Benutzerspezifische Werkzeuge

This project investigates the forgotten Neptunomania which seized European courts and cities from the mid sixteenth to the mid seventeenth century. Since Aby Warburg’s inchoate formulation of The Age of Neptune in his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, a systematic study of this craze for water-god imagery has never been undertaken. Indeed, most of the existing scholarship on early modern Neptunes focuses on the Italian context. Building on art historians’ explorations of the agentive and affective qualities of images and the afterlife of the classical tradition, as well as the link between the fashioning of state power and the emergence of the New Philosophies around 1600 established by historians of knowledge, we are conducting an iconographic study of the relationship between early modern power and new scientific engagements with the world through the figure of Neptune.

Our work starts from four hypotheses. First, between 1520 and 1620, the image of Neptune became a highly legible allegory of imperium. Second, by 1580, Neptune came to signify new ideas about reason of state and the prince as master of the elements. Third, around 1600, monumental iterations of Neptune at European courts were understood to represent princely sponsorship of new engagements with water as an element in the arts, alchemy, natural philosophy, and engineering. Lastly, we argue that Neptunian iconography visually embodies a transconfessional political-epistemic project combining the cabinet, garden, library, workshop, and laboratory at courts and cities around 1600 which was central to the development of the New Philosophies.

[Caption: M. Raimondi after Raffaello, Quos Ego (1515–16). Engraving, 43 x 32.7 cm. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, Italy.]