Date/Time
Thursday
1 Nov 2012
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Location
470 Stephens Hall

Event Type
Colloquium

Sven Dupré
Professor, Freie Universität Berlin

This talk discusses investigations of the production and knowledge of glassmaking in the early seventeenth century. It uses these vitreous pursuits to show that issues of global trade and domestic production, collecting and consumption of luxury goods, and art and science came together to produce a culture of knowledge, which also entailed re-definitions of optics and alchemy. The geographical focus of the talk is on the city of Antwerp, which in this period emerged as the largest commercial metropolis north of the Alps, and which was the home of a flourishing façon de Venise luxury glass industry, and the Medici court in Florence, where Antonio Neri (after a stay in Antwerp of almost one decade) published the first treatise on glass-making, with the title, “The Art of Glass.”