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CASE 2

DESIGN

4. Robert Hooke’s Camera Obscura — 5. Raphael’s Judgment of Paris 6. A Gritty Pebble — 7. An Oval Portrait of John Woodward 8. A Stone from the Grotto of Egeria — 9. Venus at Her Toilet

Exhibit 4. Robert Hooke’s Camera Obscura

Let us, then, let fall the curtains of Milton’s bed, and return for a moment to the dark room that John Locke carried around in his head. Locke mentions it in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while discussing the origins of knowledge; “external and internal sensation,” he insists,

are the only passages … of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this dark room. For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without: would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them.¹

This passage is well known because it summarizes the critical claim of Locke’s epistemology, its governing rule and the order toward which all its remarks tend. There is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses, Locke insists, and the admittance, sorting, storage, and arrangement of objects within a container-like space summarizes the work it may do.² And the figure doesn’t only turn up here. Locke’s cabinet shows up repeatedly in the Essay; it underwrites his lengthy and carefully argued rejoinders to Edward Stilling-fleet;³ it reappears in an even stronger and more compact form in his last book, the unfinished Conduct of the Understanding: the mind is a “secret cabinet within.”⁴ This cabinet, then, is more than a figure; it is a coordinating condition for what the mind can and cannot be thought to do. It provides the possibility of thinking about thinking at all, turning complex questions of being and intentionality into distinctions of within and without, inside and outside, contained and uncontained. The cabinet is Locke’s most powerful and seductive conceptual metaphor.

4. “An Instrument of Use to take the Draught, or Picture of any Thing,” in Robert Hooke, Philosophical Experiments and Observations (London, 1726). Courtesy University of Michigan Special Collections.

So, how did this container-like space get there? That is, how did Locke’s image of the mind’s dark room arrive in his mind, if the mind contains nothing but sensory materials and its own reflections? One possibility is that Locke is merely describing the mind’s native structure, the facilities that make it possible to accept and to sort ideas in the first place. This would be to understand the “dark room” as something innate to the mind itself—even, perhaps, an innate idea, something lurking there even before the mind thinks it. This, however, poses problems; the Essay was after all begun in an effort to dispel the doctrine of innate ideas. A less radical but related possibility would be to accept the “dark room” as a mere metaphor describing powers already existing; the dark room would in this sense be one metaphor among others, used instrumentally to describe a set of affordances the mind would have had anyway. But Locke himself has already described the understanding as an emergent property, growing stronger and more evident as the mind becomes stocked with ideas (see Exhibit 1). That is, it remains to be seen how a mind could include some things while excluding others, much less how it could make the distinction between “in” and “out,” without the more categorical ideas of rooms, closets, and containers of all sorts. In light of Locke’s imperative to trace ideas back to their originals, his insistence that it would help us correct our understanding if we chased our conceptual vocabulary back to its haptic grounding, we should perhaps rather entertain a third possibility. Perhaps Locke’s whole system, the room that seems to evade the system of categorical distinctions that it enforces, is itself a function of its own emergent logic. Perhaps the dark room is not a mere metaphor among others but something more intimately felt than this, a structuring condition and space to be dwelled in. Locke after all did not invent the idea of the dark room; he witnessed it at work, or, in other words, experienced it. For this dark room, even as a private image of the mind to itself, had a very public circulation, at once as an optical gadget, and as a space where the intellect might be put on display.

Had we timed it right, we might have caught Locke, possibly already carrying an imperfectly figured room in his head, seated at a public assembly, setting eyes on a technical device that was making the rounds of the Royal Society.⁵ This device was the camera obscura, and it would come to offer the organizing center of Locke’s epistemology, the very place where a working relationship with the environment is hardened up into a stable structure.⁶ The device is simple; it is essentially a pinhole camera, and can be produced in any conveniently sized, sufficiently dark room—the meaning, after all, of “camera obscura.” Light passing through a tiny hole or conveniently sized lens is projected, dimly, on the wall opposite, where a strikingly clear but inverted epitome of the world is made to appear.⁷ Over the course of the late seventeenth century, camera obscuras appeared in a wide variety of models and formats; to the pinhole was added a lens, and to the dark room a mirror and later a semitransparent screen of oiled paper. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the camera obscura had become a familiar sight; in the year of Locke’s death alone, encyclopedist John Harris offered a detailed account of the device for popular use, a “Mr. Marshall” began selling a version of the camera obscura in his shop on Ludgate Hill, and Newton’s Opticks demonstrated its employment in optical experiments.⁸

The device had its practical applications. When Robert Hooke presented a design for a portable camera obscura to the Royal Society, it was exactly with an eye to its “use to take the draught of a picture of anything.”⁹ This was not his first; he had previously pitched two such devices, first in 1668, and again in 1680. But his last was his most ambitious. Hooke was trained as a draughtsman, having among other things served as apprentice in the studio of the painter Peter Lely; as his sketchbooks and illustrations attest, he was himself brilliantly accomplished in capturing the outlines of things (see Exhibit 10). The goal of the portable object, as Hooke delivered it, was to unfold the technique of drafting into its components; it was to take the art of design out of the head and put it in a tool. The purpose of Hooke’s “picture box” was explicitly to make possible the accurate depiction of objects in the field by people untrained in the art of drawing, rendering one stage or aspect of the brokerage of images an automatic process.

But the camera obscura had philosophical attractions, too. First, it models the work of the eye, which condenses a world of light into a picture on the retina.¹⁰ Several things had to happen for this to be possible. For one, people had to begin thinking of the eye as a lens combined with a receptive surface—cornea and retina. Prior to early seventeenth-century thinkers, including Johannes Kepler and René Descartes, theory was likely to think of the eye as a mere container for an absorptive “vitreous humour”;¹¹ but after Kepler and Descartes, the new science was most apt to think of the eye as an instrument, working by focusing rays of light on its back surface.¹² From this shift was developed an epitome theory of vision, that is, the eye as a machine for capturing compact but precise pictures of things; Hooke, for instance, describes the interior globe of the eye as a “microcosm, or a little World,” perfectly answering, point for point, the visual field it confronts. This is quite explicit. “When a Hemisphere of the Heavens is open to its view,” Hooke concludes, the eye “has a Hemisphere within it self.”¹³ For every point in the field of view, there is a corresponding point in the back of the eye. Locke agreed with Hooke that the critical juncture between mind and world was “far from being a point”; rays of light “strike … on distinct parts of the retina,” where they “paint” a “figure”—the bigness of which Locke is at some trouble to estimate.¹⁴ These are theories of vision made possible, as Svetlana Alpers and others have noted, by experiments conducted with the camera obscura. Locke’s theory of optics, like Hooke’s, depended upon practical modeling; in this way, experiments with scopic gadgets affected abstract theories of vision.¹⁵

But this is only the first move the camera obscura makes possible, and Hooke’s design, which manages to slice the camera neatly in half while leaving its operator (Hooke himself?) neatly intact, additionally implies the strange doubling that must occur for the object to make epistemological sense. By isolating images from objects, the camera obscura offered a model for the mind separate from matter, in which a metaphorical eye—the “eye of the understanding”—presides over sensory images.¹⁶ Locke is quite clear about the similarities between eye and mind; “impressions made on the retina by rays of light” produce isomorphic “ideas in the mind.”¹⁷ It is from the senses, Locke therefore insists, that the “white paper” of the mind derives its “vast store,” and all the “endless variety” of ideas that have been “painted on it.”¹⁸ Images from the eye fall on a surface in the mind, upon which the judgment or understanding goes to work. From a painting in the eye to a painting in the mind, thinking was a matter of an internal eye consulting its store; henceforth, thinking could be imagined as the mind ranging over its perceptions. Hooke himself, in the same document in which he most fully links the optical camera obscura to the physiology of the eye, describes the mind as just such an open space, with the eye of the soul presiding over its objects (Exhibit 11).¹⁹ And so the camera obscura was apprehended as a metaphor virtually simultaneously as it was understood as an ocular gadget; to the extent that it was witnessed as a model for the eye, it was also adopted as material ground for an epistemology. It established, in Jonathan Crary’s account, “categorical relations between interior and exterior, between light source, aperture, and screen, and between observer and representation.” It shifted distinctions between inside and out to an epistemological register. It emerged, in other words, as “a sovereign metaphor for describing the status of an observer.”²⁰

