Nuncius

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The early astrophysicist Norman Lockyer was both editor of the journal Nature from its creation in 1869 and for the following five decades, and an early practioner of the new astronomy. He frequently used the journal to expound his scientific theories, report on his work and send news home while on expeditions. I look into the particular visual culture of astrophysics developed by Lockyer in Nature, its evolution at a time of rapid development both of the techniques of astrophysical observation and visualization and of the techniques of image reproduction in print...

The first exemplar of a kiwi, the wingless bird of New Zealand, arrived in the form of a lifeless specimen in Europe in 1812. A debate was sparked over the appearance and nature of this strange creature and indeed whether it actually existed. In 1833 the Transactions of the Zoological Society of London entered the debate and the illustrations published in this journal contributed greatly to the acceptance and further study of the kiwi. Some of the most eminent British zoologists and anatomists of the time were involved, from William Yarrell to Richard Owen, and from John Gould to Abraham Dee Bartlett...

The Miscellanea Curiosa, sive Ephemeridum Medico-Physicarum Germanicarum, the learned periodical published in different German cities under the aegis of the Academia Leopoldina Naturae Curiosorum, contained many cases of an anatomical nature. The Miscellanea Curiosa in its first years actively participated in the development of anatomia practica, the anatomical practice of observing the signs of diseases in cadavers and connecting them to what had been observed at the bedside. The illustrations that accompanied the post-mortem reports published in the Miscellanea Curiosa allow one to assess the evolution of the pathological illustration itself...

This paper examines the visual and verbal cross-pollination between the Philosophical Transactions and the Journal des Sçavans with a specific focus on the role of the visual as an open form of communication, which overcame the linguistic barriers implied by journals published in vernacular languages, rather than Latin. Studying the illustrated articles published in the two journals in 1666 highlights the ways in which the authors viewed the images as providing clarity to their prose and how the images provided access to useful information that was otherwise invisible...

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A manuscript by Georg and Sigmund Merz dated 1862 and containing instructions for assembling the equatorial telescope acquired by the Palermo Observatory is conserved in the archives of the Museo Astronomico e Copernicano in Rome. It is a rare document that reveals "tricks of the trade" and technical knowledge not usually included in textbooks or treatises. It was sent to the Palermo Observatory as an aid to the installation of the telescope, which made a signal contribution to the development of solar physics in Italy in the 19th century...

In the autumn of 1863 Otto Wilhelm Struve, director of the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, visited most of the observatories in Italy. The report that he wrote on this occasion provides an overview on the conditions of astronomical research in Italyjust after the unification of the country. Later Struve sent a French translation of his report to the Italian astronomer Giovan Battista Donati, who used it to promote the construction of the Arcetri Observatory in Florence, which was inaugurated in 1872...

This paper examines a polyhedral dial from the British Museum made by the instrument maker Ulrich Schniep, and discusses the status of multifunctional scientific instruments. It discerns a multifaceted iconic meaning considering different dimensions such as scientific functionality (astronomy), the complex allegorical figure of Justice (iconography), and the representation of the sovereign (politics), the court and the Kunstkammer of Albrecht v of Bavaria. As a numen mixtum the figure of "Justicia" touches different fields that go far beyond pure astronomical measurement and represents the power of the ruler as well as the rules of economic justice...

Irrespective of geo- or heliocentric presuppositions, the functioning of sundials is based on the observation of moving shadows or light spots. Even though the cast shadow was often simply used to indicate the time, it could also remind the users of the ephemerality of earthly things or function as an index of planetary movements. This article examines the various ways in which early modem sundials visually interpret the moving shadow or light spot. The instruments address the shadow in inscriptions, integrate it into their design (e...

The aim of this paper is to examine the iconography on a set of star charts by Albrecht Dürer (1515), and celestial globes by Caspar Vopel (1536) and Christoph Schissler (1575). The iconography on these instruments is conditioned by strong traditions which include not only the imagery on globes and planispheres (star charts), but also ancient literature about the constellations. Where this iconography departs from those traditions, the change had to do with humanism in the sixteenth century. This "humanistic" dimension is interwoven with other concerns that involve both "social" and "technical" motivations...

