Ingenious Images: A Catalogue of the Visual Culture of Early Modern Ingenuity

This is a searchable catalogue of the visual culture of early modern ingenuity. It comprises 300 fully catalogued images from the period ca.1450-ca.1750, ranging from woodcut emblems to oil paintings, engraved book illustrations to tapestries, silver medals, and more. This resource is intended to further the study of early modern ingenuity by providing scholars with a substantial and diverse sample of how this vital concept was visually represented.

The catalogue is intended to compliment the following book: Alexander Marr, Raphaële Garrod, José Ramón Marcaida, Richard J. Oosterhoff, Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). This book, which explores the language of ingenuity in Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch, and English, provides the catalogue with one of its most important features. Logodaedalus analyses 18 keywords related to ingenuity, such as ingenium, esprit, ingegno, geest, and wit. Each of the images collected here have been catalogued by using one or more of these ingenuity keywords. This is what makes the images here "ingenious images";. Either explicitly or implicitly, they channel the meaning of one or more of these early modern keywords, and thus some part of the wider early modern culture of ingenuity.

Besides these ingenuity keywords, the images have also been catalogued according to various other attributes, all of which are searchable. General Keywords are intended to provide a quick insight into the topic and meaning of the image. An Iconclass Classification has been assigned to each image, allowing users to find, at a glance, those images which are, for example, allegorical scenes or personifications. Simple features such as Title, Date of Production, Place of Production, Dimensions, and Medium have been noted wherever possible. Where a piece has one known Artist behind it, this has been recorded. But we have also provided Alternative Artists in cases where there is uncertainty or where more than one person was involved in the creation and publication of an image.

This catalogue was compiled by Alexander Marr, Marta Cacho Casal, Thomas Colville, Irene Galandra Cooper, Andrés Vélez Posada, and Lorraine de la Verpillière. It is part of their work on the project Genius Before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and Science, hosted by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), at the University of Cambridge. The research leading to these findings has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no 617391.

We are grateful to the holding institutions of these images, especially to those which have overseen their digitisation. To the best of our ability and knowledge, all appropriate image copyrights have been attained and listed on the relevant page for each image. Images held here are not to be downloaded directly from Apollo. For further information on reproduction and copyright, please consult the websites of each individual holding institution.