After Prometheus: Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe

The writing of art’s histories rests substantially, if for the most part tacitly, on an underlying account of technological change and development. This volume embarks on a history of that technological substrate as it pertains to the making and viewing of art in early modern Europe, c. 1420–1820. It examines artists’ instruments, tools, devices, machines, technologies, crafts, materials, skills, and techniques in their historic applications, to consider how they shaped the course of early modern art. Probing both the category of technology and the broader implications of technological shifts on the history of visual cultures, the volume maps the multiple histories of visual instrumentation devised for the making and viewing of art, to consider early modern technology’s relationship with a theoretical conceptualization of ‘art’ in the wider visual field.