The connections between Hooke, who presented several models of the camera obscura to the Royal Society, and Locke, who may have witnessed one or more of them there, may be strengthened, for they shared a mentor.²¹ This was Thomas Willis. Willis was a founding member of the Royal Society, but even before his days in London, he was part of the critical Christ Church group of scholars and natural philosophers that at different times included Hooke and Locke. Willis knew the slippery wetware of the brain better than anyone; he had pioneered the difficult surgical techniques making it possible, for the first time, to lay aside the lobes of the brain and penetrate to its delicate, ringlike vascular core. But despite the mess of fat and nerves with which he was left, he clung still to a chamber theory of mentation.²² Embedded in the brain, he surmised, is a “callous body” like a “white Wall.” In his Discourses Concerning the Souls of Brutes, Willis puts the matter this way: “Sent or intromitted by the Passages of the Nerves,” Willis writes, are the “Images or Pictures of all sensible things,” which are made to fall on this callous body.²³ For each philosopher, it is as though the optic nerves from retina to ventral cortex carried perfect images, fiber-optic-like, and cast them upon a cartilaginous membrane. This specially textured reception surface, receiving impressions from without, produces “Perception[s],” that is, “Imagination[s] of the thing felt.” Willis, in his own poetic turn of phrase, calls this interior space the “Chamber of the Soul, glased with dioptric Looking-Glasses.”²⁴ With allowances for Willis’s tradecraft, the brain surgeon has here anticipated the poetic image that would turn up in Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination (Exhibit 3); Akenside surmises a “wide palace” of the brain, where images are staged and rearranged. And, through the mediation of more discrete metaphors—or are they more material gadgets?—Willis’s thoughts would descend directly to a series of similar spaces: Locke’s “dark room,” for instance, or what would become Hooke’s strikingly realized “Repository” of the mind (see Exhibit 11).

Were the drawing of Hooke’s camera obscura more rigorously exact, then, were it to have bisected the man just as neatly as it bisects the beak-like gadget in which he stands, we might have seen a second camera obscura, impossibly miniaturized, at work behind the large eye of the viewer.²⁵ The first is made of ground glass, deal board, and oiled paper; the second is made of a strangely glass-like eye, curved bone, and sensitive membranes. In the first case, the camera obscura is an optical model; in the second, it is a model for mental work. Reproduced on the other side of the eye, invisibly, the camera obscura becomes a figure for judgment or awareness; indeed it becomes a figure that splits judgment from the objects it contemplates, producing consciousness as a tiny eye presiding over images from which it is half-screened. Like Descartes²⁶ and Willis before them, Hooke and Locke differently offer versions of what has more recently been called the “homunculus fallacy”; it is as though a little person were sitting in front of a screen inside the head, watching a picture show on display. Just as the eye offers, in Hooke’s words, a “microcosm, or a little World” of the field of view that confronts it, so, too, this microcosm is put on display for the delectation of the understanding, the “Eye of the Soul” within.²⁷ The homunculus thesis seeks to solve the problems introduced by a dualist epistemology, especially the critical problem of how sensory perceptions might cross the gap from matter to ineffable mind (and how, in turn, desire may be put into action); it solves these problems by shifting them up one level, to a mystical relationship between the mind and its ideas. The difficult conception of how ideas are received by the eye is shifted into the difficult question of how ideas are received by an internal eye. The critical question is not solved, however (see Locke’s remarks in Exhibit 19); it is merely kicked down the road, deferred perhaps until more precise instruments are available to unpack the mind’s strange commerce.

The homunculus thesis is typically understood as a fallacy. But we might look at the problem slightly differently; rather than looking at Locke or Hooke’s claims as profound dualisms, it makes sense to think about the networks that produce them, the patterns of modeling that express more profound entanglements. The mind finds itself in its environment through a heuristic twist. Experience models a mind through a readily available technical object, one that, as the engraving of Hooke’s gadget makes clear, swallows up and enwraps even the work of the hand. The value of models is not their exhaustive explanatory power; their value lies precisely in the thinking they make possible, an excess potential arising out of an initial metaphorical conjunction.²⁸ The analogical hunch takes on a life of its own, giving way to a whole host of possibilities and realizations; this is precisely why models are good to think with.²⁹ It is not that the eye of the understanding merely contemplates images; the work of the hand to design, to cut the world back to recognizable objects, distinctions, and lines is shifted into the process of witnessing. In this sense, the homunculus fallacy is not a fallacy at all; it is the natural extension of a mind being crafted in its environment. It is the proof that thinking is an ecological product—even when that product slashes an ecology into subject/object, viewer/view, mind/matter, but also understanding/memory, conscious mind/ materials of thinking.

Gadgets like the camera obscura, as metaphors and analogies, helped shape and make sense of the texture of experience. Locke remained skeptical, however, of the extent to which the materiality of the metaphor could be extended. When one thinks of the cathedral church at Worcester, Locke elsewhere remarks, no actual cathedral church pops into one’s head, nor any material similitude; when one thinks of a dark room, no actual dark room carves its way into the stuff of the brain. “When our ideas are said to be in our memories,” Locke remarks, “indeed they are actually nowhere.”³⁰ But, precisely because it organizes a way of speaking, of what can be “said to be in our memories,” Hooke’s design or Willis’s “chamber” with its dioptric glasses offers a neurophysiology of epistemic dualism: “in” versus “out.” It offers a vocabulary, a way of speaking. How else would the mind speak of itself, other than through images that it had experienced? How else to speak about what is “in” the mind or “in” the senses, other than through a figure that was incorporated there? And so Locke can comfortably speak of contemplation as “bring[ing] in sight,” or ideas as “objects … imprinted” in memory, despite his suspicion that there are no materially isomorphic changes in the brain.³¹ In this sense at least, Locke is like Willis, characteristic of the mainstream epistemology of his moment. Like Willis, Locke adapts a physical space as the basis for reimagining the mind as an entity within and depending upon the “crankling … superfices” of the brain—with (in Willis’s words) its many “Cells” or “Store-houses.”³² Locke’s contribution is to gain control of the metaphor, insisting that it must be learned in the same way as anything else; it is acquired through the senses—by “experience,” which stocks the mind with its vast store—though no actual space seems to be present there.

This is how the camera obscura reigns as a metaphor, once for the eye, and again for the understanding. It is a metaphor for metaphor, metaphor’s model. But just as metaphor was important to poets, authors, and artists for the way it enabled a reverse flow, returning ideas to their haptic ground, so, too, Hooke’s camera obscura was clearly less intended to model a mental process than to enable a certain kind of practical activity. It was a device designed to allow the capturing of ideas in images, of, in other words, designs. This is to say that it was built less as a model of the mind (this in some ways was merely an accidental effect of the object), than it was built as a practical gadget useful to a process of thinking already imagined to be taking place within the head. It isn’t enough that it merely takes an image, as though a toll at a custom house, on its way from oculus to eye; nor is it enough for it merely to capture, as though by chance, an image which will depart as soon as the whole gaudy contraption is swung around to a different field of view. It must also create the possibility of stilling that image down and capturing it. This is why there is room for the artist’s hand, bearing a pen, within its dark room. Hooke’s design has made room for art, turning the observer into what, in his day, would have been called the “designer,” the one who draws. And, as Hooke elsewhere avers, the importance of drawing is not so much to make it possible to communicate ideas to others; the principal importance of being able to design well is to allow artists to see their own ideas on paper.³³ The screen is not merely a passive surface; it is the site of an interaction between the stuff of perception and the hand that carves back into it. Hooke’s design reminds us of the activity of perception, which, etymologically, means to “take”; Hooke’s eye ceaselessly seeks, culls, sorts, and arranges.³⁴ Seeking and taking is after all the very purpose of Hooke’s object; it is an object designed to allow a traveler “to take a draught of a picture of any thing.”

