2002 Reports

Tracing lineages in Italian culture : modes of viewing from Vasari to film and television culture

White, Jonathan

The matters I am going to discuss involve in their widest implications considerations
of our epistemologies of knowledge, and our devices or technologies for bringing
distant and sometimes abstruse aspects of the world into some frame of reference and
mode for viewing. Later on I shall call this frame and mode a ‘cultural cosmorama’,
grounding that notion in an account of actual optic boxes of the late eighteenth/early
nineteenth century.