Title: Commercial visions
Description: This dissertation investigates how commercialization affected the visual culture of science in the early modern Netherlands. I focus on the high, fashionable atlases, prints, and specimens of natural history and human anatomy, produced by Govard Bidloo, Jacob Christoph Le Blon, Georg Eberhard Rumphius, Frederik Ruvsch, Albertus Seba in the Netherlands. I argue that the representational conventions, knowledge claims and circulations patterns of these images and material objects were thoroughly influenced by the processes of commodification. In the first section, I investigate how the aesthetics and rhetorics of scientific prints and illustrated books were transformed so that they could serve to advertise and facilitate the long-distance exchange of curiosities. In the second section, I study how the knowledge claims of printed images and specimens was often determined by the price of these objects. I argue that the scientific and financial values of visual representations tended to coincide in seventeenth- and eighteenth century Europe.