those engravings appeared over and over again in the same text. Skepticism’s Pictures is the work of a visual disposition forged in an age of extraordinary visuality, where graphic novels become musicals and where Instagram and TikTok help us peer into the self-​fashioned lives of others, near and far.31 Writing this book has made me more sensitive to the work that historians of all kinds of visual culture can do. In our moment, when pictorial truths are being refuted32 or doctored,33 the proliferation of images seems to threaten the act of thinking. But this is exactly why it is so urgent for us to think with pictures and because of pictures. The evidence of images is often taken for granted. Only by facing this can we begin to assess how and why this might be so. So much remains to be explained about the assumption that knowledge and wisdom are free of pictures. I have offered only one version of an explanation. A fuller treatment will be owed to an ethos once articulated by Joan Wallach Scott and to which so many historians commit themselves day after day: “To ask questions about the epistemological foundations of power require[s] not knowing the answers in advance.”34 Countless more pictures—and the cultural dynamics they enacted, the epistemic orders they created—wait to be understood. They will require the curiosity to keep wondering why they came to be and why they came to be known by us.

( 174 )  Skepticism’s Pictures

Notes All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

Introduction 1. Gaukroger, Descartes, 3. 2. Schwyzer, “Subjectivity in Descartes and Kant”; Rubin, Silencing the Demon’s Advocate. 3. The phrase “metaphysical physics” is from Garber’s Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. 4. Jay, Downcast Eyes, 69. 5. Daston, introduction to Things That Talk, 9–24. 6. Hamburger, “Haec Figura Demonstrat.” 7. Berger, Art of Philosophy, 1–41. 8. Boyle, “On the Usefulness of Mechanical Disciplines,” 13–14 [685–86]. 9. Armstrong, Melville, and Naginski, “Editorial,” 5–8; Biagioli, Galileo’s Instruments of Credit, 135–218; Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature. 10. The bibliography of early modern art and science is too vast to recount here in full. In addition to the scholarship on Descartes’s pictures and early modern natural philosophy, work that has been most critical to my own thinking includes Alpers, Art of Describing; Mahoney, “Drawing Machines”; Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature; Park, Secrets of Women; Raphael, “Teaching Through Diagrams”; Margócsy, Commercial Visions; Dackerman, Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge; Payne, Vision and Its Instruments; Bredekamp, Dünkel, and Schneider, Technical Image. 11. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form; Andersen, Geometry of an Art; Massey, Picturing Space; Heuer, City Rehearsed; Nelson, Disharmony of the Spheres. 12. Conley, Self-​Made Map; Peters, Mapping Discord; Harley, “The Map and the Development.” 13. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence, 5. 14. Meyer, Illustration des thèses à Paris; Berger, Art of Philosophy. 15. Exceptions to this include Ashworth, “Iconography of a New Physics”; Lüthy, “Invention of Atomist Iconography.” 16. Baldasso, “Role of Visual Representation.” 17. “History of Styles of Technical Imagery,” 19. 18. Werner, “Discourses About Pictures,” 9. 19. Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 35.

20. Galison, “Descartes’s Comparisons”; Sepper, Descartes’s Imagination; Zittel, Theatrum philosophicum; Bellis, “Le visible et l’invisible.” 21. Baigrie, “Descartes’s Scientific Illustrations,” 116. 22. Lüthy, “Where Logical Necessity Becomes Visual Persuasion,” 126. 23. Wilkin, “Figuring the Dead Descartes”; Zittel, “Conflicting Pictures”; Chan, “Beautiful Surfaces.” 24. Cook, Young Descartes. 25. Ariew, “Descartes and Scholasticism”; Des Chene, Physiologia. 26. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge; Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” 27. Foucault, Order of Things; Hector Reyes, conversation with author, Los Angeles, 26 November 2016. 28. Burke, “Crisis in the Arts.” Perhaps this is a reworking of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” argument. See Snow, Two Cultures. 29. Berger, Art of Philosophy. 30. Alpers, Art of Describing. 31. Derrida, Archive Fever; Steedman, Dust; Fleming, Cultural Graphology. 32. See, especially, Baxandall, Patterns of Intention; Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature; Koerner, “Impossible Objects”; Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts; Fleming, “Afterword”; Naginski, Sculpture and Enlightenment; Grigsby, Extremities; Bynum, Christian Materiality; Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption; Wagner, House Divided. 33. Mitchell, “What Is an Image?” 34. Podro, Depiction. My thanks to Jennifer Nelson for helping to clarify my thinking here. 35. Werner, “Discourses About Pictures.” 36. One of the most mesmerizing places with which to see this absence is in Clerselier’s proofs for Lettres de René Descartes: Claude Clerselier and P. Antoine Legrand, “Épreuves d’imprimerie des lettres de René Descartes, avec les corrections de Claude Clerselier et des notes marginales du P. Antoine Legrand,” Paris, Bibliotheque de l’Institut de France, ms 4469-471.

Chapter 1 1. Balz, Descartes and the Modern Mind; Clarke, Des­cartes’ Philosophy of Science, 22–23; Garber, Des­ cartes’s Metaphysical Physics; Ribe, “Cartesian Optics”; Garber, Descartes Embodied, 85–110; Buchwald, “Descartes’s Experimental Journey.” 2. AT 1:270–73, 280–84. 3. Pitte, “Some of Descartes’ Debts”; Ariew, “Descartes and Scholasticism,” 61–63; Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics, 39–57. 4. Garber, “Physics and Foundations.” 5. Any direct correspondence between Descartes and Van Schooten about their collaboration has been lost. Constantijn Huygens’s letters to Descartes about the publication of Discours are the closest we get. See notes 10 and 11 below. 6. DE 6; AT 6:86. 7. Mahoney, “Diagrams and Dynamics,” 209; Mahoney, “Drawing Machines.” 8. Baigrie, “Descartes’s Scientific Illustrations.” 9. Zittel, Theatrum philosophicum; see also Sepper, Descartes’s Imagination; Galison, “Descartes’s Comparisons.” 10. Huygens to Descartes, 15 June 1636, AT 10:607–8. 11. Huygens to Descartes, 30 October 1636, AT 10:613–15. 12. Descartes to Mersenne, 8 October 1629, AT 1:22–32; Descartes to Ferrier, 8 October 1629, AT 1:32–38; Ferrier to Descartes, 26 October 1629, AT 1:38–52; Descartes to Ferrier, 13 November 1629, AT 1:53–69; Descartes to Mersenne, [18 March 1630], AT 1:128–35; Descartes to [Beeckman], 22 August 1634, AT 1:308–12. 13. AT 10:214; Lüthy, “Where Logical Necessity Becomes Visual Persuasion,” 97. 14. Descartes to Mersenne, [5 April 1632], AT 1:243. 15. Descartes to Beeckman, 24 January 1619, AT 10:151–53. See also Shea, Magic of Numbers, 10. 16. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 265. 17. Berkel, Isaac Beeckman; Gaukroger, Descartes, 70–72; Gauvin, “Artisans, Machines, and Descartes’s Organon,” 196–97. 18. Descartes to Beeckman, 23 April 1619, AT 10:162–63; Shea, Magic of Numbers, 11. 19. Dainville, Éducation des Jésuites, 27. For more on genres of natural philosophy, see Blair, “Problemata.” 20. Toletus, Commentaria in octo libros, 308–22. 21. Meyer, Illustration des thèses; Berger, “Martin Meurisse’s Theater.” 22. Rochemonteix, Collège de Jésuites, vol. 4.

( 176 )  Notes to Pages 13–32

23. AT 6:9–10. English translation from CSM 1:9–10. 24. Israel, Dutch Republic, 421–32. 25. Stevin, Wisconstige gedachtenissen. 26. Molhuysen, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis, 1:389*–398*, 392*. 27. Ibid., 1:391*–392*. See also Maniere ende ordre; Berkel, “Simon Stevin et la foundation”; Heuvel, “Traité incomplet”; Dijksterhuis, “Golden Age of Mathematics”; Krüger, “Lessons from the Early Seventeenth Century”; Dopper, “Duytsche Mathematicque.” 28. Molhuysen, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis, 1:390*. 29. Alpers, Art of Describing, 28–29. 30. Nieuw Nederlandsch Biographisch Woordenboek, ed. P. C. Molhuysen and P. J. Blok, vol. 7 (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff ’s Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1911), s.v. “Schooten, Frans van (2)”; Molhuysen, Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis, 2:407; Hofmann, Frans van Schooten de Jüngere. 31. Huygens to Descartes, 15 June 1636, AT 10:607–8; Huygens to Descartes, 30 October 1636, AT 10:613–15. 32. DE 21; AT 6:20; CSM 1:20. 33. Smith, From Sight to Light, 232–322; Lindberg, Theories of Vision, 9–10, 188; Rosen, “Thought and Touch”; Chen-​Morris, “Optics.” 34. DE 59; AT 6:137. 35. DE 60; AT 6:138. 36. AT 10:412; CSM 1:412. On the wax metaphor, see Gal and Chen-​Morris, “Baroque Optics,” 215–17. 37. AT 10:415; CSM 1:415–16. 38. AT 10:454. 39. Garber, Descartes Embodied, 34–36. 40. Descartes to Mersenne, 15 April 1630, AT 1:137–46. 41. DE 58–60; AT 6:137 passim. 42. DE 65; AT 6:64–65. With help from CSM 1:64–65. 43. Garber, Descartes Embodied, 33–51. 44. DE 250; AT 6:325. 45. DE 255; AT 6:329–30. 46. Della Porta, De refractione optices, 200–203. 47. Mancosu, “Acoustics and Optics,” 611–12. 48. DE 250; AT 6:325. 49. DE 250; AT 6:325. 50. Shea, Magic of Numbers, 204–5. 51. DE 250–51; AT 6:325–26. 52. “Ils ne laissent pas de peindre tousjours du rouge, & ceux qui vont vers H tousjours du bleu.” AT 6:330. 53. DE 255–56; AT 6:329–30. 54. DE 256; AT 6:331.

55. DE 257; AT 6:332. 56. DE 259; AT 6:333. 57. DE 260; AT 6:334. 58. DE 264–65; AT 6:338–39. 59. Shea, Magic of Numbers, 219; Schuster, Descartes-​Agonistes, 167–224. 60. DE 261; AT 6:335–36. 61. DE 267; AT 6:341. 62. DE 267; AT 6:341. 63. DE 267; AT 6:341. 64. DE 268; AT 6:342. 65. DE 268; AT 6:342. 66. DE 269–70; AT 6:343. 67. DE 266; AT 6:340. 68. Gabbey, “Melon and the Dictionary”; Grafton, “Descartes the Dreamer”; Keefer, “Dreamer’s Path.” 69. Dunn, “ ‘Great City.’ ” 70. Burnett, Hyperbolic Quest. 71. Werrett, “Wonders Never Cease.” 72. Gauvin, “Artisans, Machines, and Descartes’s Organon”; Jones, Good Life. 73. Cook, “Unexpected Descartes.” 74. Nadler, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter. 75. DE 14; AT 6:12–13.

