HANS HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER, JAN WANDELAAR AND THE EMPIRE OF OBSERVATION
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2018-4-84-102
This paper deals with an interpretative experiment, in which two images compare with an idea formulated by American historian of science Lorraine Daston. According to Daston, in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scientific observation was theorized and its wide dissemination led to the formation of a veritable empire of observation. Two images in question are The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger (1533) and the frontispiece to Carolus Linnaeus’s Hortus Cliffortianus (1748), designed and executed by Jan Wandelaar. The main issue is what these can tell us about the empire of observation as a politico-epistemological assemblage (practices, procedures, techniques of representation, modes of description, institutions, selves and styles of life), assuming that such an assemblage represented and legitimated itself not only by various types of discourse, but through visual representations. The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein through its visual order documented (beyond their numerous enigmas) the moment in history of Europe when the political apparatus began to constitute itself as an apparatus of observation. In this context, the ambassador (as a sovereign’s representative) is first of all an observer. Particular attention is paid to the terrestrial globe, depicted on Holbein’s picture, as a mechanism of synoptic vision and totalizing representation, serving concurrently as an epistemological instrument and as an instrument of political domination. In contrast to the seemingly realistic manner of Holbein’s The Ambassadors, Wandelaar’s frontispiece exploits mythological motifs and plots, which however refer to real aspects of the empire of observation: to Europe as a geographical zone of appropriation and consumption, organized by nonequivalent exchanges, but also as a privileged territory of epistemological accumulation, and to the space of observation as an ordered space. In conclusion it is stated that these two images, despite their complex symbolic and allegorical structure, reflect the factual modes of knowledge and epistemological regimes whose formation and consolidation they supported.
Keywords: botanic garden, empire of observation, globe, Hans Holbein the Younger, Jan Wandelaar, map, observation, politico-epistemological regime, space of observation, visual representation
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Issue: 4, 2018
Series of issue: Issue 4
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 84 — 102
Downloads: 1852