Dr John Holmes scrutinizes woodwork in museum for his pre-raphaelite art and science project

First, I spent a few weeks reading through the archives of the Oxford University Museum, and looking closely at the museum itself. When the leading Oxford scientists finally persuaded the University to build them a science faculty (as we’d now call it) in the 1850s, they held a competition for the building. They ended up making an audacious, eccentric and ultimately brilliant choice, opting for Gothic architecture as the best style for their modern science museum and laboratories. The architects they chose were the Irish firm of Deane and Woodward, who had been inspired by the ideals of John Ruskin. The scientist who gave the project its momentum, Henry Acland, was an old friend of Ruskin’s, and a friend and patron of Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Lizzie Siddal. Ruskin introduced Woodward to Rossetti, and Rossetti put him in touch with the Pre-Raphaelite sculptors Thomas Woolner, John Lucas Tupper, and Alexander Munro, who went on to carve the dynamic statues of scientists who surround the museum’s main court. Meanwhile, Woodward’s stone-masons who had come over from Ireland – the brothers James and John O’Shea, and their nephew Edward Whelan – were carving some of the most beautiful, vibrant and intricate decorative stonework done since the middle ages. Between them, Woodward, the Pre-Raphaelites, the O’Sheas and the Oxford scientists created not only a rich and continually surprising building, but one of the most original and imaginative symbolic representations of the natural world and the scientific project ever created. (I’ll be giving a talk on the Oxford University Museum as a Pre-Raphaelite museum in a couple of weeks - please click on this link for the flier if you would like to come along.

The second building where Pre-Raphaelite ideals came into play in representing science and nature was the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. Another triumph of Victorian Gothic (or more precisely Romanesque) architecture, the Natural History Museum was the brainchild of the great comparative anatomist Richard Owen and the architect Alfred Waterhouse. In the 1850s, when the Pre-Raphaelites had been arguing for an art modelled on science in its close observational accuracy and commitment to truth, Owen had become keen on Holman Hunt’s paintings in particular. While Owen went on to become friends with Hunt and his fellow Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, Waterhouse employed Woolner and the O’Sheas to carve the sculptures and decorations for the Manchester Assize Courts and Ford Madox Brown to paint the murals for the Manchester Town Hall. When they came to design and build the Natural History Museum, Owen and Waterhouse had the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of an art grounded in science and giving a true image of nature in their minds. The result is another building that is at once fantastic in its richness and decorative exuberance, and meticulous in the accuracy with which it depicts the animals and plants that adorn its walls, windows, roofs and arches.

Both museums look to represent nature, both are masterpieces, and both were born from a combination of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics and Natural Theology (the view of science as revealing God’s work in Nature). Even so, they offer very different aesthetic experiences and even intellectual experiences. What I am moving on to think about now is why this should be, and how, in particular, the different materials, plans, styles and techniques of the two buildings give us subtly but very significantly different interpretations of the natural world.

Dr John Holmes, Department of English Literature, University of Reading.

http://vimeo.com/52943913

Karin Lesnik-Oberstein

For further information on the project and to take part by giving your views and reading, please go to http://www.whatscientistsread.com/ or e-mail Dr Sarah Dillon at: sjd16@st-andrews.ac.uk

Professor Karin Lesnik-Oberstein

That is the question that a team of biologists, literary critics and historians at the University of Reading set out to answer in

The British Society for Literature and Science

The British Society for the History of Science

The British Society for the Philosophy of Science

The International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology

The London Interdisciplinary Discussion Group

The Public Communication of Science and Technology Network

The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts

Professor Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, University of Reading

The workshop proved to be a very lively and positive event: there was throughout a sense of enthusiastic engagement and thought. The workshop was divided into several sections: first there was a morning introduction from Professor Battey, followed by presentations from each of the four co-investigators on their specific areas of expertise. The presentations were then responded to through group-discussions based on five pre-set questions. After a break for lunch Dr Paul Hatcher introduced and presented two short natural history films on parasitoids, one from 1931 and one more contemporary one, to see what responses these might elicit in the light of the humanities. After this everyone departed to join one of four break-out groups that had been signed-up for earlier on the day: either a group thinking about interdisciplinary research-proposals, led by Professor Battey and Professor Le Saux, or a group on how humanities might be used in natural history museum curating, led by Dr John Holmes and joined by the Director of the University of Reading’s Cole Museum of Zoology (where that break-out group also took place), Dr Amanda Callaghan, or a group on teaching an interdisciplinary science and humanities module, led by Dr David Stack and based on a module designed and forthcoming at the University of Reading, or a group considering analytic ways of reading led by Professor Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, focussing on a critical reading of an article by Vittorio Gallese and Alvin Goldman on ‘Mirror Neurons and the Simulation Theory of Mind-Reading’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences2:12, December 1998, 493-501. The workshop then ended with a summarising of the day’s events by Professor Battey.

All in all, it was a most enjoyable and productive day with the exchange of many interesting and important ideas and questions, on which we will be reporting further here in the near future.

Professor Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, University of Reading

I have been working in the field of literature and science for the last seven years or so, looking primarily at the relationship between physics and literature in the early twentieth century. My doctoral thesis considered the writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence alongside the ideas discussed by Albert Einstein in his 1905 papers, exploring moments of direct influence as well as links which could be ascribed to a more generalised zeitgeist model. One of the key ideas at the centre of my thesis, and one which continues to inform all of my work in the area of literature and science, is Gillian Beer’s suggestion that ‘ways of viewing the world are not constructed separately by scientists and poets; they share the moment’s discourse’ (Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, Oxford University Press, 1996). I am fascinated by the ways in which similar ideas can emerge across different disciplines at the same time, even when there is no obvious direct link or trace of influence in either direction. I am also interested in the ways in which scientific ideas are presented to non-scientists, and am at the early stages of a project which will consider the presence of popular science articles and scientific ideas in a number of early twentieth-century generalist periodicals.

For me, Cultivating Common Ground is of particular interest for a number of reasons: firstly, because it involves thinking about the ways in which the humanities could influence/inform/impact upon science, an aspect of the relationship between the sciences and the humanities which is often overlooked and underestimated. Secondly, because it will bring scientists and humanities scholars together, something which happens less frequently than it should: I am often surprised by the apparent reluctance of humanities scholars, including those who work in interdisciplinary areas, to engage with potential colleagues in other fields, and scientists are usually in a significant minority in interdisciplinary groups like the British Society for Literature and Science. Finally, I think that Cultivating Common Ground is exciting because nobody quite knows what the project and the workshop will reveal: I am really looking forward to listening to the discussions on 18^th July, and to seeing the sharing of discourse on biology, literature, history and the current moment in action.

Rachel Crossland

Francoise Le Saux

David Stack