Max Planck Project

In 2006, Alina Payne was awarded the Max Planck Research Prize for the Humanities from the Max Planck Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. 

Information about the Prize:
Max Planck Society announcement

Harvard Gazette article

Video Clip

THE OBJECT AS EVENT SEMINAR ONE: VISION AND ITS INSTRUMENTS IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD

In recent years the topic of vision and visuality has attracted a great deal of interest among historians of art as well as sciences. Traditionally, perspective, which governed representation and its laws, had been the most frequently addressed theme both for being a paradigmatic invention of the Renaissance and the most obvious convergence point between artists, architects and mathematicians. More recently, due to the intense scrutiny paid to images, the interest in the exchanges between the arts and sciences has shifted to the processes of image making and reception, to the physiology of the body and the mechanics of instruments. Most work has tended to focus on the post-Scientific Revolution period. However, the economy of the eye has not had a linear development that climaxed in the modern world and the debates on the nature of sight and of seeing, on sight as vehicle as well as limit to knowledge and on the eye itself as ultimate instrument of nature (often challenged and hence unstable in its privileged position as primary access to truth) in the early modern period has been both complex and complicated. The interdisciplinary seminar then seeks to recover this discourse about sight and investigate moments of discovery and crisis, of insight and mutual illumination that the arts and the sciences shared in their perpetual effort to understand nature through the eye. In this context the tools that extended or modified sight, enhanced and transformed it and that turned sight into an event are particularly relevant to the questions that will be addressed. It is the ambition of this seminar to explore the full range of early modern conceptions of vision in which mal'occhio, spiritual visions and phantasms as well as the artist's brush or the architect's compass were seen to provide equal knowledge to, and in certain cases even better than newly developed scientific instruments and practices.

Seminar Participants:

Hannah Baader
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz

Michael Cole
History of Art, University of Pennsylvania

Lorraine Daston
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

Frank Fehrenbach
History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University

Sachiko Kusukawa
History and Philosophy of Science, Trinity College, University of Cambridge

Karin Leonhard
Kunstgeschichte, KU Einstätt-Ingoldstadt

Carla Mazzio
English Language and Literature, University of Chicago

Alessandro Nova
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz

Katharine Park
History of Science, Harvard University

Alina Payne
History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University

Victor Stoichita
Histoire de l'art et de musicologie, Université de Fribourg

Nicola Suthor
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz

Claudia Swan
Art History, Northwestern University

Catherine Wilson
Philosophy, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Gerhard Wolf
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz

 

THE OBJECT AS EVENT SEMINAR TWO: TRIUMPHAL ARCHES

THE OBJECT AS EVENT SEMINAR THREE: ARCHAEOLOGY

THE OBJECT AS EVENT SEMINAR FOUR: PARADIGM UPSETS