Extracted in Siberia and moved in Anglo-Russian trade, the foliaceous mineral muscovite (white mica) fed the imaginations of early modern painters, poets, and natural philosophers alike. This seminar will focus on a group of micaceous objects — portrait overlays, embroidered cabinets, scientific instruments, and a perspective treatise — that dramatize a culture of interaction between art and science, amateurs and experts, foreign travel and domesticity in the long seventeenth century.
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