At the center of this article is an iconographic analysis of the eight silver reliefs on the sides of a table clock made in 1591 by Jost Burgi, the court clockmaker of Landgrave Wilhelm iv of Hessen-Kassel. The reliefs present an astronomical ancestral picture gallery, running from the Patriarchs of the Old Testament to Copernicus. The author argues that the "storyboard" for this sequence of images must have been conceived down to its smallest details by the Kassel court astronomer Christoph Rothmann; indeed, many of the scenes shown, along with many particular details depicted within them, are literally described in Rothmann's never-published manuscript Observationes stellarum fixarum of 1589...

When Tycho Brahe published a description of his astronomical instruments in 1598 as part of a strategy to procure royal patronage, it was not with one of his grander, precision measurement tools that he opened his account, but rather a small brass quadrant with limited observational utility. The defining feature of this instrument was seemingly a small emblematic image inscribed within the arc of the quadrant. Through this symbolic motif Tycho conveyed a moralising message about the relative worth of astronomy...

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Alchemy in Cambridge captures the alchemical content of 56 manuscripts in Cambridge, in particular the libraries of Trinity College, Corpus Christi College and St John's College, the University Library and the Fitzwilliam Museum. As such, this catalogue makes visible a large number of previously unknown or obscured alchemica. While extant bibliographies, including those by M.R. James a century ago, were compiled by polymathic bibliographers for a wide audience of researchers, Alchemy in Cambridge benefits from the substantial developments in the history of alchemy, bibliography, and related scholarship in recent decades...

At the beginning of the 20th century the collective imagination was fascinated and terrified by the discovery of radium. A scientific imagery sprang up around radioactivity and was disseminated by public lectures and newspaper articles discussing the ambiguous power of this strange substance. It was claimed that radium could be used to treat cholera, typhus and tuberculosis, but at the same time there were warnings that it could be used for military purposes. The media and the scientists themselves employed a rich vocabulary influenced by religion, alchemy and magic...

The aim of this essay is to show the existence of a substantial discontinuity between the Kunst- und Wunderkammern phenomenon and the practice of both eclectic and specialised collecting in the 18th century. A more detailed examination of the cases of fossils and corals, particularly the way they wove in and out of the differing rationales of collecting in the 17th and 18th centuries, brings to light how elusive their relationship was with the history of the notion of temporality. Subsequently, Lamarck and Darwin were to provide a conclusion to the temporality debate when they completed the historisation of nature...

The herbarium of the 19th-century Neapolitan botanists Vincenzo and Francesco Briganti was acquired by Orazio Comes in 1892 for the Royal Higher School of Agriculture in Naples. Based on a study of the handwriting on their labels, Comes concluded that some of the dried specimens were the sole remains of the herbarium of Domenico Cirillo, the distinguished 18th-century Neapolitan botanist, entomologist and physician. The current arrangement of the specimens not uniform and it is clear that they underwent extensive handling and rearrangement Some of the exsiccata are preserved in two packets, fixed on sheets bearing a printed label that reads "Herbarium D...

This article explores the relationship between Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson's scanning electron micrographs and commercial culture from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. By retracing how Nilsson's micrographs of the internal structures of the human body were made, circulated, and received, its aim is to investigate three aspects of this relationship. First, it highlights how the complex and sometimes conflicting interplay between the photographer and various actors in science, industry and the media shaped the pictures and their trajectories...

1966 Twentieth Century Fox big-budget film Fantastic Voyage represents a corner stone around which a whole audiovisual trope was built. The topic of the voyage of shrunken people sent to explore the inner space of the body was adopted since then by many feature films, television series and animated TV series, for the aims of education, entertainment or edutainment. While the exploration of the body (and, often, the meeting with its inhabitants) gives space to just a few possibilities of plot development, it leaves open ground for metaphors...