A welcome development in the history of science in recent decades has been an increased focus on the interactions between the sciences and the visual arts. Nancy Rose Marshall seeks to build on and extend this work with her recent edited volume on Victorian art and science. She begins with a salutary observation: in Victorian culture, the arts and the sciences were not separate and distinct spheres, but rather interpenetrated. If artists and scientists were often investigating the same phenomena and asking the same kinds of questions about them, she suggests, then a comparative study can illuminate the shared epistemological goals and standards that characterized the broader culture.
Two principal themes run through the essays. The first is methodological. Most studies of the interactions between Victorian science and the broader culture have been written by historians of science or literary critics. Marshall seeks to foreground instead the methods of art history. This entails in the first instance a particular attention to the medium and the formal elements of the images under consideration. Marshall also decries what she sees as the tendency of much scholarship to search exactingly for documentation of influence – to seek to uncover, for example, ‘precise proof’ of the effect of a scientific theory on later artistic expressions. In Marshall's view, the demand for proof is stifling; she prefers interrogations of ‘intersection[s]’ and shared ‘associations’ to unidirectional tracings of influence (p. 20). In the end, she concludes that the techniques and tools of art history can be ‘uniquely generative in revealing resonances’ between the visual arts and systems of thought (p. 112).
Marshall's second theme is substantive and relates to the shared interest in, and anxieties about, vision that run through much Victorian art and science. Many of the phenomena that captured the attention of scientists during this period were not visible by the human eye. Moreover, the fixed-point perspective pioneered by Filippo Brunelleschi in Renaissance Florence that had come to dominate painting implies the existence of an objective – even a ‘God's-eye’ – view of those phenomena that can be seen. By the nineteenth century, however, it was becoming increasingly clear that vision is always and necessarily embodied, implying the inherent subjectivity, even the imperfection, of human visual experience. These anxieties were explored as much by visual artists as they were by scientists who dissected eyes in order to reconstruct their mechanisms of operation, making these anxieties especially apt for an exploration of the common epistemological grounding of artistic and scientific modes of investigation.
Each of the various essays that comprise the book touches more or less directly on Marshall's various themes. Rachael Z. DeLue's chapter on a moving panorama of the Mississippi valley examines the challenges and opportunities not only of representing what lies invisible below the earth's surface, but also of representing time itself. Alison Syme offers a close reading of a single illustration by Edward Burne-Jones for the Kelmscott Chaucer in the context of contemporary images of glaciation to interrogate the connections between the geological and the human. Carey Gibbons reads the illustrations for a children's story personifying the North Wind against emerging techniques for visualizing meteorological phenomena. Marshall herself looks at a John Everett Millais painting of a man visited in his bed by a woman (or a hallucination, or a ghost) and asks how it resonates with scientific inquiries into vision and the unconscious mind. Naomi Slipp examines the use of daguerreotypes to document an invisibility – the way that ether can seemingly dissolve physical pain – and interrogates the role of such visual artefacts in the emerging professionalization of medicine. Keren Rosa Hammerschlag examines an idealized image of the internal anatomy of a human torso in a surgical atlas; in the original English edition, the man was black, but he was rendered as a white man in the American edition of the same atlas. She asks what this episode of ‘whitewashing’ can tell us about contemporary attitudes about race. Barbara Larson examines the late nineteenth-century emergence of aestheticism – in which ‘art for art's sake’ was esteemed over ‘realistic’ representation – in the context of post-Darwinian physiological psychology, with its focus on the corporeal and affective aspects of mind. And Caitlin Silberman invites us into James McNeill Whistler's Peacock Room. She sees it as a paean to the unique creative power of the artist, opposed equally to John Ruskin's view of beauty as a gift from God and to Charles Darwin's grounding of beauty in animals’ reproductive choices.
Victorian Science and Imagery is a first-rate piece of work. It offers fresh perspectives on the ideas and anxieties that reverberated through Victorian culture. It will also be of more general interest to students of the relations between the sciences and the visual arts, as the book more than lives up to its promise to show how the tools and practices of art history can open up new perspectives on those relations.