This raises a final point about the engraving of Hooke’s design. Hooke’s man, enclosed in his own little world, is set against something that appears at first to be superfluous, a picture of a setting where the camera may be employed. It is clearly not London, where Hooke’s camera obscura (if it was built) might have been found; it is not a meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College. It is a view of a bit of foliage in the foreground, a small island town or fortification in the middle distance, and a larger landmass beyond it; it is either the sort of thing that an Englishman might see on the ramble, or what might be instantly summoned up in the engraver’s mind, merely to make clear the camera’s work out of doors. The camera obscura, write Lance Mayer and Gay Myers, was “considered especially useful for rendering in two dimensions the complex lines of recession in a landscape.”³⁵ The English observer endlessly divided the wilderness into bands or zones of space—foreground, middle distance, and far distance; this, too, was what the camera obscura was good for: for streamlining complex fields of color and movement into discrete breaks and outlines of things.³⁶ The drive to divide was more than a pictorial convenience; capturing an outline, especially in the case of complex landscapes, was more than a convenient way of representing some thing in itself. Delineating landscape was about, in the words of John Barrell, “the world conceived of and grasped as though it were a picture.”³⁷ There is no word in English, Barrell observes, to refer to a view of the outdoors that does not conceive of it as already pictorial—that is, a “landscape,” a word that marks what one scholar on the question calls “a felt difference unrecuparable by the usual designators of place.”³⁸ This felt difference, this endless superadded partitioning, is something added by the eye that picks and chooses, isolating out certain things according to their present purpose. And it is therefore ideological; it was historically connected, Barrell compellingly demonstrates, to contemporary struggles over land rights, the division and enclosure of commons and wastelands into agricultural plots. The elegance of design, the outline in the image, would appear, therefore, to be the discovery of a familiar ideology in the world ordered as the eye is accustomed to see it—when the observer is to be recognized in the image itself.³⁹

We are prepared to see, then, that the engraving of Hooke’s design is a function of the machine it represents; as we gaze at it, we should imagine ourselves gazing at a sheet hung up in the darkness, with an oculus projecting light onto its reverse side. We are looking at the design of a camera obscura. It offers part of a network to think with, and it therefore involves us in a host of peculiar implications. Any way you look at it, the screen is the critical thing, serving, like a slash, as the figure for separating then linking subject and object, thinker and thought. Part of this is purely optical. As Hooke puts it, in thinking about optics, there are always “two different cones” to be considered—one emerging from the projecting or “inlightning body,” and one condensing upon the “Body inlightned.”⁴⁰ Naturally crossing, like a three-dimensional chiasmus, the work of the screen is in effect to slice these competing cones one from another. Blank paper, razed tablet, or white linen (see also Exhibit 19): the screen stands or appears to stand between the object and the viewer, between, in the language of the device, the oculus of the camera and the eye of the beholder. But this slicing is also epistemological. Meeting on the screen of the camera obscura are pairs of principles, brought automatically into alignment. Crossing on this screen are things like object and idea, nature and design, the tangled aesthetic impulses of the arts under the empiricist regime. That is the side of nature, of the order of the things projected on the back of the page. If there is a design on that side of the sheet, it is the design of natural law, ordered by Creation. Nature is in this sense not what is visible on the screen; it is what is behind it—the design of things in the absence of design—and it is for this reason that nature, personified, is often represented as though it were behind a veil, curtain, or screen (see Exhibits 17–20). This is the side of the lens-like eye guiding the hand of the artist and author;⁴¹ this is the realm of design, which flows from ideas to a field of view. It is the special work of the screen continually to hold these concepts in tension and alignment. The camera obscura, remarked Samuel von Hoogstraten, offered a “truly natural painting.”⁴² When John Cuff in 1747 undertook to sell a new batch of camera obscuras, he hired a Grub Street poet to write copy; this poet pitched it as a special device for making visible the key terms in the exchange between objects and ideas. “Say, rare Machine,” the poet begins, “who taught thee to design? / And mimick Nature with such Skill divine?”⁴³ Design and nature are continually crossed and confounded on the same screen that seems to keep them apart: in the world of the camera obscura, nature is crossed with art, object with idea.

This case puts design on display, which is another way of saying that it is interested in attempts to make visible the nature of things. “Design” makes its way into English through two routes. On the one hand, the word arrives through the Continental tradition of the visual and literary arts, in which the “design” is a rough sketch or disposition of parts. Design, in this sense, means a pattern. As a schematic, the engraving of Hooke’s camera obscura is just such a design. It is not interested in precisely what such a machine would be made of, how it would be built, or where it could be carried. It does not concern itself with particulars and it is incapable of failure.⁴⁴ On the other, “design” arrives to eighteenth-century England with a borrowed French meaning of an intention. For instance, Hooke’s camera obscura was imagined with just such a design in mind; lurking behind the object is a desire to capture and collect accurate images of things. It is motivated by the general project of collecting and cataloguing. Taken in this mixed sense, rediscovered in the mixed sense of “plan,” “scheme,” and other closely allied concepts, “design” means the arrangement of things according to an idea. As Locke himself puts it, design means an arrangement of things “by reference to those adjacent things which best serve to their present purpose.”⁴⁵ If we return to the engraving of Hooke’s instrument, which is clearly also a plan or blueprint, we may see this schematic impulse at work; presented here is the arrangement of components—a lens, a white sheet, an observer, a curved deal board, an eye, a hand, and so on—that isolates and makes possible the essential function of the device.⁴⁶ It is the arrangement of things according to an intention. Like so much else in the age that produced it, this little anonymous engraving is a product of the philosophical device that it displays; it is the world as seen through a camera obscura.

Exhibit 5. Raphael’s The Judgment of Paris

According to the standard account, theories of “design” emerged in and among the trades, especially as new native crafts made their way into the market. Prior to the blossoming of consumer culture in the mid-eighteenth century, as this account has it, England had no established craft tradition of design. The patterns of things like textiles arrived from Paris or Italy, and were only subsequently applied in domestic production.⁴⁷ But when the history of design is broadened to include “wider cultural concerns with the related concepts of ordering, planning and scheming,” a different tradition emerges.⁴⁸ A glance at art historical manuals, like Jonathan Richardson’s Two Treatises, or the Earl of Shaftesbury’s remarks on the design for The Judgment of Hercules, reveals a rich tradition of design thinking.⁴⁹ Richard Checketts goes so far as to argue that the development of design as such links Shaftesbury’s definition of the painting as what delivers “one single Intelligence, Meaning, or Design” with a manufacturing praxis elaborated by painters and engravers like William Hogarth.⁵⁰ That is, the understanding of design that would turn up in the manufacturing trades over the last half of the eighteenth century focuses on design precisely because design all along articulated a tension between ideal patterns and messy particulars, between intention and realization.⁵¹ Even as early as Locke’s remarks, design all along represented the moment when the clean-handed thinker muddled into the mangle of practice, when the mind’s eye elaborated itself in complex negotiations with the material world—or, in other words, where the hand is reintroduced in the space of the camera obscura.

Like the British tradition of design in manufacturing, design in the arts arrived in England from a Continental tradition, brought back from France and Italy by travelers in the early years of the Restoration. Among these was John Evelyn.⁵² During his lifetime, Evelyn published three treatises on aesthetics—a study on engraving called Sculptura, and translations of Roland Fréart de Chambray’s Idea of the Perfection of Painting and his Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the Modern. Taken together, these three treatises constituted, in Evelyn’s words, a complete “design” of the “three Illustrious and magnificent Arts,” which, “like the three Graces,” were understood to lean upon one another.⁵³ Sometimes linked also with gardening, poetry, and sculpture, these together constituted the so-called sister arts, each of which was understood differently to relay ideas—that is, “designs”—through arrangements of things in the world.

5. Marcantonio’s engraving of The Judgment of Paris, from the design of Raphael (1511–1513). H,2.24 © Trustees of the British Museum.

