Anneke de Bont: The Christian Epistemic Image in Northern European Print, c.1570–c.1700

Supervisor: Prof Alexander Marr

Research overview:

This dissertation employs the framework of the ‘epistemic image’ — a scholarly term which early modernists apply in near exclusivity to images of scientific inquiry — to explore the ways in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printmakers in northern Europe visualised subjects on the boarders between science and religion. Typological, morphological, and thematic groupings of ‘Christian epistemic prints’ which have received little, if any, art historical attention, are presented in this dissertation as case studies. These include the first comprehensive exploration of the seventeenth-century Christian horological images which arrange religious instruction along the hours of sundials or mechanical clocks, an analysis of a German calendar print which adjusts astrological information to create a Christian message, and an investigation into the ways in which Christian readings of observable, astronomical phenomena were conceptualised in print. As a resource for further study, this dissertation concludes with an appendix which collects additional early modern prints which may be further analysed under the umbrella term of Christian epistemic imagery.

Biography:

Anneke earned a BA in the history of art from Reed College in 2015, an MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2018 and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in 2019 where she is now a PhD candidate in the history of art. Her research interests include print culture, diagrammatic and schematic imagery, word-image relationships, and the intersections of science and religion in the visual culture of early modern northern Europe.