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Post date: 15-Jul-2009 19:22:17
Thirty-First Annual Conference
October 4 - October 7, 2007
San Diego, California
Presenter: Vera Keller, Princeton University
Paper Title: Moving Pictures: Circulating Drebbel’s Perpetuum Mobile
Abstract: The perpetual motion machines Cornelis Drebbel (1572–1633) devised in Stuart
London and Rudolfine Prague became a byword for invention in early modern Europe. Reports
of the device spread rapidly as a commonplace in arguments concerning human ingenuity.
Images of the perpetuum mobile also circulated in the new Southern Netherlandish genre of the
cabinet d’amateur. Such works depicted fictional and repetitive assemblages of paintings,
statuary, and machinery. Painters manipulated collections of drawings to generate this visual
copia just as writers deployed commonplace-books to produce rhetorical copia. “Commonplace”
drawings of Drebbel’s perpetuum mobile did not provide technical details; rather, such
drawings were used to make a rhetorical point concerning the power of art. I show how this
medium not only served to advertise Drebbel in particular as the inventor of the device, but to
engage circles of amateurs in affective associations celebrating human art in general.
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