The first of these treatises, Evelyn’s Sculptura, does not mean sculpture in the modern sense of the word—though he suggests that there might be homologies between the forms. Rather, Evelyn reminds us that “sculptura” descends from the Latin for “cutting,” and then defines it as that “art, which takes away all that is superfluous of the subject matter, reducing it to that form or body which was designed in the idea of the artist.”⁵⁴ The treatise was based largely on the collection of prints and illustrations Evelyn either saw or purchased while on the Continent. It ostensibly offers a history and description of the art of “cutting or graving of brass, copper, and other metals”—but in fact it is strangely bare of interest in the intricacies of engraving itself. His history does not take any interest in the particularities of medium, dispensing with them as the trappings of “matter.” It does not mention that engravings are made in wood or copper and transferred to paper, or that they are related to developments in the printing press, or that they are reproducible without the successive intervention of the artist. In fact, Evelyn seems loath to mention the material conditions of engraving at all. Instead, the tenor of his argument is that engraving—“sculptura”—is the reproduction of ideas reduced to their essence. It is a question of design, and this is why engraving is such a particularly valuable art. Engraving is the elimination, by cutting, of all that is superfluous, in order to reveal an idea lurking within a visual field.⁵⁵ It is not just that engraving forgoes the clutter or distractions of texture and color—which, Evelyn insists, can anyways “be conceived” from the “splendor and beauty in the touches of the burin.”⁵⁶ Rather, engraving strips away everything “superfluous” until it reveals the ideal origin of its design—that which was “designed in the idea” of the artist, the “prime conception of the workman.”⁵⁷

Evelyn is less interested, therefore, in engraving as a medium of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, than as the next best thing to minds communicating ideas directly. Nor is an engraving an imperfect art form, a cheap way of distributing facsimiles of an original; it dispenses with the crudeness of more elaborate forms, arriving nearer to the ideal realm that constituted, in Evelyn’s system, the true content of art. The perfection of engraving as an ideal art was, for Evelyn, strikingly exemplified by a certain print of The Judgment of Paris, a collaboration between Raphael and his favorite engraver, Marcantonio Raimondi.⁵⁸ Not only did The Judgment of Paris represent, to Evelyn’s eye, the prime conception of an artist particularly known for his designs; it was in fact believed to refer to no original painting at all, no completed table or detailed drawing.⁵⁹ No original has survived, and so it seemed to Evelyn’s contemporaries to have been engraved on copperplate by Marcantonio directly from Raphael’s design, relayed either through what Roland Fréart calls Raphael’s “Sprezzo”—his initial sketches—or directly from ideas communicated between artists. It appeared therefore to be an engraving of a painting which never existed, and which, according to Evelyn, survives as the immediate record of a pure idea, of Raphael’s unadulterated “design.”⁶⁰

The fable is this: Paris, ignorant of his own identity as prince of Troy, is herding sheep on the slopes of Mount Ida when he is approached by three goddesses. In order to settle a dispute, each of the three goddesses differently asks Paris to select her as the fairest. Athena sweetens the deal with an offer of wisdom; Juno offers him wealth and power. Each goddess, after all, is the emblem of the virtues she offers. Paris is however ultimately swayed by Aphrodite’s offer of sexual love; in exchange for granting her the prize for the fairest of Olympos, the golden apple of Discord, Aphrodite gives him the woman in the world most celebrated for her beauty. The gift, however, bears an unlooked-for freight, not unlike the horse later to show up before the gates of Troy. Aphrodite’s gift is Helen, and Helen is already married. Her eventual elopement, orchestrated by Aphrodite on Paris’s behalf, will activate a complex network of reciprocal promises between military and political leaders.⁶¹ The story is of course well-known; the judgment of Paris, though he could not have known it at the time, will turn out to be the meteor of the Trojan War, plunging the Mediterranean rim into ruinous conflict. It will kick off the events culminating in the anger of Achilles, Odysseus’s fraught return to Ithaca, and the flight of Aeneas to Rome: the major subjects of epic literature. Paris’s choice—his “judgment”—is therefore an almost trivial moment, at the crossroads of vision and desire, which nevertheless brings into focus the full sweep of epic history.

Because of the history it condenses, this moment was to become the favorite of a wide range of moralists, fabulists, and painters; Raphael treated the subject, but so too did Rubens (many times), Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Claude Lorrain, to name just a few whom Fréart and Evelyn might possibly have seen.⁶² Helmut Nickel, expressing a common position, argues that the popularity of this scene is no doubt “due to the fact that for the display of piquant nudes it was an even better choice than the Three Graces,” because it “not only offered the chance of presenting three undraped female bodies in three different postures … but also put them in teasing contrast with … fully and properly dressed males.”⁶³ But the popularity of the subject seems on the contrary not to have been for the erotic potential of the three nudes but for the moral lesson the fable was continually used to tell. It was a position already old⁶⁴ when Alexander Ross in 1647 read Paris’s choice as a moral allegory of “beauty and Venereall pleasure” weighed against their ideal alternatives. Given over to the pleasure of the body, Paris refuses Juno’s offer of “power” and “wealth,” and (what is worse) Athena’s of “wisdome” and honor.⁶⁵ Paris’s decision, as many eighteenth-century critics read it, is consequently a failure of judgment: he is too interested in the flesh; he fails to subordinate the figures themselves, the things of this world, to the lesson or allegory they are meant to carry.⁶⁶

In The Judgment of Paris, we may see a curator at work, indeed several curators, arranging figures according to their different ideas. For one thing, the image is composed of figures borrowed from ancient Roman sculpture, bas reliefs, and ceramics; this is the first thing that announces it as a curatorial composition, the work of an arranging eye.⁶⁷ But it is not, as Fréart sees the engraving, the eye of the viewer that organizes the arrangement of figures, or even the viewer that implies the vanishing point of its perspective. Through a complex consideration of angles, axes, parallels, and horizons, the relative sizes of figures, the twisting of torsos and the oblique slopes of shoulders, Fréart argues that the true point of vision is not where a standard account of Renaissance perspective might anticipate—that is, is not in the eye of the spectator.⁶⁸ On the contrary, the viewer is something contained in the picture itself. “The Subject of this History being chiefly about Sight,” Fréart insists, “the Paynter could not have plac’d the Visive point more judiciously, than in the Eye of Paris.” Raphael has placed Paris in profile, Fréart argues, specifically to reduce vision to a single point only, as “Geometricians teach us in their Optics, where they represent Vision or the function of Seeing, by a radiated Pyramis with an Eye fixt upon it.”⁶⁹ We might think, here, of the second cone of Robert Hooke’s formulation (Exhibit 4), the one that condenses on the “inlightned body”⁷⁰; in Paris’s eye is reproduced the full field of the perspectival scene. But, more than this, we have caught him just as he is making his choice, as he is, in other words, arranging history. This helps account, Fréart believes, for the turning of the bodies of the three goddesses. At the center of the chaos on display, where history is being composed out of the matter of classical prehistory, is the single form of the goddess of love. The principal figures of the piece all are turned toward her, as she at once receives the twin objects of her victory: the laurel crown and the apple of Discord. Paris has his designs; motivated by a bodily response to the three nudes, he reaches into the scene to arrange history.

Read as a moral allegory, The Judgment of Paris is about a failure of judgment. Paris fails to see with his intellectual eye; what instead he sees is what is available to the eye of the senses. He chooses the only goddess who offers a version of what she displays. And if Nickel is right that numerous viewers enjoyed the painting for its contrast between clothed men and nude women, the voyeuristic thrill it offers, then those viewers are essentially seeing the scene as Paris sees it, and not (as Raphael encourages us) seeing the table as an opportunity to see Paris seeing.⁷¹ Perhaps taking his warning from the very scene on display, Fréart does not locate the truth of the visual arts in what is available to the eye; it is not to be found in coloring, the handling of human anatomy, or other aspects of what he calls “the Mechanical Arts.” Painting is instead to be considered a “demonstrative science,” which arranges its “matter” according to the “rules of geometry.” “The image itself,” writes Peter de Bolla of images like this one, “instructs the eye.”⁷² To witness the Judgment of Paris is to stand both inside and outside Paris’s point of view; to see The Judgment of Paris is to see, and hence to judge, the judgment of Paris, Paris’s single pupil as the sedimented fund of his world, and his hand, all intentionality, reaching back to arrange things to his liking.