76. Parker and Smith, introduction to The General Crisis, 14. 77. Hale, “Military Education of the Officer Class.” 78. Hornstein, “Just Violence.” 79. Rosen, “Dutch Guardroom Scene.” 80. Gauvin, “Artisans, Machines, and Descartes’s Organon.” 81. Dupré, “Playing with Images.” 82. Scheiner, Rosa ursina,123. 83. Crombie, Science, Optics, and Music, 139–60; Smith, From Sight to Light; Gal and Chen-​Morris, Baroque Science. 84. Hesse, Models and Analogies; Sabra, Theories of Light. 85. DE 11; AT 6:91. 86. DE 19; AT 6:99. 87. Dijksterhuis, “Jeu de Paume,” 131. 88. Unwin, Wine and the Vine, 203–35. 89. Fangé, Mémoires, 66–69. 90. DE 33; AT 6:112–13; with translation assistance from CSM 1:113. 91. Cf. Massey, “Anamorphosis Through Descartes,” 1157–159; Zorach, “ ‘Secret King of Charm,’ ” 238. 92. Wilkin, “Figuring the Dead Descartes”; Zittel, “Conflicting Pictures.”

Chapter 2 1. “De mundo adspectabili” is Descartes’s name for the third part of Principia, where he introduces his vortices for the first time. PP, 70; AT 8:80. 2. PP 75; AT 8:86. 3. See especially: AT 4:131–34, 180–83, 453–72, 474–85; AT 5:258–61. Lüthy also confirms the picture’s novelty in his review of Zittel’s book (“Claus Zittel”). 4. Respectively, [Clerselier] to Descartes, July 1646; and AT 4:458.AT 4:476. 5. Moore to Descartes, 11 December 1648, AT 5:245–50, 267–79, 298–317. Gabbey, “Philosophia Cartesiana”; Henry, “Cambridge Platonist’s Materialism.” 6. Burtt, Metaphysical Foundations, 105. 7. Koyré, From the Closed World; Dijksterhuis, Mechanization of the World Picture. Even E. J. Aiton, whose genealogy of the vortex theory is indispensable, seemed to separate the conceptual implications of Descartes’s proposal from the construction of the Principia’s vortices picture (see Vortex Theory of Planetary Motion). 8. Baigrie, “Descartes’s Scientific Illustrations.” 9. Nikulin, Matter, Imagination and Geometry, 122. 10. Lüthy, “Where Logical Necessity Becomes Visual Persuasion,” 126–27.

11. Zittel, Theatrum philosophicum; Galison, “Descartes’s Comparisons”; Sepper, Descartes’s Imagination. 12. Koerner, “Impossible Objects,” 73. 13. Margóscy, “Camel’s Head”; Dackerman, “Dürer’s Indexical Fantasy.” 14. See chapter 1. I borrow the term “pictorial intelligence” from Michael Baxandall and Svetlana Alpers. See Baxandall and Alpers, Tiepelo and the Pictorial Intelligence. 15. Baxandall, Words for Pictures, 117. 16. Ibid., 117–61. 17. PP 95; AT 8:105. 18. Barany, “Translating Euclid’s Diagrams,” 158. 19. Smolarski, “Jesuit Ratio Studiorum.” 20. “Totius hic primus liber in eo positus est, ut nobis tradate ortus proprietatesque, triangulorum, tum quod ad eorum angulos spectat, tum quod ad latera: quae quidem inter se comparat interdum, interdum vero unumquodque, per se inspicit, & contemplatur.” Clavius, Opera mathematica, 13. 21. Nieuw nederlandisch biographisch woordenboek (Haarlem: J. J. van Brederode, 1869), s.v. “marolois (Samuel).” 22. Bos, Redefining Geometrical Exactness, 270.

Notes to Pages 32–49  ( 177 )

23. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form; Baltrusaitis, Anamorphoses; Massey, Picturing Space. 24. Brusati, “Reforming Idols”; de Groot, “Pieter Saenredam’s Views of Utrecht.” 25. “P. de Puente tamen suadet, ut se in praesentia Dei colligat anima, & intueatur Deum, ut erat ante mundi creationem, omnia Replens, & in se solus sibis sufficiens, & se quasi solam cum eo, & in eo, uti punctum, qui solus omnia est, & solus sufficit; & totum in eum suum transfundat amorem.” Sucquet, Via vitae aeternae, 968, quoted in Melion, Meditative Art, 179–80n68. 26. The endurance of this logic may very well have encouraged Johan Comenius to picture the human figure as a field of dots in 1659. See Comenius, Orbis sensualium pictus, 86. 27. Descartes and Moriarty, Meditations on First Philosophy, 91. 28. “Sur une ligne droicte donnee & infinie; d’un poinct donné, lequel n’est en icelle; mener une ligne perpendicularie.” Euclid, Quinz livres, 69. 29. Bourdin would also later become a fierce commentator against Descartes’s arguments about the reflection and refraction of light. Ariew, “Pierre Bourdin.” 30. Metius, Arithmeticae libri duo, 164. 31. Lefèvre, “Limits of Pictures”; Vilain, “Circular and Rectilinear Motion.” 32. Brahe, Astronomiae instuaratae progymnasta . . . , 131. 33. MacMillan, “Sovereignty ‘More Plainly Described.’ ” 34. Olson, Fire and Ice; Schechner, Comets, Popular Culture; Silver, “Nature and God’s God.” 35. Houle, Meter in Music. 36. PP 90; AT 8:101; emphasis original. 37. PP 91; AT 8:102. 38. Murdoch, “Naissance et développement de l’atomisme,” 16–18, 20–22, 24–27; Lüthy, “Invention of Atomist Iconography.” 39. Lüthy, “Invention of Atomist Iconography,” 123; Lüthy, “Thoughts and Circumstances.” 40. Lüthy, “Invention of Atomist Iconography,” 125. 41. PP 41–42; AT 8:49. 42. Lüthy, “Where Logical Necessity Becomes Visual Persuasion,” 114. 43. Westman, “Nature, Art, and Psyche.” 44. Goodrich, “Iconography of Nothing.” 45. “Caelos esse fluidos.” PP 78; AT 8:89. 46. Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, 324–57. 47. Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo, 94–102. 48. Waller, Milky Way, 10–52; Ragep, Nasir al-​Din al-​Tusi’s Memoir, 129.

( 178 )  Notes to Pages 50–72

49. Remmert, “Tycho Brahes Nase,” 177–80; Herlihy, “Renaissance Star Charts.” 50. Delano-​Smith, “Signs on Printed Topographical Maps.” 51. Grove Dictionary of Art, 2012 s.v. “Stipple,” by David Alexander, accessed 4 September 2012, http://​www​.oxfordartonline​.com​/subscriber​/article​ /grove​/art​/T081466; s.v. “Campagnola,” accessed 4 September 2012, http://​www​.oxfordartonline​.com​ /subscriber​/article​/grove​/art​/T013477pg1. 52. Oxford English Online, s.v. “stipple, v.,” accessed 4 September 2012, http://​www​.oed​.com​/view​ /Entry​/190465. 53. ’T Hart, “Nicolas Witsen.” 54. Chennevières-​Pointel and Montaiglon, Abecedario de P. J. Mariette, 1:35. 55. PP 73; AT 8:83. 56. Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, 73–88. 57. PP 89; AT 8:99. 58. PP 44; AT 8:52. 59. Zittel, Theatrum philosophicum, 353. 60. Orth, “What Goes Around.” For more on the transgression of such borders, see Camille, Image on the Edge. 61. Unknown artist, De onthoofding van Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, engraving, 1619, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, http://​hdl​.handle​.net​/10934​/RM0001​ .COLLECT​.359044; Rembrandt van Rijn, Rembrandt’s Mother, etching, 1633, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, http://​hdl​.handle​.net​/10934​/RM0001​ .COLLECT​.36959. 62. Schellinks, quoted in Van Thiel, Framing in the Golden Age, 27. 63. Huygens, quoted in ibid. 64. Marin, On Representation, 356; Simmel, “Picture Frame.” 65. Schapiro, “On Some Problems,” 227. 66. For more examples, see Pelletier, “National and Regional Mapping in France.” 67. Marin, On Representation, 354. 68. See Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon. 69. Alpers, Art of Describing, 39–40. See also Swan, “Ad vivum, naer het leven”; “ ‘Naer het leven’ Affair.” 70. This is not unlike that which Baxandall articulated as “the period eye” (Painting and Experience, 29–108). 71. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 186. 72. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 142–48. 73. Gabbey, “Melon and the Dictionary.” 74. Cook, “Unexpected Descartes.” 75. DE 11; AT 6:9. 76. AT 9:18. 77. AT 7:382; CSM 2:262. 78. See chapter 1.

Chapter 3 1. Throughout this chapter and briefly in chapter 4, I detail the little French commentary on Descartes’s pictures I have been able to find. 2. Goldstein, Print Culture; Scott, “Authorship, the Académie, and the Market.” 3. McClaughlin and Picolet, “E xemple d’utilisation du Minutier central de Paris,” 14–17. 4. I refer to Rohault’s figures as “figures” for two reasons. First, the term preserves the actor’s category. And second, unlike the other woodcuts and engravings I examine throughout this book, they are bare and hardly pictorial in the usual scene-​setting and descriptive senses of the term. 5. Roux, “Was There a Cartesian Experimentalism,” 51, 55–58, 72. 6. Dobre, “Rohault’s Cartesian Physics.” 7. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 12–40. 8. McClaughlin, “Descartes, Experiments, and a First Generation Cartesian.” 9. For Rohault’s public reconciliation of the Eucharist with the new natural philosophy, see Rohault, Entretiens sur la philosophie. 10. Marin, Portrait of the King. 11. Amyot’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, first published in 1559 and then reissued in 1617, gained landmark status during the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries. Billault, “Plutarch’s Lives”; Frazier and Guerrier, “Plutarch’s French Translation.” 12. “Le vaisseau sur lequel Theseus alla & retourna, estoit une galiote à trente rames, que les Atheniens segradent jusques au temps de Demetrius le Phalerien, en ostant tousjours les vieilles pieces de bois, à mesure qu’elles se pourroissoyent & en y remettant des neuves en leurs places tellement que depuis, es disputes des philosophes touchant les choses qui s’augmentent, assavoir si elles demeurent unes, ou si elles se sont autres, ceste galiote estoit tousjours alleguee pour exemple de doute, pource que les uns maintenoyent que c’estoit un meme vaisseu, les autres, au contraire, soustenoyent que non.” Amyot, Vies des hommes illustres, 7. 13. For a longer history of Theseus’s ship, see Starn, “Authenticity and Historic Preservation”; for more on the masterful structures and forms that Renaissance generations wished to preserve against the crumbling vicissitudes of time, see Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 7–20, 29–36, 331–46. 14. McClaughlin, “Censorship and Defenders”; Nadler, “Arnauld, Descartes, and Transubstantiation,” 49, no. 2; Schmaltz, Early Modern Cartesianisms, 22–28; Armogathe, “Cartesianism and Eucharistic Physics.”

15. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3a.76.1. As Brockliss describes, Aquinas was France’s “leading scholastic influence” on seventeenth-​century physics (French Higher Education, 338). 16. CMS, 2:152–53. 17. Phillips, Church and Culture, 205–25. 18. AT 7:218–56; CSM 2:130–53; Brockliss, French Higher Education, 337–50; Brockliss, “Moment of No Return.” 19. Le Rées, Cursus Philosophicus, 1:413–14: Instat ex Concilio Tridentino: post consecrationem specierum manet quantitas panis, cùm tamen non maneat actualis extensio panis. Respondeo, hoc velle tantùm Concilium, post verba consecrationis, quantitatem, seu extensionem, per quam substantia panis erat mensurabilis, in accidentibus manere eadem, saltem moraliter, & secundùm aequiuvalentiam: quatenus nec maior est, neque minor priori, nec sensibus ulla deprehenditur mutation in dius modi extensione: & per illam & accidentia, quibus est prorpia, demonstrabile est corpus Christi, sicut substantia panis per priorem. See also “François Le Rées (159.-16. . .),” Bibliothèque nationale de France, Data, https://​data​.bnf​ .fr​/12199052​/francois​_le​_rees; Triger, “Étudiants manceaux,” 349n4. 20. See, for instance, Pascal on the “heresy of Geneva” and the salvatory powers of the Eucharist (Provincial Letters, 259–61); see also Hardon, “Historical Antecedents,” 510. 21. Garrioch, Huguenots of Paris, 25–26; Labrousse, Essai sur la révocation, 25–27, 121–31, 53–58; Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 87, 129–31. 22. “Que si l’Eucharistie n’est autre Corps & du Sang de jesus-​christ; comment peut-​on prouver par elle, la Toute puissance de Dieu, & quel prodigieux miracle se trouve dans la Cene des Calvinistes?” Adam, Calvin défait par soy-​mesme, 404. 23. “Car si l’Eucharistie n’est que la figure du corps & du sang de jesus-​christ, comme enseignent les Calvinistes, la preuve de S. Cyrille, & du Concile general auquel il presidoit, se destruiroit elle mesme, & seroit entierement ridicule . . . Et dans l’opinion de nos Adversaires, on se sçauroit prouver par l’Eucharistie la Resurrection de jesus-​christ: parce que l’une ne suit pas de l’autre, & la figure du corps peut estre sans la Resurrection du mesme corps; comme la figure de Henry le Grand, & le portraict de Louys XIII. ne sont pas des preuves qu’ils sont ressuscitez.” Ibid., 416–17.

Notes to Pages 73–80  ( 179 )

24. Though we have the inventory of Rohault’s library, the smaller quartos and octavos in his collection go unnamed. It is possible that Rohault could have encountered a small polemic like Adam’s. McClaughlin and Picolet, “Exemple d’utilisation du minutier central.” 25. Clair, Jacques Rohault, 24. 26. For an overview of curricula at comparable French Jesuit collèges, see Codina Mir, Aux sources de la pédagogie, 89, 287; Dainville, Éducation des Jésuites, 267–78; Brockliss, “Moment of No Return,” 259. 27. Brockliss, French Higher Education, 463–66. 28. Ibid., 345. 29. Martin, Guillaume Desprez, 205; Martin and Chartier, Livre, pouvoirs et société, 339–42, 382. For Descartes in print specifically, see Van Otegem, “Bibliography of the Works of Descartes”; Guibert, Bibliographie. 30. Roux, “Was There a Cartesian Experimentalism,” 64. 31. Dear, “Miracles, Experiments, and the Ordinary Course.” 32. Ibid., 680. 33. Clair, Jacques Rohault, 44. 34. Rohault, Traité de physique, 166–68. 35. McClaughlin, “Descartes, Experiments, and a First Generation Cartesian,” 331–37. 36. Ibid., 337. 37. Rohault, Traité de physique, 200–201. 38. Rohault’s students’ notes reflect this. The Rohault manuscript in Sylvain Matton’s possession follows a similar sequence as both the Bibliothèque Sainte-​Geneviève manuscript (MS 2225) and Rohault’s Traité de physique. See also Clair, Jacques Rohault, 44–50; Roux, “Was There a Cartesian Experimentalism,” 74. 39. During his early days as a public practitioner, Rohault had presented his experiments concerning water rising in glass tubes to much acclaim at the Académie Bourdelot. See Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 22:539–41. For more on the Académie Bourdelot’s procedures, see Bourdelot, Conversations académiques, 1–76; Brown, Scientific Organizations, 231–33; Peumery, “Conversations medico-​scientifiques”; Roux, “Was There a Cartesian Experimentalism,” 60–70. 40. “Les Conferences publiques qu’il faisoit une fois toutes les semaines, où se trouvoient des personnes de toutes sortes de qualitez & conditions, Prélats, Abbez, Courtisans, Docteurs, Médecins, Philosophes, Géometres, Regens, Escoliers, Provinciaux, Estrangers, Artisans, en un mot des personnes de tout âge, de tout sexe, * de toute profession.” Rohault’s dedication in Oeuvres posthumes, n.p. 41. Rohault, Traité de physique, 203–4.

( 180 )  Notes to Pages 80–86

42. Clair, Jacques Rohault, 52. 43. “Mais il est impossible de bien entendre tout cecy si on n’a lû les principes de Monsr. Des Cartes, et veu les figures de son livre.” Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-​Geneviève, ms 2225, fol. 91r. Unfortunately, the figures for this manuscript are lost, but the book is a helpful indicator that Rohault was using figures early on. 44. In November 1641, Regius, who had once been Descartes’s star acolyte, had compelled his students to present disputations claiming that each body was only accidentally joined with its mind—a message that reduced the soul to an Aristotelian substance and flouted God’s will. This was less than helpful for an upstart philosophical system that hoped to dislodge a philosophy so woven into the fabric of theological life. Descartes and Bos, Correspondence, 90–91. See also chapter 4. 45. Descartes, preface to the Principes de la philosophie, n.p.; AT 9:19–20. 46. CSM, 1:293–312. 47. Schmaltz, “Claude Clerselier.” 48. Attestation donnée, devant les notaires parisiens Coussinot et Jacques de Blois, par Claude Clerselier, avocat au Parlement de Paris, en faveur de l’orthodoxie de Descartes (1667), Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-​Geneviève, ms 3534/2, fol. 3. 49. Wilkin, “Figuring the Dead Descartes,” 44–45; Zittel, “Conflicting Pictures,” 220–26. For a closer analysis of the context within with Schuyl produced his engravings, see Chan, “Beautiful Surfaces.” See also chapter 4. 50. Clerselier, “Preface” in Descartes, L’homme, [14]: S’il avoit aussi bien rencontré dans les figures des muscles & du cerveau qu’il a inventées, comme il a fait dans sa Preface, & qu’il eust travaillé sur une copie plus fidele pour faire sa version, je n’aurois rien voulu faire autre chose, que de remettre ce Traité en sa langue Naturelle, & me serois servy de ses propres figures, qui l’emportenet sans doute de beaucoup sur celles que j’ay fait mettre icy, si l’on a simplement égard à la graveure & à l’impression, mais que je croy pour la pluspart estre moins intelligibles que celles-​là, & moins propres à l’intelligence du texts. 51. Ibid. 52. “Il n’y a rien de plus aisé que de les remettre dans le Naturel, & de les concevoir comme elles sont, apres les avoir ainsi considerées autrement qu’elles ne sont.” Ibid., [37]. 53. Following Descartes’s death, Stockholm sent Clerselier a trunk stuffed full of the philosopher’s possessions. The literary executor fished out the

unpublished manuscript for L’homme. References to a number of pictures abounded, but the manuscript contained a lone figure in Descartes’s hand. Any adequate understanding of Descartes’s ideas required many more. So Clerselier recruited a professor of anatomy at Leuven, Gérard van Gutschoven. Delays came and went. Clerselier solicited the help of another doctor, this time French, by the name of Louis de la Forge. But while he waited on both collaborators’ woodcuts, Florent Schuyl, a medical student in Leiden, had published a Latin translation of the same manuscript. More on this saga in Wilkin, “Figuring the Dead Descartes,” 44–53; Zittel, “Conflicting Pictures,” 220–21. 54. It is unclear which of Clerselier’s collaborators produced this woodcut. Though Clerselier promised his readers he would designate whose hand had produced which drawings, this figure was not subject to (or maybe it did not warrant?) that courtesy. 55. For more on depicting Dal Monte’s machines, see Meli, Thinking with Objects, 18–39. 56. Zittel’s thesis is that the pictures in L’homme argue for the man-​machine concept over and against Descartes’s texts (“Conflicting Pictures”). 57. Descartes, L’homme, [1–9]; Wilkin, “Figuring the Dead Descartes,” 51; Zittel, “Conflicting Pictures,” 220. 58. Sorbiere, Lettres et discours, 688–89: Et les figures Mathematiques frappant la veuë, font croire que tout ce qu’elles font semblant d’expliquer, sont autant de demonstrations: de sorte qu’à voir seulement les Livres de M. Descartes, on presume d’abord qu’ils continent la pure verité. Et ainsi les personnes curieuses, qui ne veulent pas se donner la peine d’une longue attention, sont fort disposées à donner les mains à tout ce que ces Livres contiennent, soit en faveur des figures, ou par lassitude; afin d’éviter la fatigue des abstractions, ou en suite de plusieurs belles & bonnes choses, dont les oeuvres de ce galand homme sont industrieusement parsemées. It is clear that Sorbière was referring to Descartes’s Essais and Principia because he published Relations in 1660, two years before even Schuyl’s De homine would appear and, thus, well before Clerselier’s edition of L’homme. 59. Clair, Jacques Rohault, 28, 30. 60. Guibert, Bibliographie, 117. 61. Pottinger, French Book Trade, 59–64. 62. Oldenburg, Correspondence, 2:35; Ariew, Descartes Among the Scholastics, 219. 63. Schmaltz, Early Modern Cartesianisms, 22–25. For more on “donec corrigitur,” see Putnam,

Censorship of the Church, 1:26–27, 30–32; 2:83, 127–28, 342–44; Pottinger, French Book Trade, 59–64. 64. Rohault, Traité de physique, [23]. 65. Chartier, On the Edge, 99–100. 66. Pascal, Pensées, 25–308. 67. For a much broader history of the cross as a symbol, see Jensen, Cross. 68. Brockliss, “Pierre Gautruche.” 69. “Un nombre indefini de points differens les uns des autres, & qui approchent de plus en plus de l’extremité E.” Rohault, Traité de physique, 49; for the initial description of the diagram, see pp. 48–49. 70. “Il faut avouër que l’on peu assigner un nombre indefini de points dans quelque portion determinée de matiere que ce soit; & par consequent que la matiere est divisible à l’indefini.” Ibid., 49. 71. “Putà in lineâ e.f. designari possint novae & novae partes infinitum.” Gautruche, Philosophiae ac mathematicae, 2:241. 72. “Putà in lineâ e.f. designari possint novae & novae partes infinitum.” Ibid., 2:241. 73. “Retinendam esse doctrinam Aristotelis, nempe quantum istud, seu continuum non posse conflari nisi ex quantis, seu extensis; non habere actu partes ullas; nec posse divide nisi in partes, quae semper sint divisibilies; alioquin si fieret resolution usque ad indivisibilia, sequeretur componi ex indivisibilibus: quod aiebamus esse impossibile.” Ibid., 2:240–41. 74. Dear, Discipline and Experience, 32–62. 75. “In V. Eucharistiae Sacramento, [S]anguis Christi Domini totus est simul loco, nec tamen sanguis v. g. pedum confunditur, aut continuatur cum sanguine capitis, aut aliarum partium; quod oriri non potest nisi ex defectu indivisibilis, aut similis alicuius modificationis determinatiuae. Rx. Christi sanguinem in eo statu, ita esse simul loco, ut tamen servet ordinem cum aliis partibus eiusdem corporis. Quare, qui suis est inclusus vasis, non potest hoc modo cum alio permisceri; quomodo sanguis unius arteriae, non potest simule esse cum sanguine alicuius venae.” Gautruche, Philosophiae ac mathematicae, 2:257–58. 76. “Quand on se represente le pouvoir de Dieu, & l’empire absolu qu’il a sur toutes les choses qui sont au monde, on ne sçauroit douter qu’il ne puisse faire que certaines parties de la matiere soient de telle nature, qu’il n’y ait dans tout l’Univers aucun Agent capable de les diviser, d’où il s’ensuivroit que chacune de ces parties ne differeroit en rien des petits Corps qu’Epicure appellee des Atomes; Toutefois cette proprieté de ne pouvoir estre divisée par aucun Agent exterieur, ne seroit qu’arbitraire, & ne seroit appuyée sur aucun principe naturel, mais seulement sur une pure supposition; laquelle ne changeant

