Watch, Read, Listen

An exhibition centered around Joseph Wright of Derby’s masterpiece “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” becomes a starting point to examine how witnessing experiments with air pumps were critically important for the transfer of scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment and after.

Featuring Otto von Guericke’s 1672 publication “Experimenta nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de vacuo spatio”

Produced for the exhibition “Science and the Sublime: A Masterpiece by Joseph Wright of Derby”

Tita Chico, professor at the University of Maryland, explores how the concept of wonder during the eighteenth century helps us to see the imaginative underpinnings of how we come to understand the natural world and its various phenomena. Through this lecture, she reveals how feeling played a constitutive role in the formulation of Enlightenment rationalization.

The eighteenth century was populated with fantastical wonders where the moon could bleed; a tree could moan and also amble about the countryside; a little boy could have Latin and Hebrew etched in the whites of his eyes; one woman infected with smallpox could find that her legs self-amputate and another could give birth to seventeen rabbits; and people in the North of England lived up to 140 years. These wonders illustrate a co-mingling of divine portents and scientific facts, contradictory and yet concurrent ways of understanding the natural world, and a myriad of social connections that give these interpretations their value.

This is the Dibner Lecture in the History of Science and Technology.

In her new book, Temples in the Cliffside: Buddhist Art in Sichuan, Sonya Lee argues that centuries-old religious monuments can be part of the world’s sustainable future. This talk focuses on the transformation of cave temples from religious centers into tourist destinations in southwest China, where venerable sites such as Leshan, Nankan, and Baodingshan have become entangled in some of the most consequential economic, political, and religious trends in Asia today.

In response to Mathew Craske’s prize winning recent biography of Joseph Wright of Derby, Huntington curators Joel Klein and Melinda McCurdy discuss Wright’s iconic painting, Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768) in the exhibition, “Science and the Sublime: A Masterpiece by Joseph Wright of Derby,” in the context of older traditions of European art and of the history of science.