Raphael’s design is particularly accomplished because it strives to put perspective on review, to show us how Paris makes a picture. This is what James Elkins suggestively calls an “object oriented” use of perspective; we are witnessing Paris in the mangle of practice as he (unwittingly) constructs a world.⁷³ In this sense, The Judgment of Paris is formally like the engraving of the camera obscura: Paris’s eye forms one perspectival “pyramis,” while the body of Aphrodite offers its natural counterweight. The handing off of the apple signals Paris’s designs—where he reaches into the scene to craft it according to his idea. But there is a final twist, as Fréart sees it, where the eye of the Enlightenment meets the arrangement of the Renaissance—for the very organization of a tableau according to an idea is the province of Raphael’s design. These are his words; “Design” is not only the “veritable Principle and only Basis … of Painting,” it is also “the universal Organ and Instrument of all the politer Arts.” Without it, painting becomes “a meer Chymaera and confusion of Colours.”⁷⁴ The essence of art, according to the apologist for Raphael, is not what is made by a craftsman but what is designed by the “clean-handed genius” who arranged an intellectual tableau in the first place.⁷⁵ “Everie understanding… knoweth,” opined Sir Philip Sidney, that “the skill of ech Artificer standeth in that Idea, or fore conceit of the worke, and not in the worke itselfe.”⁷⁶ It is design that forms the real object of art, and the techniques that closest approach this ideal pattern—the arts that most capture this design without the imperfections of matter—are therefore the most technically accomplished. Raphael’s critical trick, as it was witnessed by Fréart and Evelyn, was to put the viewer outside the view. Paris sees with embodied purpose; the viewer sees with dispassionate judgment. Raphael’s design is to show us Paris’s. It is just as though we are seeing an anamorphic picture from the wrong spot; through the obliquity of false perspective, we are made to stand outside history.⁷⁷

In one of the critical passages in his lecture on the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan addresses anamorphosis explicitly. In a study beginning with one of the iconic images of Raphael’s generation, Lacan observes that painting in the end has no particular fidelity to realism, nor does it use the real things it hopes to represent as its materials. The painter means to display a way of ordering things—what Evelyn and Fréart called a design—for which the things themselves are merely the means. His “search” or “quest” is less about an aesthetic effect, in this sense, than it is to make the risky passage between an idea and a disposition or arrangement.⁷⁸ As Lacan puts it, the painter’s ambition is to “sustain and vary the selection of a certain kind of gaze”—which is to say, an ethics or an idea or a way of seeing, rather than merely a spot from which a thing may be seen.⁷⁹ The “gaze” as Lacan understands it is not on the side of the viewer who looks; it is the arrangement of things in the field of view, a way of seeing looking back at us. The painting, Lacan insists, “looks at me”; it projects its light “in the depths of my eye”; and in the depths of his eye are reproduced the geometric relations that the painting first established. It is not, for Lacan, that a viewer necessarily wishes to see herself seeing herself; nor is it true that an artist is endlessly interested in representing herself in the visual field (like Milton’s Eve, half-seduced by her own reflection). The field need not capture the image of the painter. For the painting “grasps” its viewer through the design it offers, showing us the painter’s way of seeing.⁸⁰

What Lacan calls “the screen” is “the locus of mediation,”⁸¹ where a way of ordering things (his “gaze”) meets the pyramis of the viewer’s look (the perspectival subject).⁸² Lacan’s intellectual debts here are to a tradition of design and anamorphosis; his remarks in fact develop from an insight afforded by Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors, a painting executed roughly two decades after The Judgment of Paris. Lacan is in other words elaborating a point raised by Evelyn and Fréart,⁸³ for the point Fréart extends throughout his discussion is just this: what is on display (in the end) is not a version of history, or even merely a parable of Paris’s judgment, but Raphael’s way of seeing.⁸⁴ “An Artist,” Fréart concludes, “paints Himselfe in his Tables,” representing himself “as in so many Mirrours and Glasses.”⁸⁵ As Jonathan Richardson would later affirm, “Painters always paint themselves.”⁸⁶ The Judgment of Paris is the judgment of Raphael, for it offers us a moral system and an ethical imperative, the very picture of negotiations between the eye of judgment and the hand of the artist—borne out on the screen of the world.

Exhibit 6. A Gritty Pebble

In a dark room, sectioned off from the rest of the Sedgwick Museum of Natural History at Cambridge, is the geological collection of John Woodward (1665–1728), standing more or less as Woodward designed it. Open the door to Woodward’s curatorially dark study; put on your cotton gloves; open the eighth drawer in the first cabinet on your left; and scan to object number 64. In the drawer custom-made to receive it, in the walnut cabinet custom-made to contain the drawers, is object c.226 in Woodward’s catalogue. It is

a gritty Peble of a very light brown Colour, an oblong oval Shape, an Inch and ¾ in length, and one Inch in breadth, flattish, and having the two Ends somewhat pointed. There’s a narrow Ridge, of the same breadth in all parts, running directly long-ways of the Stone, and quite encompassing it. This Ridge consists of a closer and harder sort of Matter than the rest of the Stone. In the middle on one side, the Stone sinks in, and rises out on the opposite, as if it had been soft and press’d in that Part.⁸⁷

6. “A gritty Peble of very light brown Colour.” Specimen c.226 (Mason-Ogden #A-8-64), in the Woodwardian Collection. Courtesy Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge.

Looking back at you is a stone that looks like nothing so much as a large, heavily lidded human eye. You see it, but it does not see you. This, however, has not stopped at least one person from trying to imagine himself into its place. Viewing it as an enlightened witness to geological time, a silent and opaque relic of momentous events, Woodward more than once mused upon what sights it might have seen, were its eye open one fateful day roughly six thousand years before.

John Woodward was a physician, minor poet, antiquarian, and rock hound. He was a collector of statues, vases, inscriptions, and amulets. But his “great and lasting preoccupation” was his collection of stones.⁸⁸ At the height of his reputation, he was the professor of physic at Gresham College in London, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the foremost figures in the development of geology. Apart from a few published treatises, a handful of vitriolic pamphlet-satires, and a few portrait engravings, what remains of him is now precisely this cabinet—kept in its original order by the terms of his bequest. The cabinet captures nothing less than a design and way of ordering the world; it takes the stuff of the landscape and puts it in a more perfect order—an arrangement according to an idea. And he was, of course, the man who collected and attempted to make sense of this “gritty Peble,” a compact object which nevertheless, for Woodward at least, articulated a vast design. The cabinet and this pebble represent an asymmetrical dialectic now frozen in time, a record of Woodward’s efforts to arrange an explanatory and complete system of the world.

The last work of Woodward’s life was his Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Fossils of England (1728), a half-finished catalogue of his mineralogical collection. Containing, by one count, 9,400 specimens, the collection is a study in variety. Each of its items, Woodward writes, “so much differ[s] from the other, that in the whole there are scarcely any two alike.”⁸⁹ Nevertheless, among this chaos of objects, the Attempt offers an organizing scheme, and it is here that the collaboration between nature and design emerges. Recognizing that “there are Those who would have the Study of Nature restrain’d wholly to Observations, without ever proceeding further,” Woodward offers this reply:

Assuredly, that Man who should spend his whole Life in amassing together Stone, Timber, and other Materials for Building, without ever aiming at the making an Use, or raising any Fabrick out of them, might well be reputed very fantastic and extravagant. And a like Censure would be his Due, who should be perpetually heaping up of Natural Collections, without Design of building a Structure of Philosophy out of them, or advancing some Propositions that might turn to the Benefit and Advantage of the World. This is in reality the true and only proper End of Collections, of Observations, and Natural History.⁹⁰

As Woodward understands it, a collection without an organizing “End” threatens to lapse into a mere “heap,” a sort of “extravagance” (a “detour” or “going out of the way,” see Exhibits 10–14). The alternative is to organize a collection around some “Design,” which he calls, after the example of the “Fabrick,” an intentional “Structure of Philosophy,” a connected system of observations and remarks constructed out of the objects he has accrued. Such an ideal structure, a pattern composed in the mind during a life of “amassing,” is at once a “design” itself and what the collector “designs” to build out of the materials of thinking.