Notes to Pages 87–96  ( 181 )

pas leur veritable nature, nous devons tenir pour certain que toute la matiere de ce monde est divisible; Si bien que la seule difficulté qu’il peut y avoir en cecy, est de sçavoir en combien de parties une certaine portion déterimée de la matiere peut estre divisée.” Rohault, Traité de physique, 47. 77. Véronique Meyer is the foremost authority on seventeenth-​century French thesis prints. See Meyer, Illustration des thèse; Meyer, Pour la plus grande gloire. 78. Le Bretonnière and Fléchier, L’Hercule françois, and Meyer, Pour la plus grande gloire, 206–9. 79. “Nullum datur potentia infinitum actu in rebus creatis datur tamen actu infinitum potentia. Duo corpora in uno loco, aut unum simul in duplici circumspectivé à Deo poni nihil vetat. Nec mundus in loco est, nec Deus in spatiis imaginariis.” Charles Le Brun, François de Poilly, Jean Richer, and Jean-​Baptiste Antoine Colbert de Seignelay, Conclusiones ex univers philosophia . . . , engraving, 1688, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, https://​ gallica​.bnf​.fr​/ark:​/12148​/btv1b525066249. 80. Erika Naginski makes a similar observation about Piranesi’s polemical ostracizing of Julien David Le Roy’s Greek columns, made some eighty years after Le Brun’s print (“Preliminary Thoughts on Piranesi,” 162). 81. Meyer, Illustration des thèses, 145–50. 82. Rohault, Traité de physique, [13]: Mais l’utilité la plus naturelle que les Physiciens peuvent tirer en particulier des Mathematiques, est qu’elles les accoûtument à la consideration des figures, & les rendent plus propres à en connoître les differentes proprietez. Je sçay qu’il y a en a qui disent

qu’on ne doit pas s’arrêter aux figures, par ce qu’elles ne sont point actives; Mais encore que d’elles mesmes elles n’agissent pas, il est certain neantmoins que leurs differences rendent les corps que l’on met en action, capables de certains effets qu’ils n’auroient pû produire sans cela. Ainsi, un coûteau estant aiguisé, devient capable de couper autrement qu’il n’auroit fait; & les divers outils des ouvriers deviennent, par leurs differentes figures, propres à produire les differentes choses qu’e l’on fait par leur moyen. Or si la figure des corps que leur grosseur soumet à nos sens, sert tant aux effets qu’ils produisent, la raison veut que l’on croye que les parties les plus imperceptibles de la matiere, ayant chacunes leurs figures, sont aussi capables de certains effets à proportion de leur grosseur, semblables à ceux que nous voyons estre produits par les corps les plus grossiers. 83. This was in keeping with Descartes’s own approach to figurative proportionality. See Sepper, “Figuring Things Out.” 84. For more on Desgabets, see Schmaltz, “Robert Desgabets”; Schmaltz, Radical Cartesianism, 25–75. 85. Du Hamel, Philosophia universalis, 17–18. Translation with help from Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics, 174. 86. Sarton, “Second Preface”; Hoskin, “ ‘Mining All Within’ ”; Schüller, “Samuel Clarke’s Annotations.” 87. Grant, “Aristotelianism,” 103. 88. Blair, “Problemata as a Natural Philosophical Genre.” 89. Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, 100.

Chapter 4 1. Bossy, “Counter-​Reformation.” 2. Daniel Gaesbeeck, the publisher of Philosophia naturalis, likely put Senguerd in touch with Schoonebeek. Schoonebeek had been an apprentice to Romeyn de Hooghe, whose work will feature later on in this chapter. Schoonebeek had created a portrait of Terence for Gaesbeeck’s new 1678 edition of Comoediae sex. See Van Hoof ’s Van Gaesbeeck, a rare pamphlet that is kept at the Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden under call number Z232.V36 H66 1984. As of the writing of this book, Schoonebeek is currently known solely for having made the frontispiece to the second edition of Philosophia. See Hollstein et al., New Hollstein, xxvi, 38. But comparing the illustrations in the book with other prints that Schoonebeek made in subsequent years (at the Rijksprentenkabinet, in particular)

( 182 )  Notes to Pages 97–104

have led me to believe that the two worked in concert throughout the book’s production. Leiden Univer­ sitaire Bibliotheken’s Special Collections hold a copy of this title page—PK P-106.136—though not the book itself. For more on De Hooghe’s book output, see the list of publications in De Hooghe and Van Nierop, Romeyn de Hooghe. For more on Schoonebeek’s biography, see De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, beeldhouwers, graveurs en bouwmeesters, ed. Christiaan Kramm (Amsterdam: Gebroeders Diederichs, 1857), s.v. “Schoonebeek, (Adriaan)”; Biographisch Woordenboek der Nederlanden, vol. 17, pt. 1, edited by A. J. van der Aa (Haarlem: J. J. van Brederode, 1874), s.v. “Adriaan Schoonebeek”; Janssen et al., “Adriaan Schoonebeek’s Etching Manual,” 93–106.

3. Alpers, Art of Describing, xxv. 4. Grant, “Aristotelianism.” 5. Cook, Matters of Exchange; Schama, Embarrassment of Riches; Smith, Body of the Artisan. 6. Wiesenfeldt, Leerer Raum in Minervas Haus, 21–58. 7. Swan, “Ad vivum, naer het leven”; Parshall, “Imago Contrafacta.” 8. Koerner, “Impossible Objects,” 73. 9. Cf. Smith, Body of the Artisan. 10. De Jonge, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandse zeewesen, 1:75. 11. “Unde corpore moto, ex continuat à corporum, ab ipso propulsorum, serie, circulus describi debet; quem ut vità, quae propellit quae à latere C est, haecque aquam clavum D subeuntem, unde circulus ABCD.” Senguerd, Philosophia naturalis, 40–41; emphasis original. 12. PP 102; AT 8:112. 13. AT 8:58–59, 112–13. 14. Senguerd, Philosophia naturalis, 41. 15. “Si quid Aristot. doctrinae congruens & conveniens esse intelligo, probabile duco: si quid autem rationi consentaneum esse video, verum certumque judico. Itaque in Physiologia primas judicio sensuum longa experientia & diligenti observatione explorato atque confirmato, secundas rationi, auctoritati Philosophorum postremas defero.” Senguerd, Introductionis ad physicam, n.p. 16. Krauss, “Notes on the Index.” 17. Daston, “Empire of Observation,” 100. 18. “Forma vocatur principium generatione quia, licet in executione non sit prior generation, attamen ratione intentiones prior est; & gene ratio substantialis est intrinsece in formam tend it ut in finem, & id à quo species sham desumit.” Senguerd, Introductionis ad physicam, 12. 19. “Sicut mobile ante motum erat in potentia ut movetur, ita movens tum erat in potentia ut moveret, & cum sit motus, movens partim actu movit, partim potest ulterius movere, sicut mobile tum ex parte actu motum est, & ex parte ulterius moveri potest.” Ibid., 107. 20. Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch; Verbeek, “Regius’s Fundamenta Physices.” I have not yet had the opportunity to see Regius’s Disputatio medica prima (Utrecht: Aeg. Roman, 1641), as the only extant copy of this book is held at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. 21. Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch, 13–33; Correspondence of Renè Descartes, appendix 1. 22. Stronks, Negotiating Differences, 131. 23. “Idem qaero de emblematis, hieroglyphicis Christi, Mariae &c., ut quando sol pingitur tanquam hieroglyphicum misericordiae, & eo denotatur Maria [. . .] Emblemata quidem Christi, strictè ita dicta, non sunt illicita, ut nec Mariae, si modo

veritatem symbolicè exhibeant. Sed cum accedit pictura, transeunt in hieroglyphica propriè ita dicta; abstinendum est, propter speciem & periculum iconolatriae.” Voetius, Selectarum disputationum theologicarum, 3:308. 24. Stronks, Negotiating Differences, 131. 25. Calvin and Allen, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 98. 26. Seaman, Religious Paintings, 88. 27. However, as Angela Vanhaelen has chronicled, Pieter Saenredam may have been commissioned by a small group of Roman Catholic patrons to record the Roman Catholic remnants of the church, ca. 1636 (“Utrecht’s Transformations”). 28. Seaman points out that following the iconoclastic ruptures of 1566, Dutch Catholics began to worship in private, whether at home or in hidden churches. In the 1610s, these suppressed congregations began to commission artists. Seaman, Religious Paintings, 51. 29. Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, 194–95; translation by Weststeijn, Visible World, 110. 30. Amy Powell claims that this “condition of possibility” in late sixteenth century—specifically, in Frans Francken’s—Antwerp were the bursts of iconoclasm themselves (“Painting as Blur,” 48–49). See also Gombrich, Story of Art, 308–24. 31. Senguerd, Annotations to Opera, note 7, facing p. 4: Ut Author facit . . . qui putat mentem esse corporem, idem similiter de Deo fingat: qua causa idolatria est; revera autem omnes homines talem ideam in se habere iisdem argumentis probatur, quibus vulgo cognitio Dei naturalis adstruitur; nempe ex consensu omnium gentium; ex qaulicunque cultu Dei, seu religione, sive bona, sive mala; adeo ut ipsa idolatria id probet; nam qui idolum fingit et illud adorat, supponit quid summe intelligens et summe potens. Tanquam fundamentum adorationis suae id vero neque lignum est, neque lapis, quod propriam substantiam suam, sed quid superadditum iis, uti in nobis intellectus respectu carnum et ossium, superadditum quid est. 32. Daalder and Hoyle, Van De Velde & Son; Packer, “Prints as Paintings.” 33. Parshall, “Imago Contrafacta”; Swan, “Ad vivum, naer het leven”; Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, 62–81. 34. Weststeijn, Visible World, 58, 161, 295–304. 35. Alpers, “Picturing Dutch Culture,” 59; see also Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 169–217; Brusati, “Natural Artifice.” 36. “Talis efformatur ab aquâ è cataracta A eructante, quae à subsequente propulsa, dum magis in

