October 16, 2018
Excerpt from The Fate of Anatomical Collections, Chapter 5 Resilient Collections : The long life of Leiden’s earliest Anatomical Collections by Tim Huisman
“To characterize the collection assembled by Otho Heurnius in the Faliedebagijnenkerk as an anatomical collection naturally raises the question of what exactly anatomy was in the early seventeenth century. How could this kaleidoscopic ensemble, in which skeletons and anatomical preparations accounted for only a relatively small share compared to the vast bulk of naturalia and artificialia, have functioned in combination with the anatomical demonstrations and instruction that also took place at this location? Anatomy in the early seventeenth century can be considered an investigation by means of the fabric of the dead human body into the essence of the human being, namely the evidence it shows of God’s in nite wisdom and providence. Man – the pinnacle of Creation – is the most perfect example of God’s work in the world. But it is not the only example. Knowledge of God’s work in the world through anatomy would be insufficient and incomplete without a much wider understanding of the Book of Nature and the moral and philosophical place of man therein. Hence Heurnius’s ensembles of engravings representing biblical, mythical and emblematic themes, of objects from the earliest stages of history, where biblical tradition and the literary sources of Antiquity meet, and of naturalia and ethnographica showing the wonders of nature and the endless variety of creation. “
Source: The Fate of Anatomical Collections Rina Knoeff, Robert Zwijnenberg. Ashgate Publishing Company (2015)
ID: god-s-work-early-17th-century-epistemology
Categories:
Tags: Boerhaave | COGWEB | Chinese | LSTM | Leiden | PGM | RNN | Ruysch | actors | aesthesis | agency | algorithm | analysis | anatomical | anatomy | androgynous | architecture | archive | artificialia | axis | black-box | body | botanical | brain | categories | categorization | channel | character recognition | chinese | classification | clustering | cnn | codes | cognition | collecting | collection | collections | colonialism | commodification | concept | conceptual-clustering | convolutional neural network | cost | counting | cut | cuts | cutting | datasets | demonstration | diagram | dimensionality | disgust | dissection | distance | domestication | elegance | epistemology | error | euclidean | evaluation | eye | figures | finger | forecasting | forensics | frame | freakish | geometry | gesture | gestures | gradient descent | graph | graphs | grouping | hacking | hand | hand writing | hands | hands-on | handwriting | hardware | history | human | human body | imagination | imperfect | inscription | instruments | joint | kmeans | knowledge | labeling | landmark | learning | location | machine learning | machines | materiality | meaning | measurement | memory | mnist | model | models | monsters | muscles | mystical | mythological | naturalia | nerves | nervous system | network | networks | neural networks | neural-anatomy | neuron | nonlinearity | observation | offline | online | ontologies | ontology | ontology-building | optimization | orientation | orthogonality | parallel | pca | perception | perceptron | perfection | performance | planes | poetic | position | prediction | preparation | preparations | projection | proportion | proportions | psychology | python | races | representation | representations | rhetoric | rnn | segments | selection | sensory experience | sensory perception | similarity | skeleton | skin | skull | skulls | space | sparseness | spectacle | spectators | speech | standard | statistic-ontology | statistical | statistical-ontology | svm | symbols | tacit | taxonomy | theatre | time-series | timeseries | tools | topological | training | treatise | trial | truth | type | typography | unsupervised | vision | visualization | wellcome | word2vec | writing | zodiac |