Woodward’s architectural figure, however, barely qualifies as a figure; in summoning up a hypothetical “Man” who “spends his whole Life amassing together Stone, Timber, and other Materials for Building,” Woodward could be speaking of his own life, and his own stones, housed in four fall-front walnut cabinets, custom-built for the purpose. Lumber and stone: we might at first say that this is an ecology without nature: the pieces are all there—rocks and stones and trees—but this is clearly a moment in English history where natural resources are the stuff of building.⁹¹ Nature, in this instance, emerges as a structural effect; nature is after all the “End” of “natural history,” both purpose and final product. This, too, begins to imply the particularly material imagination Woodward possessed, that of a man whose “Judgment” is founded entirely “upon the … Nature and Properties” of the objects in his collection.⁹² It was not that he was simply unimaginative, that he could not think of a better metaphor; he was involved in a ruinous pamphlet war with his rival Richard Mead—and his richly vituperative prose signals a mind capable of extraordinary invention. It is, on the contrary, that Woodward thought his way through the materials with which he surrounded himself; he was invested in his cabinet. And so, when one satirical pamphlet suggests that Woodward’s geological treatises had “stood [their] Ground” supported not by “Observations and Reason” but by “Shelves and Brackets,” it happens upon the justifying logic of the book itself.⁹³ Woodward, at least when he is speaking as a geologist, thinks through the materials of his concern; collecting stones ends up not just modeling but performing a set of recognizable cognitive activities. His design was all along a matter of geological practice.

It is, therefore, worth dwelling on Woodward’s description of his collection, especially as his cabinet puts it on display. It is organized by class, beginning with “Earths and Earthy substances,” followed by stones, pebbles, and flint, crystals, salts, metal ores, and finally other minerals mined more deeply from the earth.⁹⁴ Woodward recorded, wherever possible, the locations and depths of the objects he collected; he requested his donors and correspondents, which he at one time estimated to number around five hundred, to do the same. His instructions to collectors show no particular interest in the time of collection; as far as Woodward was concerned, all these objects were collected almost simultaneously in the geological scheme, anyway. But the emphasis on place and depth was crucial to how he understood geology, and understanding it, went out into the field to witness it. This emphasis is reproduced in the general index to the collection, a synopsis, which, allowing for exceptions, inclusions, and things like marine fossils, is organized according to specific weight, from least to most dense. The same scheme governs the arrangement of stones in his cabinets. Indeed, it organizes the cabinets themselves. His collection of English stones, confined to cabinets A and B, were made to reproduce the cataloguing scheme of stones from earths to ores. Looking at Woodward’s cabinets is like looking at two leaves of a book, recto and verso, repeating from top to bottom, then top to bottom again, Woodward’s geological system. The cabinets manifest, as an organizational scheme, a visual synopsis of nature that is repeated in the index to his Attempt; this is what has been called Woodward’s “synoptic method.”

There is a selecting eye at work here, coordinating with the designer’s hand. Woodward sorts from the mass of dirt and stone the stones that make possible a rigorous set of lines and demarcations, cleaning up the mess of strata that he might have seen in the field. From the beginning, a design is operating, yoked sometimes violently to what Woodward called “nature.” Woodward remarks, for instance, that to make such a “Collection” as his, “requires … an exquisite Judgment, not one in ten [specimens] of the Bodies collected having been admitted,” the rest being “rejected for being defective in something requisite to render them fine Exemplars.” Judgment has a way of anticipating the data upon which it seems to work, altering the ideas received from sensation “without our taking any notice of it.”⁹⁵ It is a question of repetition. Set before your eyes, Locke suggests, “a round globe of any uniform color”—gold, for instance, or alabaster or jet—and the “idea imprinted on our mind is of a flat circle.” Locke is thinking of course of the model of perception passing through Willis and Hooke; the idea falls upon a flat surface. If it is reconverted into the sphere from which it appears to have come, this is a question of custom—for we, “having, by use, been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us,” reconvert the flat disk into a sphere. “It is evident,” Locke remarks, “in painting” that this is the general way of perception, rather than its exception; what strikes the eye is only a “plane variously coloured,” but what we experience are “the sensible figures of bodies.”⁹⁶ In this way, the work of judgment, through repeated use, structures the field of view; the judgment, Locke concludes, “by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes.”⁹⁷ So, when Woodward’s publisher notes that Woodward’s sorting work is meant to look like no work at all, for it descends from a “thorough Insight into … Nature,” “reducing [it] into a Science,” Locke might remind us that here is habit producing naturalness, a way of seeing concreting itself in a vision.⁹⁸ The end of natural history is to produce nature as its cause. At work is the hand of the designer; Woodward’s cabinet observably pares back the geological world just as though in a camera obscura, drawing out the lines of its design. What emerges there—what Woodward experiences as emerging—is not Woodward himself but the world’s order and elegance. This is what Woodward calls “nature”; “nature” emerges as the design that may be elicited from an organization of objects as though that design were there already.

Woodward offers his stones as examples of nature—but this is nature cultivated over a long career of seeing the world in a certain way. Woodward’s prose suggests that they are merely examples of the species they may be made to represent, but, all along, the Judgment of Woodward has been lurking there: Woodward’s eye the visive point, silently designing. Woodward was best known not for his collection, exactly, but for a paper he composed shortly after being admitted to the Royal Society, his Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth (1695). The problem taken up by Woodward’s Essay is how to account for layers of rock, when prior theories insist that the Earth and all its inhabitants were created whole in six days of divine labor. Why would the earth not be homogeneous, one perfect sphere as uniform as the word of God? Why would the eye, in gazing at the globe, not be met with a perfect disk, rather than mixed textures and shades, various varieties of landscape? What Woodward proposed was a theory of the biblical Deluge, indeed, a physicalist explanation of the Deluge as a temporary suspension of natural law. Set with the problem of reorganizing a world gone astray, the Creator (Woodward suggests) implemented the simplest and mathematically most elegant solution. He simply suspended gravity for a few days, allowing land and ocean to mix in an unvarying slurry of earth and mud. When gravity was restored, and the excess water drawn off, heaps of rock and earth precipitated out according to their densities.⁹⁹ The seduction of this theory is that it accounts for strata visible in exposed rock faces. It also explains animal and vegetable inclusions within layers of solid rock. And, finally, it makes intelligible geological wear, which resulted from the “Hurry, Precipitation, and rapid Motion” of the excess water being drawn off.¹⁰⁰ As all rivers lead to the sea, so Woodward’s cabinets all tend to this same unfathomable theory of things. The entire visible geological world, according to Woodward’s theory, could thereby be explained by the rapid and violent actions of a few days or even hours, thus coordinating visible geological phenomena with inherited strains of scriptural cosmic history.

This is the best that can be said for Woodward’s system, which was immediately attacked from numerous quarters. John Arbuthnot, among others, took Woodward’s postulate seriously, launching an extended, forcefully reasoned counterargument. But detractors in general preferred the low road of satire; though few offered superior systems, and though Woodward’s system would prove to be an important step toward later understandings of geological strata,¹⁰¹ critics in and out of the Royal Society called Woodward’s theory the “hasty pudding” model of the Deluge, a kitchen metaphor that sinks Woodward’s sublime vision of the liquefied terraqueous globe to a low image of flour, eggs, and suet.¹⁰² The Great Deluge was, as one contemporary remarked, “his great beloved catastrophe,”¹⁰³ just as it was the organizing idea of his collection, the object of imagination that he distributed throughout his cabinet. Woodward’s first scholarly concern was also his last; his system of nature provides what Woodward more than once calls the “Design” of each of his geological essays—what he intends for them to prove. His collection was likewise the opportunity for a repetitive return to the same ideal image of a world he could never have seen. As Woodward elsewhere notes, evidently without irony, “’tis not easie, when once a man suffers himself to grow fond of a subject, not to be at once far transported.”¹⁰⁴ The design is, in this sense, the sketch or convenience that allows a collector like himself “to draw a considerable number of Materials into so narrow a Compass” that they might be contained in a single cabinet or volume.¹⁰⁵

It is with this backdrop, the sublime backdrop of the Great Deluge, that Woodward’s pebble swims into significance. Woodward’s collection contains a number of extraordinary objects, but they all point toward the same desideratum—the event of the Great Deluge that organizes the stones in his collection. Among these objects is the pebble (specimen no. 226) that Woodward found in a gravel pit near the “New Buildings by Dover Street, St. James,” the geologically generic “gritty Peble of a very light brown colour.”¹⁰⁶ Woodward’s description of the pebble stretches over two paragraphs—the object itself could in fact be wrapped up three or four times in the amount of paper it takes to describe it—but what becomes apparent is that this “ridge” is its most interesting feature. The ridge, Woodward surmises, comes from the relative densities of the different layers of sediment that the stone contains. It is by the concretion of these different materials that a single pebble like this can be made to prove the truth of his theory about sedimentation—different layers exhibited in one stone. Moreover, the pebble proves the second part of his theory, the withdrawal of water that shaped the globe as it now is. Such stones, he notes, “have had their Surfaces ground, and worn”; the ridge is raised because it is harder than the surrounding material, and therefore became less worn in the hurry and precipitation of the recession of the waters.¹⁰⁷ Woodward’s most characteristic descriptions follow this pattern—a lengthy description of the object itself followed by a return to the Deluge; geology is a reading of patina, his stones, in the common phrase, being the medals of creation. Specimen no. 226 is therefore symbolic, greater than itself, condensing a much larger “Structure of Philosophy” into something that can be arranged into a system. Woodward’s fantasy, which colors all his work, is that the sublime object of the deluge can be contemplated in the compass of a pebble; his stones materialized an imagination.

All objects in the collection work this way, but this little stone is additionally resonant—is in fact biographically special—because, Woodward records, “’twas the first stone I ever took notice of, or gather’d.”¹⁰⁸ It was the first object that caught Woodward’s eye, and it anticipates the arrangement of his whole system. This raises a final, suggestive point. Woodward’s discovery of what would become specimen c.226, the object that sparked his passion, the “first stone [he] ever took notice of,” precedes his first remarks on the geological importance of the Deluge by more than a dozen years. Is it possible that the stone, which looks for all the world like a lidded human eye, noticed Woodward, rather than the other way around? Did the stone call out to Woodward, providing the nugget that crystallized a world? Or, could Woodward ever have wondered what the stone might itself have seen, on that precipitous day, if only its eye were open? Could the stone, in other words, have been the oculus to Woodward’s cabinet, looking out on the vanished vista of the forty days’ flood? Viewed this way, the mute and material pebble, fantasmagoric, provided Woodward with his design, rather than the other way around, itself catching Woodward’s eye and providing a pattern for rejection and exclusion of the “exemplars” of his collection. As Jonathan Richardson reminds us, nothing, properly speaking, is invention; what appears to be invention, even Woodward’s astounding theory, is only an idea once gathered, which turns up again as a pattern.¹⁰⁹ The stone forgets itself into an organizational principle. The single element, a principle masquerading as an emblem, condenses a synoptic view—indeed, presents the view as a feature of the arrangement. This marks Woodward’s stone, a serendipitous find if ever there was one, as a special object, the material origin of a world-making idea (see Exhibit 9).

Exhibit 7. An Oval Portrait of John Woodward

The single-mindedness of Woodward’s arrangement means that his judgment is everywhere on display. As Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach noted, while being shown Woodward’s collection, one “must listen to his opinion de diluvio et generatione antediluvian et lapidum postdiluvia, till you are sick of it.” He complained of having to listen “ad nauseam” to Woodward’s theories, noting that he “recites whole pages of his writings.” But this is not nearly “the maddest thing of all.” Woodward, this visitor notes, had “many mirrors hanging in every room, in which he constantly contemplates himself.”¹¹⁰ This same visitor was made to wait while Woodward conspicuously “called to his lad” for a dish of hot water and shaved in his presence. This was evidently a repeated ritual, for “more than four foreigners” had previously been likewise “favored with the privilege of looking on” while Woodward performed his toilet in the midst of his collection.¹¹¹

This ritual posturing strikingly realizes the function of the cabinet, clustered around the idealized and carefully organized projection of Woodward’s own public image; in composing his cabinet, Woodward composes himself, framing an ideological version of himself in a mineralogical history: Woodward’s judicious eye the end and center of his geological design.¹¹² In this sense, Woodward was not eccentric at all. He was, on the contrary, characteristic of his age; this was a culture, Peter de Bolla writes, “suffused with the desire to see oneself and to exchange self-images as a form of social practice.” Much as (in Fréart’s words) “an Artist … paints Himselfe in his Tables,” representing himself “as in so many Mirrours and Glasses,” Woodward’s collection is ultimately, only more obviously than other cabinets, an extended experiment in self-fashioning. Any arrangement contains in this sense an element of self-portraiture.¹¹³ Or, put differently, Woodward intended his cabinet as a portrait of nature, but it captures, as though a fossil in strata, Woodward himself. As Sir John Clerk, the Scottish antiquary, said of Woodward, “some of his fossils were very curious, though indeed he himself was the greatest curiosity of the whole collection.”¹¹⁴

While Woodward was alive, the cabinet was a living ecology; he arranged nature according to his design. And, in the way of private collections, the cabinet’s function as a sort of Woodward machine extends after his death. It fossilizes him, as it were. Woodward left his cabinet to Cambridge, along with enough money to provide the first endowed professorship in the physical sciences in Great Britain (and, one scholar notes, perhaps the world).¹¹⁵ Woodward expected its occupant to curate and to expand his collection, to be physically present in it for the purposes of tours at least three days per week, and to give at least four lectures per year on “some one or other of the subjects treated of in my Natural History of the Earth.”¹¹⁶ Take this chair, Woodward commands; lecture on what I lectured on; inherit my ideas as you inherit my stones: this is the thrust of the terms of Woodward’s Will.

7. John Woodward, F.R.S., by an Unknown Hand. CAMSM.P.111. Courtesy Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge.

The “Chair of Woodwardian Studies” has a number of peculiar requirements, which, taken together, suggest that Woodward himself recognized the autogenetic function of his cabinet: the cabinet as a mirror reflecting himself. The Woodwardian Fellow was required not to marry, lest “the care of wife and children should take the Lecturer too much from Study.” This is remarkable for a couple of reasons; the first is that it tacitly assumes that all of the Woodwardian Fellows will be men—which a survey of the historical occupants of his chair confirms.¹¹⁷ And, of course, it insists that the person seated in the chair will prefer study to the many pleasures of family.¹¹⁸ These restrictions are, however, additionally remarkable in light of Woodward’s own lifelong bachelorhood, not least because Woodward himself seems to have preferred men.¹¹⁹ In part because he was generally irascible, he was the subject of numerous public satires. He was attacked in print for his controversial positions in natural philosophy and medicine, and for his unusually high-pitched voice.¹²⁰ The Scriblerian play Three Days after Marriage is commonly supposed to have taken Woodward as its major satirical object, mocking him for his eccentric philosophical pursuits.¹²¹ But he was repeatedly, publicly, coarsely slandered for sexual preferences that became well known over his lifetime. Uffenbach is one of many who records that Woodward was criminis non facile nominandi suspectus; he was widely suspected, in other words, of the love that has no name.¹²² He was repeatedly accused of affairs with choirboys and attractive young protégés.¹²³ One particularly abusive pamphlet, accusing him simultaneously of bad Latin and an inappropriate “love … of boys,” caricatured him as “not being able to decline Anus.”¹²⁴ The point here is that Woodward’s collection seems by him designed to guarantee a legacy, in the absence of any heirs; it seems even, if it may be put this way, have been designed by Woodward autogenetically to reproduce himself in a series of mirror images.