Notes to Pages 104–115  ( 183 )

motus suit continuatione impeditur ab aqua B quae ante ipsam est, quam ab illá quae est in D eo versus reflectitur, unde ex reiteratà reflexione oritur vortex BCDE.” Senguerd, Philosophia naturalis, 51. 37. Vries, Barges and Capitalism, 26–34. 38. Adams, “Competing Communities,” 52. 39. Ibid., 54. 40. Gelderblom, “Landscap En Schooenheid.” 41. Revius, Statera philosophiae cartesianae, 12–13. 42. Ibid., 65–66. 43. Ibid., 16: Princ. pag. 188. Quippe cum imaginemur omne spatium, quod jam à primo coelo occupatur fuisse olim divisum in quatuor vortices, in quorum centris erant illa sidera, quae nun conversa sunt in planetus, fingere non possumus illorum omnium siderum axes versus easdem partes fuisse conversos; hoc enim cum legibus naturae non conveniret. Sed valde credibile est materiam primi elementi, quae in terrae sidus confluebat, ex iisdem fere partibus firmamenti venisse, quas nunc adhuc ejus poli respiciunt &c., nota id quod credibile vocat, idem esse acsi id credibilius fingi dixisset, quam illud alterum. Utrumque enim versatur circa subjectum imaginiarium, ut ipse profitetur. 44. Smith, Body of the Artisan; Heuer, “Entropic Segers.” 45. Brusati, “Reforming Idols.” 46. For more on Van Hoogstraten’s “perspectyfkasten,” see Koslow, “De Wonderlijke Perspectyfkas”; Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 169–217; Weststeijn, Visible World, 304–11. 47. Brusati, Artifice and Illusion. 48. Descartes and Schuyl, De homine, 98. 49. De Raey, Clavis philosophiae naturalis, 21. 50. Senguerd, Philosophia naturalis, 126. 51. Rowen, John de Witt, 403–6. 52. Ibid., 406–8. 53. Israel, Dutch Republic, 796–806; Stern, “Poison in Print”; Grijzenhout, “Between memory and amnesia”; Warren, “Paper Warfare.” 54. Otterspeer, De Vesting van de macht, 51–61. 55. Ibid. 56. Molhuysen, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis, 3:313–15. 57. “Extract Uyt de Resolutien.” 58. Molhuysen, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis, 3:313– 15; Spaans, Graphic Satire and Religious Change, 16–19. 59. “Léonard van Russen,” 31. 60. “En sagh in al ‘t gestel, een snood en quaad humeur. / ‘t Was alles quellig zand, waer op dat hare gronden / Van menschelik vernuft, seer los gebadent stonden. / Haer waerheyt was maier schijn, de schijn een snood bedrog. / Om daer door yder menschen

( 184 )  Notes to Pages 116–129

van God te leyden. Och!” Ryssenius, Doot-​Stuypen der Cartesianen, front matter. 61. Kuyper, Den philosopherenden boer, 3–4. 62. Ibid., 10. 63. Bieleman, Boeren in Nederland. 64. “atque ita verba non significant res ut sunt, sed ut concipiuntur.” Senguerd, Annotations to Opera, fol. 22r. 65. “Atque ita ut in picturis, sic quoque in ideis nostris tres causae sunt considerandae, sc [?] subjectum in quo, quod tabula; Efficiens a qua ut est pictor, exemplar ad quod, ut est res ipsa depingenda. Sic ergo ideae in animo nostro expressa et quasi pictae sunt, ad aliarum rerum exemplum quas nobis notas faciunt, et in hoc uno consistit omnis veritas perceptiones, seu simplicis apprehensionis.” Ibid., fol. 5r. 66. Ariew and Grene, “Ideas, in and before Descartes.” 67. Tokumitsu, “Currencies of Naturalism”; Honig, “Making Sense of Things”; Hochstrasser, “Imag(in)ing Prosperity.” 68. Jan de Vries tells the story of a late seventeenth-​century Englishman who so marveled about the punctuality of the trekvaarten that he decided he could tell time by the comings and goings of the barges (Barges and Capitalism, 26–34). 69. David Billay, Vanitas Still Life with a Self-​Portrait of the Young Painter, 1651, Museum de Lakenhal Leiden. 70. Bruyn, “David Bailly”; Wurfbain, “Vanitas-​Stilleveln David Bailly.” 71. Grootenboer, Rhetoric of Perspective, 41. 72. Berger, Caterpillage, 5. A number of later Dutch still lifes also depicted rarities, many of which had been shipped to Holland from the East. As a handful of authors have emphasized, this likely intensified the vectors of artifice—their premeditated composition and their depiction of things from far-​flung parts of the globe—through which these paintings could be understood. See Loughman, “Market for Netherlandish Still Lifes,” 88. For an extensive elaboration of these themes and their relation to Dutch trade in general, see Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade. 73. Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, 33, 35–36, 274; Smith, “Science and Taste,” 457. 74. “Intellectus, rectè intelligat, et nihil pravè intelligamus. Ita si Pictor aliquid in Hollandiâ, ubi rarè Asini videntùr, Asinum depingat, et circa aures vel pedes, etc. aliquid pingat, quòd magis equò sit conveniens, illud depictum, in quò errare dicitur, inse malùm non est, sed eatenus tantum, quatenus illud ipsum,—quod debebat, non exprimit.” De Raey, Analysis sive argumenta, n.p. 75. Parshall, “Imago Contrafacta”; Swan, “Ad vivum, naer het leven.” 76. Berger, Caterpillage, 29–30.

Chapter 5 1. Brooks, “Irony as a Principle of Structure,” 762. 2. Hodgson, “Parody of Traditional Narrative Structures”; Desjardins, “De la ‘surface Trompeuse.’ ” 3. Margócsy, “Camel’s Head.” 4. Fransen and Reinhart, “Practice of Copying.” 5. Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, 63–69. 6. Loh, Titian Remade, 8. 7. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction, 229–30. 8. I borrow the term “wicked” from Matthew Hunter (Wicked Intelligence). 9. Lavers, “Fantastic Voyage,” 77–107; Solère, “Récit de philosophie-​fiction.” 10. Smith, “Gabriel Daniel.” 11. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference, 64–69. 12. Riskin, Restless Clock, 66. 13. Heyndels, Voyage du monde de Descartes; Tuzet, Le cosmos et l’imagination. 14. Sabol, “Fables of Knowledge,” 150. For more on vraisemblance, see Rapin, Réflexions, 193; Moyes, “Seventeenth-​Century Prose Narrative,” 328–30. 15. Sabol, “Fables of Knowledge,” 150. 16. Deazley, “Copyright and Parody,” 788. 17. “Peu de gens l’ont inquieté sur l’hypothese de ses Tourbillons, qui est cependant le fondement de tout ce qu’il enseigne touchant le mouvement des planetes, le flux & le reflux de la mer, la légereté, la pesanteur des corps; & de tout son systême de la lumiere, pour lequel il a eu tant de complaisance.” Daniel, Voiage du monde, [8]. 18. Daniel, Voiage du monde, 261. 19. There is so much more to say about the apparition of the Black servant than I can write here. Justin E. H. Smith notes that this figure stands as yet another of dualism’s lacunae that Daniel wishes to exploit, that it leaves little room for categorizing humans according to their skin color (Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference, 64–68). Given recent work in Atlantic Studies, this figure, perhaps as a paroxysm of French imperial anxieties or an allegory for the labor seventeenth-​century philosophizing required, merits a great deal more study. 20. Daniel, Voiage du monde, 437. 21. That is, it does not come until the sequel to Voiage: Nouvelles difficultez. 22. “Montrer donc que ce systême est plein de contradictions qu’il n’est nullement suivi, qu’une supposition en détruit une autre, ce seroit l’attaquer dans son fort, & le blesser dans l’endroit le plus sensible: on verra dans la suite de cette Historie ce qu’il en faut.” Daniel, Voiage du monde, [10]. 23. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 60.

24. The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1908), s.v. “Gabriel Daniel,” by John F. X. Murphy. 25. For a useful overview of the life of a novitiate, see Gesuiti and Ranum, Beginning to Be a Jesuit. 26. Daniel, Histoire de France, 1:xix. 27. Ibid., 1:xxix. 28. “Verum cum vanum esse demonstraverim argumentum, quo impulsus asseveravit Cartesius nihil esse posse vacuum, frivolam quoque esse consectarium est, & absonam, quam inde commentus est, rerum progenerationem.” Huet, Censura philosophiae cartesianae, 119. For more on Huet’s rejection of Descartes’s philosophy, see Shelford, Transforming the Republic of Letters. 29. Schmaltz, Radical Cartesianism, 215–60. 30. Recueil d’articles biographiques sur Religieux S. J., T. 2: C–F: 13, Archives jesuites, Paris; “Le P. Daniel, 1649–1728 (d’après le P. Oudin) (369–72),” Archives jesuites, Paris. 31. I have not been able to find a copy of the Maison professe library catalogue printed around 1690, but this is the claim of the 1763 catalogue: Catalogue des livres de la Bibliotheque de la Maison professe des . . . Jésuites. 32. Martin, Guillaume Desprez, 205; Martin and Chartier, Livre, pouvoirs et sociètè, 339–42, 382. 33. Descartes, Le monde. For more on world building in Le monde, see Ramachandran, Worldmakers, 147–81, 259–67. 34. Van Otegem, “Bibliography of the Works of Descartes,” ch. 10. 35. Descartes, Le monde, [3]. 36. Descartes, Lettres de Mr. Descartes, 2:349–51; AT 1:270–73. 37. Descartes, Le monde, 66–67; AT 11:31. 38. “Fingeremus.” PP 71; AT 8:81. 39. “Putemus.” PP 79; AT 8:89. 40. Sabol, “Fables of Knowledge,” 125. 41. Fumaroli, Poet and the King. 42. Schmaltz, Early Modern Cartesianisms, 315. 43. Lucian and d’Ablancourt, Lucien, 433–84. See also Ladborough, “Translation from the Ancients”; Bury, “Sophiste impérial.” 44. Lucian and d’Ablancourt, Lucien, 434–35: Mais je ne le trouve pas estrange à un Poëte accoustumé à dire des fables, puis-​que nous voyons tous les jours la mesme chose arriver aux Philosophes; je m’estonne seulement que les Historiens ayent pretendu par là faire accroire. Cependant il m’a pris envie, pour n’estre pas le seul au monde qui n’ait pas la liberté de mentir, de co[m]poser quelque

Notes to Pages 131–141  ( 185 )

Roman à leur exemple; mais je veux en l’avoüant me montrer plus juste qu’eux; & cet aveu me servira de justification. Je vais donc dire des choses que je n’ay jamais ni veuës ni oüies, & qui plus est, qui ne sont point, & ne peuvent estre, c’est pourquoy qu’on se garde bien les croire. 45. Cyrano de Bergerac, Comical History, 2. See Hallyn, Poetic Structure of the World, 273n39, and Campbell, Wonder and Science, 170. 46. DeJean, Libertine Strategies, 157–202; Harth, Cyrano de Bergerac. 47. Campbell, Wonder and Science, 151–80. 48. Kepler and Rosen, Kepler’s Somnium, 20, 23–24, 88, 104–7; Chen-​Morris, “Shadows of Instruction”; Moran, “Everything Must Be Understood.” 49. Fontenelle, Nouveaux dialogues des morts. 50. Daniel provides marginalia throughout Voiage, starting from p. 12 all the way up to p. 435, two pages before the end of the book. Interestingly, he does not cite a source for his reproduction of the vortices woodcut. 51. Daniel, Voiage du monde, [2–3]: Le caractere d’un Philosophe, c’est de dire toûjours ou de s’imaginer dire toujours la verité; ou du moins de vouloir toûjours sembler la dire. M’en écarter de gaïete, & affecter de paroître le faire, pour suivre l’exemple du plus grand ennemi que les Philosophes aïent jamais eu, ç’auroit été soûtenir mal une qualité, dont je me fais trés-​grand honneur. Ainsi je n’aurois eu garde de me servir jamais d’un pareil debut, & de faire entendre à mes lecteurs, comme Lucien, que tout ce que j’avois à leur dire étoit faux. Je les avertis même dés à present, que j’ai une intention toute contraire, & que je prétends donner à mon Histoire un air de verité, qui seroit capable de persuader aux plus incrédules, que tout ce que j’y raconte est asseurément vrai. 52. Gabbey, “Melon and the Dictionary.” 53. Doyle, Jansenism, 21–34. 54. Lisieux, Relation du pays de Jansenie, 104–10. 55. “Le P. Zacharie, par un petit trait de vengeance, trouva le moyen de les [ Jansenistes] en mortifier.” Rapin and Aubineau, Mémoires du P. René Rapin, 3:41. For more on Rapin, see Lecompte, Assemblée du monde. 56. For the map itself, see de Scudéry, Clélie, histoire romaine, 1:396. For commentary, see DeJean, “No Man’s Land.” 57. DeJean, “No Man’s Land,” 184; Furetière, Roman bourgeois.

