Thomas Lolis

Fluddean Art: An Inquiry into Visual Representations of the Cosmos

Abstract

As both an investigation into the architecture of the universe and a defense against the advent of Keplerian science, seventeenth-century English astrologer, alchemist, and physician Robert Fludd constructed his incomplete magnum opus, Utriusque Cosmi…Historia. Fludd meticulously designed a series of artistic engravings to accompany this text, and these images signify and illuminate Fludd's Neoplatonic consideration of cosmic structure. These works of astrological art also underscore the way in which early modern magical philosophy struggled with and against the rising interest in astronomic science. While Fludd used the Utriusque Cosmi…Historia as a way to assail Keplerian methodology, my presentation demonstrates that Fluddean art highlights complementary moments between the discourses of science and magic. Most significantly, I address the ways in which the inherent complexity in Fludd's astrological art represents an attempt to create psychological stability in the increasingly unstable environments of early modernity.

Biography

Thomas Lolis has held an Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA's Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies and a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research is focused on early modern natural philosophy, visual rhetoric, the history of science, and narratives of religious dissent. He has published on magic and early modernity in Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the History of Philosophy, Forum for World Literature Studies, and Renaissance Text Series: Early Modern Digital Pedagogy (forthcoming). A book manuscript, "The Cartography of Interiority: Magic, Mapmaking".