The making of cabinets: it is a repeated pattern. Locke has custom crates built for his library (Exhibit 1); Pepys has custom book presses built for his books, and a very special little case built for a more personal specimen (Exhibit 15); Walpole builds a cabinet for a single book, putting that cabinet in a room custom-built to contain it (Exhibit 17); and so on. A pattern emerges: the building of cabinets happens late in life; it signals the beginning of the end of a living ecology. Make no mistake: Woodward’s cabinet long ago ceased to be a working collection of geology. No one visits it to learn about soil constitution or fossilized inclusions. It is visited, when it is visited at all, because it is the earliest intact geological collection, the largest such collection composed in the eighteenth century and maintained more-or-less in situ. It is visited because it captures a way of judging, a highly particular vision of nature. This hardening up, the conversion of a working ecology into a single-minded machine, is most strikingly figured by the oval portrait of Woodward, the only mature portrait of him in existence, which hangs amid his collection.¹²⁵ The room housing the collection, as specified by his Will, is sectioned off in its own special space; it is in the Oak Wing of the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, but it is not a part of it. Kept here are the four fall-front cabinets, still with their original collection of stones; also here is arranged a desk, open books, and writing implements set up, as though the first Woodwardian Fellow had just left, or as though the chair were left warm for the next occupant to take his place in his turn. What you will not find here, however, are any mirrors; what would they reflect that belonged there? In their place is this portrait in an oval frame, which, like the collection itself, disdains the shifting image of the various occupants of the chair. It offers instead the same, timeless image of Woodward, gazing over his custom cabinets. His eye, enlarged by the natural magnification of the living man into a timeless image of himself, droops under a heavy lid; it sees the same nature coming into being, strata endlessly created out of disorder, that might have been seen by specimen no. c.226—which is in fact there, also trapped in witnessing the same frozen coming-into-being. Woodward’s cabinet, this dark room in Cambridge, is dark room as cabinet obscura. At one end of the contraption is a gritty brown pebble, the oculus to nature at its geologically critical moment. At the other is Woodward, his large eye surveying the work of his life. Caught between them, like a screen upon which are tangled the imperatives of the Enlightenment, are Woodward’s cabinets. Epitome of the world and summary of his understanding, engraved here are the outlines of Woodward’s design, a synopsis of the Judgment of Woodward.

Exhibit 8. A Stone from the Grotto of Egeria

Just as Woodward was drafting the codicil that offered his mixed gift to posterity, Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was dreaming up a natural history museum of his own. Viewed superficially, Pope and Woodward had little in common. Pope, among the leading poets of his age, was one of Woodward’s most biting satirists; Woodward turns up in Pope’s work—once in his early prose satire The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, and again in his multiply revised mock-epic The Dunciad—each of which offers a more explicit send-up of the Gresham College geologist than the last. But there is also a way in which satire gives way to something like sympathy. “The starving chemist in his golden views,” Pope remarked in 1734, is “Supremely blest,” just like “the poet in his muse.”¹²⁶ A chemist gathers up the mineralogical world with the hope of unlocking the settled laws that organize it; this is what is implied in his “golden views.” What strikes his eye are rocks, sand, various liquids, and salts; what he has become habituated to see is their nature or secret quiddity. A poet collects visual objects as part of a project guided by his muse; this project, too, is oriented by the design he has trained himself to see. “Muse” here meets “golden views,” a chemist’s arrangement of stones answering a poet’s arrangement of object lessons. And Pope, perhaps more than any other of his contemporaries, was expert at what he called “design,” the arrangement of parts to satisfy an argument. This is more than an accidental binding between poet and geologist; Pope’s poetics were all along the poetics of a curator, even more so than among his contemporaries. As Pat Rogers puts it, “Pope indeed could have been an antiquarian, as Swift or Gay could not.”¹²⁷

8. A fragment of marble, now in Twickenham, fastened in a grotto with “invisible clamps.” Image used with kind permission of Radnor House School.

But this does not go far enough. Pope was a collector, of many of the same sorts of things as Woodward. He was, for instance, interested in old coins, a habit he picked up when he inherited a small collection of miniatures and ancient medals from his maternal aunt.¹²⁸ And Pope, like Woodward, collected geological specimens; his collection, considered in sheer numbers of stones and weight of rock, outweighs even Woodward’s at the Sedgwick Museum. Likewise, Pope crafted for himself a cabinet—which, again like Woodward’s, survives mostly as Pope designed it. Pope’s five acres of Twickenham land, leased in 1719 with profits from his wildly successful translation of the Iliad, were marred by a curious circumstance; they were bisected by the London highway, which separated his neo-Palladian villa from his small plot of plantable ground. A tunnel solved this problem. At one end of the tunnel, which runs completely under highway and house alike, is Pope’s garden; at the other, fronting the house, is a short lawn sloping down toward a bend in the Thames. This tunnel was destined to become a site of use.¹²⁹ Contemporary sketches, including a rough sketch by William Kent, the architect responsible for at least some of the house and grounds, suggest that the tunnel was fitted with a desk and enough furniture that it could function as a place of retreat and poetic composition. Built over the last twenty years of his life, Pope’s tunnel realized (in Samuel Johnson’s words) “ornament from inconvenience,” offering a retreat from civilization, a site of intellectual labor, and a meeting place for Pope and his friends in the Tory opposition.¹³⁰ Finally, it came to house Pope’s mineralogical collection, which remains today where it was originally placed.

Pope named this tunnel his “grotto,” and its design multiply registers Pope’s understanding of the relationship between ideas and the senses—enough so that it makes sense to trace out its genesis in some detail. To begin with, Pope’s grotto represents a paradigmatic example of what Diana Balmori calls an “intermediate structure.” These structures historically included things like grottoes, hermitages, artificial ruins; they stand halfway between “architecture and landscape,” thereby “articulat[ing] the relationship between art and nature.”¹³¹ The grotto after all links neo-Palladian house to semi-informal garden, art put manifestly on display alongside a delicately sculpted natural scene. These are the sort of tensions with which Pope was at home; passing from a pastoral landscape to the house’s formal symmetry, Pope’s grotto displays manifold resemblances with his poetic craft, which delights in staging nature in the rigorous symmetry of the heroic couplet. He was a figure of paradox, who waded into public life by retreating from public centers. Set free from the demands of the marketplace, Pope, like the Roman poet Horace, took up a site outside the immediate orbit of City politics—a place from which he could launch his satires, free of the demands of piece-work production.¹³² But if the grotto has helped us develop a general understanding of the public figure he established for himself, this is in part because Pope built it as a site of work for his particularly poetic intellect. Indeed, he designed it to stage and to mirror the intellect at work there. The grotto was, as Frederick Bracher put it in 1949, a “Maze of Fancy.”¹³³ During the winter months, Pope composed from the warmest rooms in the house—indeed, like Milton, composing at times from bed. But during the warmer seasons, he composed in the grotto, which was, among other things, the house’s coolest space. And as he became used to composing there, he turned the space itself into a reflection of the poetic process as he understood it. In time, this mental cabinet and space of labor was destined to become, in Helen Deutsch’s memorable phrase, “Pope’s most representative and elusive self-portrait.”¹³⁴

The grotto has, in other words, all the signs of an active cognitive ecology, a space of thinking that captured something about how Pope saw his place in the world. This was true right from the beginning, in the grotto’s first state. The best-known description of the grotto appears in a 1725 letter penned to Edward Blount; Pope invites us to stand at the back of the grotto, looking down its long tunnel toward the Thames. Pausing at its back entrance, and looking along its length, Pope insists, “you [will] see the Sails on the River passing suddenly and vanishing, as thro’ a Perspective Glass.” Indeed, Pope’s gardener, in a pamphlet written upon Pope’s death, invites us to witness precisely this view. What he calls a “Perspective View of the Grotto”¹³⁵ ends up offering a tantalizing view through the grotto, “as thro’ a Perspective Glass,” with a small sail just passing silently by. Even here, the language is language that would not have been out of place in a description of a camera obscura; Joseph Addison and Samuel von Hoogstraten developed strikingly similar descriptions of camera obscuras they separately saw in Greenwich and London.¹³⁶ But this similarity is perhaps because Pope was himself thinking of the grotto’s other trick. “When you shut the Doors of the Grotto,” Pope continues, “it becomes on the instant, from a luminous Room, a Camera obscura; on the Walls of which the Objects of the River, Hills, Woods, and Boats, are forming a moving Picture in their visible Radiations.”¹³⁷ Deutsch calls the grotto, described in this way, Pope’s “personal embodiment of the human mind,” for it stages a streamlined account of intellection for the reflexive consumption of the eye.¹³⁸ It was not enough simply to throw the doors of the grotto open to the scene they frame; this would simply be to take advantage of the view Pope’s villa commanded. The grotto is also made to internalize an epitome of the same scene when the doors are closed, putting the process on review. This is the basic work of the camera obscura.