( 186 )  Notes to Pages 141–152

58. Peters, Mapping Discord, 147–62. 59. Pioffet, “Voyages au royaume des lettres.” 60. “Au premier Volume qu’ils ouvrirent s’estant recontré la Physique de Monsieur desCartes, quand ils apperceurent tous les cercles par lesquels ce Philosophe a distingué le mouvement de chaque Planete, tous d’une voix heurlerent que c’estoit les cernes que je traçois pour appeller Belzebut.” Cyrano de Bergerac, Oeuvres diverses, 55. The English translation is from Cyrano de Bergerac, Comical History, 21. It is unlikely that Cyrano could have been referring to a Cartesian universe fitted to the Ptolemaic system, since that model had undergone so much transformation, as recounted earlier in this chapter. 61. PP 83; AT 8:93. 62. Remmert, Picturing the Scientific Revolution. 63. Sabol, “Fables of Knowledge,” 168–70. 64. Schmaltz, Early Modern Cartesianisms, 26. 65. “Les peintures de ses Tourbillons imaginaires, & d’autres choses semblables, peuvent estonner d’abord, & il n’y a point d’homme qui les voyant sans lire le Discours, pût jamais deviner ce que cela signifie; Neanmoins ces Figures & quantité d’autres, sont pleines de petits Corps si peu connus qui y sont representez avec autant d’asseurance que s’il les avoit veus clairement.” Sorel, Science universelle, 422. 66. The habit was reminiscent of Athanasius Kircher. See Kircher, R. P. Iter Extaticum Coeleste, plate facing p. 36. Note that Kircher did not include the Cartesian universe in his plate. 67. On the maison particulière interior, see, for instance, de Rabutin-​Chantal de Sévigné, Lettres, 68–71. 68. Harth, Cartesian Women, 123–67; Terrall, “Gendered Spaces.” 69. Bremer-​David at al., Woven Gold, x. 70. Ibid., x, 94–95, 101–4. 71. Christout, “Noces de Pélée et Thétis”; Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body. 72. Fontenelle, Entretiens, 11–12. For more on the new mechanical philosophy’s contact with theatrical productions, see Baur-​Heinhold, Baroque Theatre; Buccheri, Spectacle of Clouds. 73. If, across the decades, some of the significance of Silvestre’s iconography was lost on Fontenelle’s audiences, its full extent was known to Fontenelle himself, who had gotten his own start as a librettist for (rather unsuccessful) royal ballets. See Mamczarz, Le masque et l’âme, 173–98. What is more, Dolivar had run in the same circles as Pierre Le Pautre, Silvestre, and Silvestre’s apprentices. See Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne, etc., ed. L. G. Michaud ([Paris]: Michaud, 1814), s.v. “Dolivar ( Jean).” For more on networks of printmakers, see Grivel, Commerce de l’estampe, 82–122.

Three years after Dolivar’s work on the Conversations frontispiece, he would use similar cloudwork to depict another production of Thétis et Pélée, whose libretto was written by no less than Fontenelle himself. See Bauman and McClymonds, Opera and the Enlightenment, 107–8. Furthermore, the physicien in Conversations had advised his marquise tutee, “To see Nature as she really is, one must stand behind the Scenes at the Opera” (Fontenelle, Entretiens, 11). 74. “Je suis resolu de m’instruire à fond de la Philosophie de M. Descartes, dont je n’ai encore qu’une connoissance assez confuse, ne l’aïant jamais étudiée dans lui-​même, mais seuelement dans les Livres de ses Disciples, à mesure qu’ils paroissent, & cela sans nulle méthode.” Daniel, Voiage du monde, 19. 75. For the extensive passage from Passions, see ibid., 275–77. Paraphrasing appears throughout the book. Daniel describe celestial matter as one of the three elements in passages on pages 318, 325, and 326, and he characterizes vortical movement around a central star on pages 332 and 384. 76. Sabol interprets the Voiage “I” as a counter to the traditionally impersonal voice of philosophy (“Fables of Knowledge,” 159). 77. I have borrowed the phrase from Mariah Loh. See Loh, Titian Remade, 22. 78. PP 102; AT 8:113. 79. PP 107; AT 8:118. 80. PP 142; AT 8:153. 81. PP 154; AT 8:166. 82. PP 109–27; AT 8:119–38. 83. Delano-​Smith, “Signs on Printed Topographical Maps.” 84. Daniel, Voiage du monde, [2–3], 153. 85. At this point, the Jesuits were still largely distinguishing astronomy from the physical sciences, which meant there would be no matter in motion in their astronomical books. Van Helden, “Telescope in the Seventeenth Century”; Ashworth, “Scientist of the Day.” 86. Daniel, Voiage du monde, 155. 87. Ibid., 153. 88. Ibid., 158, 202–3. 89. Ibid., 38. 90. Gabbey, “Melon and the Dictionary.” As Descartes put it in Discours: C’est pourquoy, sitost que l’aage me permit de sortir de la sujection de mes Precepteurs, je quittay entirement l’estude des lettres. Et me resolvant de ne chercher plus d’autre science, que celle qui se pourroit trouver en moymesme, ou bien dans le grand livre du monde, j’employay le reste de ma jeunesse à voyasger, a voir des cours & des armées,

a frequenter des gens de diverses humeurs & conditions, a recueillir diverses experiences, a m’esprouver moymesme dans les renconctres que la fortune me proposoit, & partour a faire telle reflexion sur les choses qui se presentoient, que j’en pûsse tirer quelque profit. AT 6:9. See also Dunn, “ ‘Great City.’ ” 91. Daniel, Voiage du monde, 38. 92. Ibid., 265. 93. “Ne comprenant rien dans tout ce galimatias de Tourbillons de premier, de second, de troisiéme Elément.” Ibid., 328. 94. “L’oeil ne peut voir l’Etoile B.” Ibid., 394. 95. “Donc l’impression du Soleil ne peut pas arriver jusqu’à nôtre oeil.” Ibid., 402, 404. 96. Ibid., 421. 97. Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land, 62–76. 98. Chapter 15 of Le monde—called “La façon dont le Soleil & les Astres agissent contre nos yeux” in the 1664 edition—ends with a comparison of second element particles in one sphere versus another, but it remains unresolved. See Descartes, Le monde, 104–18; AT 9:104–18. 99. Daniel, Voiage du monde, 411. Even blind men, who, according to Descartes, experienced the world through the pressures all these particles of motion exerted on one another, would not be able to detect the phenomena Descartes himself had described. See ibid., 397–99. Daniel’s words dovetail nicely with Martin Jay’s thesis that Descartes was fundamentally allergic to sight and vision. See Jay, Downcast Eyes, 63–76. 100. “Il ne fait point autre chose en cela, que d’envelopper la question de nouvelles tenebres, au travers desquelles il semble vouloir se sauver.” Daniel, Voiage du monde, 402. 101. “Ce n’est pas un Monde, mais un cahos [sic]: tout y est en desorder & en confusion. On ne peut pas même s’y remuer. Il n’y a ni lumiere, ni couleurs, ni chaud, ni froid, ni secheresse, ni humidité. Les plantes, les animaux n’y vivent point. On y a non seulement droit, mais même on y a ordre de douter de tout.” Ibid., 12–13; emphasis added. 102. See, for instance, Daniel, Voyage du monde (1702), 2, 46, 383, 415, 520, 530; Daniel, Voyage du monde (1703), 2, 46, 383, 415, 520; Daniel, Voyage du monde (1739), 2, 265, 289, 360, 367. 103. For more on the reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses throughout seventeenth-​century France, see Chatelain, Ovide savant. 104. I have only come across a few scholarly discussions of early modern images having been printed upside-​down (none, so far as I know, pertain to early modern France): McKitterick, Print, Manuscript,

Notes to Pages 152–160  ( 187 )

and the Search for Order, 88; Engel, Mapping Mortality, 161; Werner, “Learning from Mistakes.” For subversive printing in early modern France, see Mellot, “Counterfeit Printing.” 105. Wittkower, Allegory, 186. 106. For widespread early modern French versions of misrule, see Davis, “Reasons of Misrule.” 107. “Mais pour moy je conclus par ce qui a esté cy-​devant dit, que la plus belle connoissance est, d’estimer les Tableaux, Desseins, & Tailles-​Douces, par la bonté qui est en eux, & non par la reputation de leur Autheur, en sçachant ou reconnoissant en gros s’ils sont bien faits par regle, ou à veue d’oeil.” Bosse, Sentimens, 67. 108. “Quand il falloit aller à Rome pour voir le Marc Aurele, rien n’estoit égal à cette fameuse figure equestre, & on ne pouvoit trop envier le bonheur de ceux qui l’avoient veuë. Aujourd’huy que nous l’avons à Paris, il n’est pas croyable combien on la neglige, quoyqu’elle soit moulée tres-​exactement, & que dans une des Cours du Palais Royal où on l’a placée elle ait la mesme beauté & la mesme grace que l’Original.” Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, 1:185–86. 109. Arnauld and Nicole, Logic, 12. 110. Brockliss, “Moment of No Return,” 264. 111. “Ce livre est ecrit d’une maniere egalement propre à instruire & à diverter. L’auteur y raconte l’occasion qui se presenta de faire ce voyage, & la maniere agreable dont il s’y prépara, & qui a toujours

quelque rapport à la doctrine de ce Philosophe, dont il fait voir le fort ou le foible, selon que les matieres qui se presentment lui en donnent l’occasion.” “Voyage du Monde,” Journal des sçavans, 19. 112. Huygens to Leibniz, 11 July 1692, in Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 10:296–304. For more details, see the preface to the French translation of Leibniz’s Animadversiones, in Leibniz, Opuscules philosophiques choisis, 6–7; Sabol, “Fables of Knowledge,” 151. 113. Daniel, Voyage du monde de Descartes: Nouvelle edition, 1702. 114. A WorldCat search yielded five copies of the Spanish translation, Viage de el mundo de Descartes, in libraries across the Spanish-​speaking world: for instance, 4/141042 at the Biblioteca Nacional de España and ENP 194 DAN v.1742 at the Biblioteca nacional de Mexico. 115. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 148. 116. Descartes, Opera philosophica. 117. Ibid., 80. I refer here to the copy of the book held at the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon (this is the copy of the book featured on Google Books: https://​bit​.ly​/3f V2gG1). By page 80, when the vortices woodcut is reproduced again, it is right-​side up and remains so throughout the rest of the book. It should also be said that a copy of the book at The Huntington Library (RB487000:0128) does not feature an upside-​down woodcut.

Epilogue 1. According to searches performed in WorldCat and Gallica on 14 February 2022. 2. Leclerc, Nouveau systême du monde, plate between pp. 2 and 3. 3. Maupertuis, Discours, frontispiece. 4. Wright, Original Theory, plate XXXI. 5. Euler, Theoria motuum planetarum et cometarum, plate facing p. 9. 6. Stafford, Artful Science; Naginski, Sculpture and Enlightenment. 7. Drucker, Graphesis. 8. Of course, there are exceptions: Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall; Huizinga, Waning of the Middle Ages. 9. Daston and Galison have, however, done much to describe the nineteenth-​century shift from “truth to nature” to “objectivity” (Objectivity). 10. According to the Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogue, the last Opera was published in 1695: René Descartes, Opera philosophica omnia, ed. Rasmus Bartholin (Frankfurt, 1695). Search performed 19 April 2018.

