Globes in the Library. Baroque Geocentrism and the Visual Order of Knowledge

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Mateusz Kapustka
• Subject Area: Art History ; History of Science
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548646008

The project investigates visual dimensions of the 17th- and 18th-century geocentrism upon the comprehensive analysis of images, books, globes, scientific instruments, and illustrated university theses as iconic media of knowledge in representative Baroque cloister library halls, colleges, and astronomical observatories of the Habsburg Empire (Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia). Starting with the assumption that monumental fresco images served as visual directories for library book collections and signified the cluster order of scientific faculties and disciplines represented, it analyses the relation between the painted depictions of divine heaven and the geocentric order of knowledge in the library halls. Thus, the investigation aims to critically reconstruct the Baroque intertwining of scientific and religious argumentation and seeks to overcome the dichotomy between heaven and sky, which sustainably affected the art-historical writing on the topic until today. The project’s transdisciplinary goal is hence to integrate the history of the hitherto frequently marginalised 17th-18th-century substantial debate on Earth’s universal centrality and its imagination into the very dispute on cultural media of the early modern production of knowledge, scientific evidence, and globalisation in art history, visual studies, and cultural studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants