Natural knowledge in the 1660s: probing an iconic image

Abstract

Michael Hunter, The image of Restoration science: the frontispiece to Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667). With a chapter on the instruments by Jim Bennett . Routledge, London and New York, 2017. Pp. xvi+150. £115 (hardback). ISBN 978-1-4724-7872-6. Take one iconic image, add two distinguished historians and a huge amount of painstaking research and what results is a fascinating, interdisciplinary account of a single printed frontispiece, its origins and afterlife that is of the widest possible interest. Read this as a detective story for anyone intrigued by the second half of the seventeenth century, the friendships, collaborations, cultural buzz and intellectual quests that characterized it. Hunter and Bennett deserve the heartfelt appreciation not just of historians of science, but of anyone who researches the history of collecting and connoisseurship, print makers and their techniques, seventeenth-century culture, intellectual networks and visual culture. The book's full title provides a neat summary. The print that shows a bust of Charles II being crowned by fame, and flanked by Francis Bacon on one side and the first President of the Royal Society on the other, is well known (figure 1). There is a lot going on here, visually speaking, and the authors explicate all aspects of the figures, their setting and the many accoutrements in so far as this is possible. Figure 1. Frontispiece to The history of the Royal Society of London, for the improving of Natural Knowledge, by Thomas Sprat (printed by T. R. for J. Martyn, London, 1667). Presentation copy, The Royal Society of London. …