( 188 )  Notes to Pages 160–170

11. For more on Cousin, see Goldstein, Post-​Revolutionary Self; Simon and Nadar, Victor Cousin. 12. Marrast, Examen critique, 7. 13. Goldstein, Post-​Revolutionary Self, 139–81. 14. Descartes and Cousin, Œuvres de Descartes, 3:192–93, table II, fig. 1. Note that Descartes himself did use fold-​outs for his first French edition of Principes. 15. I have been referring to the copy of Cousin’s Oeuvres de Descartes that is now held at The Huntington Library, call no. B1833 1824. 16. Ibid., vol. 1, frontmatter. 17. Goldstein, Post-​Revolutionary Self, 132. 18. Royer-​Collard, Fragments philosophiques, 32. 19. “Les signes, la parole, ne sont rien en eux-​mêmes; ils ne sont que ce que la volonté les fait être; et en ceci, comme en beaucoup d’autres choses, il est dur d’entendre partout célébrer les effets, quand la cause est ou négligée, ou méconnue, ou repoussé.” Cousin, Premiers essais, 217. See also Formigari, Signs, Science, and Politics, 154.

20. Antoine-​Léonard Thomas, “Éloge de René Descartes,” in Descartes and Cousin, Œuvres De Descartes, 1:1–2: Je viens, après cent ans, prononcer cet éloge. Puisse-​t-​il être digne et de celui à qui il est offert, et des sages qui cont l’entendre! Peut-​être au siècle de Descartes on étoit encore trop près de lui pour le bien louer. Le temps seul juge les philosophes comme les rois, et les met à leur place. Le temps a détruit les opinions de Descartes, mais sa gloire subsiste. Il est semblable à ces rois détrônés, qui, sur les ruines même de leur empire, paroissent nés pour commander aux hommes. Tant que la philosophie et la vérité seront quelque chose sur la terre, on honorera celui qui a jeté les fondements de nos connoissances, et recrée, pour ainsi dire, l’entendement humain. On louera Descartes par admiration, par reconnoissance, par intérêt même; car si la vérité est un bien, il faut encourager ceux qui la cherchent. 21. Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 1:150. 22. Littré, quoted in Simon, “ ‘ Two Cultures,’ ” 52. 23. Biot, Traité de physique expérimentale, 2: plate IV. 24. Bann, Paul Delaroche. 25. Ibid.; Deshayes, Paul Delaroche. 26. The one exception I have found comes from an exceptional text, all the way on the other side of the

Atlantic. In chapter 35, “Masthead,” of Moby Dick, Melville makes a passing reference to the vortices: “Over Descartian vortices you hover” (Moby-​Dick, 136). 27. Descartes, Principes de la philosophie (1886). 28. Scott, “Against Eclecticism,” 117–21. 29. Christia Mercer, “Descartes Is Not Our Father,” New York Times, 25 September 2017. 30. Lizzy Davies, “Outrage at Move to Send Descartes’s Skull Back to School,” Guardian, 1 January 2009; Janet Maslin, “Alas, Poor Descartes: Meditations on a Well-​Traveled Skull,” New York Times, 8 October 2008. 31. Kalle Oskari Mattila, “Selling Queerness: The Curious Case of Fun Home,” Atlantic, 25 April 2016. 32. Tim Wallace, Karen Yourish, and Troy Griggs, “Trump’s Inauguration vs. Obama’s: Comparing the Crowds,” New York Times, 20 January 2017; Sarah Frostenson, “New National Park Service Photos Prove Obama’s Inauguration Crowd Was Bigger Than Trump’s,” Vox, 7 March 2017, https://​www​ .vox​.com​/policy​-and​-politics​/2017​/3​/7​/14843204​ /new​-photos​-park​-service​-obama​-inauguration​ -bigger​-trump. 33. Olivia Solon, “Future of Fake News: Don’t Believe Everything You Read, See or Hear,” Guardian, 26 July 2017. 34. Scott, “Against Eclecticism,” 132.

Notes to Pages 170–174  ( 189 )

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Index Italicized page references indicate illustrations. Endnotes are referenced with “n” followed by the endnote number. académies and salons, French, 81–82 accidents, role in knowledge. See serendipity in the archives Adam, Jean, 80 Aiton, E. J., 177n7 Alpers, Svetlana Art of Describing, 7, 104 Dutch realism as “perceptual model,” 115 Amyot, Jacques, 76, 179n11 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 77, 79 anamorphosis. See perspective ancients, reinterpretations of, 24, 40, 101 Aristotelianism concept of form in, 109 figures in, 95–96 in education, 98 and the Eucharist, 77–79, 95–96 Arminianism. See Calvinism Arnauld, Antoine Fourth Objections, 78 La logique de Port–Royal, 162 ars and techne, 17 astronomy, visual languages of, 56, 57, 60–61, 61, 62, 153–59, 154, 156, 159 atomism, 59 Audran, Claude, portrait of Galileo in Systema Cosmicum, 64–65, 65 autopsia. See observation Baigrie, Brian, 15, 45 Bailly, David, Vanitas Still Life, 127 Barthes, Roland, 71, 164 Basson, Sébastien, Philosophiae naturalis adversus Aristotelem libri XII, 59, 59 Baxandall, Michael “intentional visual interest,” 75 Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, 4 “pictorial events,” 47 Bayer, Johannes, Uranometria, 60, 62 Beeckman, Isaac, 17 Bellarmine, Robert, liquid heavens, 60 Benjamin, Walter, 134 Berger, Susanna, 4, 7

Berger Jr., Harry, 127, 129 Biot, Jean–Baptiste, 171 blindness as analogous to sight, 22–24, 24 of the ancients, 40 Bontekoe, Cornelis, 124 book history, 5, 139–40, 155–56, 164 Bosch, Hieronymus, 46, 106–7 Bosse, Abraham, 91, 93, 160–62 Bourdin, Pièrre, Le Cours de mathématique, 52, 53, 60, 61 Boyle, Robert, 3 broadsheets natural philosophical, 4, 7, 97–98 political, 97–98, 97, 123–24, 123 provisional blanks in, 98 Brahe, Tycho Astronomiae progymnasta, 56 liquid skies, 60–61, 61 Bredekamp, Horst, 4 Brooks, Cleanth, 131 Brusati, Celeste, 117–18 Burke, Peter, 6–7 Burtt, E. A., 45 Buytewech, Willem, Verscheyden Landschapjes, 65–66, 66 Calvin, John, Institutio christinae religionis, 111 Calvinism and images, 111 Orthodox/Gomarist, 110–11 See also Eucharist: Calvinist rejection of camera obscura, 14–15, 15, 38 cartography imagined, 142–46, 144, 145 visual language in, 57–58, 58, 61–62, 63, 68–69, 69 cause, 15, 22, 31–33, 126 Chan, Eleanor, 5 chaos, 59, 159–60, 161 Christian cross, 90–93, 91–93 Christogram, 91, 92 Clarke, Samuel, 100 Clavius, Christopher, Opera mathematica, 48–49, 48 Clerselier, Claude as Descartes’s executor, 85, 175n36, 180n53, 181n54 as Rohault’s father–in–law, 89 See also L’Homme

Cocceius, Johannes, 124 cogito, 2, 36–37, 108–9, 124, 139, 141, 172–73 Colbert de Seignelay, Jean–Baptiste, 97–98 colonization (Dutch), 126, 184n72 Comenius, Johan, 178n26 comets, visualizations of, 44, 58–59 Comte, Auguste, 171 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 169–70 Cook, Harold, 37, 71 copies and aura, 134 and printers’ mistakes, 164 theories of, 160–62 See also mimesis Cousin, Victor, Oeuvres de Descartes, 168–73 crisis of representation, 6–7 cultural histories of natural philosophy, 5 Cyrano de Bergerac, L’autre monde, 141, 146–47 Daniel, Gabriel as bibliothècaire, 139–40 Voiage du monde de Descartes, 131–64, 132, 156, 157, 158 youth and education, 139 Daston, Lorraine, 109 Dear, Peter, 81 Deazley, Ronan, 135 Delaroche, Paul, 172 Descartes, René education at La Fleche, 17–18, 48, 52 and the Index Librorum Publicatorum, 90, 147 lack of discourse around his woodcuts, 16–17, 73 as mind without history, 173 as peripatetic and social, 36–37, 71 posthumous publications of, 85, 140 regret over his protégé Regius, 83–84, 180n44 rejection of the schools, 18 his visualizations of particulate matter, 27, 32–33, 44, 59–62, 105, 120, 120, 121 on wisdom and knowledge, 71–72 youth, 18 See also Discours de la méthode; Essais; Eucharist; L’Homme; Meditationes; Principia philosophiae; Regulae ad directionem ingenii; Tractatus de homine Desgabets, Robert, 99 Discours de la méthode as biographical source, 36, 71 “clear and distinct ideas” in, 36 dreams in, 36, 71, 142 ironic rejection of books in, 37 nineteenth–century publication of, 168–69, 173 perception and visualization in, 26 divisibility and indivisibility, 93–98, 101 Dolivar, Jean, 148–52, 150 dotted line, 51–59

( 208 )  Index

doubt, 2, 16, 159–60 Dutch realism. See naturalism/realism Duytsche Mathématicque, 18–20 epistemic pictures, 1–2 Essais Dioptrique: discussion of engravings, 41; perception and visualization, 22–26; refraction and reflection, 14, 14, 38–40 Météores: rainbows, 26–36; nineteenth–century publication of, 168–9 essence in Descartes’s philosophy, 14–15, 77 in scholastic philosophy, 109–11 Eucharist Catholic descriptions of the Calvinist rejection of, 77–80 French Catholic fears over Descartes’s interpretation of, 78, 90, 100 and God’s omnipotence, 96 substantial presence of Christ in, 79, 90, 96 Thomas Aquinas on, 77 as visual conundrum, 76–80 Euler, Leonard, 166, 167 experience/experiments, 81, 89, 108, 119 See also perspective: experiments with single– point perspective; pictures: as experiments extension, 14–15, 78–79, 128 Ferrier, Jean, 17 figure, definition of, 9 Fludd, Robert, 60 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, 148–52, 150 La description de l’empire de la poésie, 144–46, 145 Dialogues avec les morts, 142 Les noces de Pelée et de Thétis, 151–52, 186–87n73 Forge, Louis de la, 180–81n53 Foucault, Michel, 5–6 frame, 67–70 free will, 18, 106 123–24 Fromondus, Libertus, Labyrinthus sive de compositione continui, 59 Furetière, Antoine, 145 Gaesbeeck, Daniel, 182n2 Galilei, Galileo effect of his condemnation, 13 memorialized, 155 Sidereus nuncius, 153 Systema cosmicum, 64–65, 65, 140 Galison, Peter, 16 Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France), 7 Luigi Galvani, 171–72 Garber, Daniel, 175n3

Gautruche, Pierre, Philosophiae ac mathematicae totius . . . institutio, 93–96, 95 genre historique, 172 Ghebellinus, Stephanus, 68–69, 69 Giambattista della Porta, 28–29, 30 glass tear/Prince Rupert’s Drops, 74–75, 74, 82 Gombrich, Ernst, “the beholder’s share,” 71 Grant, Edward, 100–101 Grimaldi, Francesco Maria, Almagestum novum, 153–55, 154, 156 Grootenboer, Hanneke, 127 Gutschoven, Gérard van, 180–81n53 Harlay, François de, 100 Heda, Willem Claesz, 127 Heidanus, Abraham, 124 Hevelius, Uranographia, 60–61, 62, 153, 155 Heyndels, Ralph, 135 historicity, 1–7, 173–74 Hobbes, Thomas, 101 Hochstrasser, Julie Berger, 126 L’Homme figures in, 85–88, 86, 88 Descartes’s pictures distinct from those in, 88–89 theorization of figures in, 85 historical epistemology, 8 Honig, Elizabeth, 126 Hooghe, Romeyn de, 104, 123–4, 123 Hoogstraten, Samuel van perspective boxes, 118 prescription for God–fearing images, 112–13 juxtaposing scholastic philosophy with the new physics, 128 on pictures as mirrors, 115 hubris, 110, 113, 124, 137, 142 Huet, Pierre–Daniel, 139 Hulsius, Anthonie, 124 Hunter, Matthew, 4 Huygens, Constantijn, 16, 20, 68 iconoclasm (Beeldenstorm), 111–13, 118, 183n28 idolatry, 111, 113–14 image–saturated culture, 174 Index Librorum Publicatorum, 90, 147 individuation of bodies. See divisibility and indivisibility irony, 131–35, 132, 152–53, 162–64, 163 See also Discours: ironic rejection of books in; Principia philosophiae: irony of “visible world” Jay, Martin, 2, 187n99 Jesuits, 51, 90, 139–40, 187n85 juste milieu, 172–73 Kepler, Johannes Harmonices mundi, 54, 55

Mysterium cosmographicum, 56, 57 Somnium, 141–42 Ad vitellionem paralipomena, 22, 38 Kick, Simon, Company of Soldiers in a Guardroom, 38, 39 Koerner, Joseph Leo, 46, 106–7 Kusukawa, Sachiko, 114 La Bretonnière, Antoine de, 98 La Ville, Louis, 139 Le Brun, Charles, Conclusiones ex universa philosophia . . . 97–98, 97 LeClerc, Sébastien, 165 Le Rées, François, Cursus philosophicus, 79 Lereuchon, Jean, 29 light. See refraction and reflection Lisieux, Zacharie de, Relation du pays de Jansénie, 143–44, 144 Littré, Emil, 171 Loh, Maria, 134 Louis XIV, representation of, 97–98, 149–52 Lucian, True Story, 134, 141–42 See also irony Lüthy, Christoph, 45–46, 60 magnetism, 82, 121 Mair, Alexander, printmaker for Uranometria, 60, 62 Malebranche, Nicholas, 139 “man of good sense,” 37–38 Mander, Karel van, on naer het leven, 70 Mardele, P. Le, translation of Euclid’s Elements, 52, 53 Marin, Louis, 70 Marolois, Samuel, Opera mathematica, 49, 49, 50, 52–54, 55 Marrast, Armand, 168 mathematics. See practical mathematics Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de, 165–66 Maurice, Prince of Orange, 17, 18, 49 Maurolycus, Francesco, 36 Meditationes discussion of Eucharist, 78–79 discussion of pictorial illusion, 72 God described, 51 nineteenth–century publication of, 169, 173 Meijer, Lodewijk, 124 mercantile capitalism, 126 Mersenne, Marin as correspondent to Descartes, 17 memorialized, 155 parodied, 136–37 method. See Essais: Météores: rainbows Metius, Adriaan, Arithmeticae libri duo, 54, 56 Meyer, Véronique, 4 Milky Way, 60–61, 62 mimesis and illusion, 51, 65, 67

Index  ( 209 )

mimesis (continued) and semiosis, 40–41, 67 See also copies; naturalism/realism mind–body problem, 136, 185n19 miracles, 81 Le Monde, 140–41, 147–48, 148, 158 Monte, Guidobaldo dal, 87 Moore, Henry, 43 motion circular, 107–8 depiction of, 44, 57–59, 57, 58, 66, 104, 107–8 scholastic conception, 109 musical notation, 58–59 Naginski, Erika, 8 naturalism/realism after iconoclasm, 112–13 naer het leven, uit den gheest, and imago contrafacta, 70, 107, 114–15, 126–30 See also Bosch, Hieronymous Newton, Sir Isaac, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, 141, 165 Nicole, Pierre, La logique de Port–Royal, 162 Nikulin, Dmitri, 45 note–taking, 113–14, 128–29, 147–48, 149 observation, 108–9, 157–59 obsolescence, 165–74 Orangists, 121–24, 123 Ortelius, Abraham, 61–62, 63, 68–69, 69 Panofsky, Erwin, 134 paradox, 43, 101, 130 Parshall, Peter, 114 Pascal, Blaise, on representation, 90 See also Puy–de–dôme experiment Perrault, Charles, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, 162 Perrot d’Albancourt, Nicolas, 141 perspective bird’s–eye view, 68–69, 69 experiments with single–point, 50–51, 50, 117–18 historiography of, 4 physics and pictures, 2 pictures as arguments, 3 as experiments, 4–5, 108, 114–20 definition of, 8–9 Plutarch, as translated by Jacques Amyot, 76, 179n11 point, depictions of, 47–51 Podro, Michael, 8 Port–Royal, aesthetics of, 91, 92 Powell, Amy, 183n30 practical mathematics. See Duytsche Mathématicque; Marolois, Samuel, Opera mathematica; Metius, Adriaan, Arithmeticae libri duo

( 210 )  Index

Principia philosophiae 1648 French translation, 71–72, 84 1692 Blaeu edition, 163, 164 illusionism, 63, 65, 67 irony of “visible world,” 43 “liquid Skies” and their depiction, 44, 58, 60, 62, 65 motion, 75, 108 nineteenth–century publication, 169, 173 particulate matter, 120, 120, 121 plenum and anti–atomism in, 59–60 visual hypothesis, 43, 44, 52, 54, 66–67, 70 vortex theory, 43–47, 44, 48, 51, 52, 54, 58, 59–60, 62, 65, 66, 67–68, 69–70, 133, 152–53 Prisenvlag, 107 Ptolemy, Geographia, 61 Puy–de–Dôme experiment, reception of, 81 Raey, Joannes de notebook kept by his student, 128–29 Clavis philosophiae naturalis, 119 Rapin, René, 143 realism. See illusionism; naturalism/realism refraction and reflection in Rohault’s practice, 91–94, 91, 94 See also Essais: Dioptrique: refraction and reflection Régis, Pierre–Sylvain, 139 Regius, Henricus Descartes’s regret over, 83–84 Fundamenta physices, 83, 83 parodied, 136 See also Utrecht affair Regualae ad directionem ingenii, discourse on perception and visualization, 21–25 Reisner, Friedrich, 38 Remonstrants. See Calvinism Revius, Jacob, Statera philosophiae cartesianae, 116–17, 122 Riccioli, Giovanni Battista, Almagestum novum, 153–55, 154, 156 Roberval, Gilles Personne de, 81 Rohault, Jacques attempts to reconcile Cartesianism with Aristotelianism, 90–98 avoidance of controversy through pictures, 93–96 as Clerselier’s son–in–law, 89 education and youth, 80–81 dependence on Descartes’s pictures, 83 Entretiens sur la philosophie, 75 explanations of particulate matter, 82 figure–making practice, 82, 89–98 Physique de Rohault, 74, 90–91, 91 Traité de physique, 75, 89–100, 165 theorization of figures, 99 Wednesday conférénces, 74–75, 81–82

Roux, Sophie, 74–75 Royer–Collard, Pierre Paul, 169 Ryssenius, Leonard, 124–25 Sabol, Jeremy, 135, 146–47 Saenredam, Pieter, 118 Interior of the Church of St. Bavo, 50 Schapiro, Meyer, 69 Scheiner, Christoph, Rosa ursina, 38 Schellinks, Willem, 68 scholastic philosophy. See Aristotelianism; textbooks, natural philosophical Schoonebeek, Adriaen, 104, 182n2 Schooten Jr., Frans van (Frans van Schooten [I]), 5, 6, 14, 15, 16, 20, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29 Schooten Sr., Frans van, 19–20 Scudéry, Madame de, Clélie, 144–45 Schuyl, Florent, 119 Tractatus de homine, 85–87, 87, 118–19 scientia, 17 Scott, Joan Wallach, 174 Senguerd, Arnold, 108–9 Senguerd, Wolferd his annotations to Principia philosophiae, 113–14, 126 education, 126 Philosophia naturalis, 102–30; circular motion in, 104, 107–8; vortex theory in, 104, 115 youth, 108 Sepper, Daniel, 16 serendipity in the archives, 7, 163, 164 Ship of Theseus, 76, 101 side–eye, 5–6, 6 side–sword, 28, 29, 30, 37, 39, 115 Silvestre, Israel, Design for a theater set created by Giacomo Torelli da Fano for the ballet “Les nosces de Thétis,” 151–52, 151 skepticism. See doubt sluices, 104, 115–16 Smith, Justin E. H., 134, 185n19 Smith, Pamela, 119 Sorbière, Samuel, 101 Sorel, Charles Le berger extravagant, 133 on Descartes’s pictures, 147 Relation veritable de ce qui s’est passé au royaume de Sophie, 145 soul as a dot, 51 parodied, 136–38, 156 as separate from body, 110, 180n44 Spanheim, Friedrich, 124 States Party, 121–24, 123 Stevin, Simon, 18–19 still life, 120–30 stippling, 64–66

Stronks, Els, 111 style, 4 substance. See divisibility and indivisibility Sucquet, Antonius, 51 Swan, Claudia, 114 Sylvius, Franciscus (Franz de la Boë), 119 symbolism. See Christian cross; Eucharist: Calvinist rejection of; mimesis: and semiosis Sype, Nicola van, Experditio Francisci Draki, 57–58, 58 Tachard, Guy, Voiage du Siam, 158–59, 159 Das Technische Bild, 8–9 tennis, 38–40 textbooks, natural philosophical, 4, 13, 93–96, 104–30 Thomas, Antoine–Léonard, éloge to Descartes, 170 Toletus, Franciscus, 17 Tractatus de homine. See Schuyl, Florent: Tractatus de homine transubstantiation. See Eucharist trekvaarten (towing canals), 115–16, 126 triangles, 19, 72 trigonometry visual language, 21, 23, 23, 34 See also Duytsche Mathématique upside–downism, 132, 160, 163, 164, 187–88n104 Utrecht affair, 109–13, 180n44 van de Velde, Esaias, 64, 64 van de Velde the Elder, Willem, 112, 114 van de Velde the Younger, Willem, 112, 114 Vanhaelen, Angela, 183n27 Vermeer, Johannes, 117–18 visual conventions, 4, 47, 67, 71–72, 130, 160 visual paradox, 8 visual reception, 3, 73–74, 134 Vlieger, Simon de, 114 Voetius, Gijsbert, 110, 124 De idolatria indirecta et participata, 111 parodied, 137 See also Utrecht affair de Vries, Gerard, 124 Vredeman de Vries, Hans, Opera mathematica, 49, 49, 50 water, depiction of, 61–62, 63, 104 Werner, Gabriele, 4 Wilhelmius, Wilhelm, 124 Wilkin, Rebecca, 5, 85 wine, 40 Witt, Johann de, 121–23 Wittkower, Rudolph, 160 woodcutting as laborious, 46 Wright, Thomas, 166 Zittel, Claus, 5, 15–16, 46, 85, 181n56

Index  ( 211 )