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Michael Bycroft Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVIII:3 (Winter, 2018), 359–384. Michael Bycroft Style and Substance in Rococo Science “Rococo science” might seem to be a jarring term, and not just because we are accustomed to placing “art” and “science” in different categories. Consider the following statements, one about a set of ornamental engravings and the other about a theory of electricity. The first comes from the Mercure de France, the unofficial organ of the style rocaille in 1730s Paris, and the second from the Histoire et Mémoires of the Royal Academy of Science, the official organ of French sci- ence in the same period: (1) “There has appeared a suite of engravings in wide format that will pique the curiosity of the public and of curious people [curieux] of the best taste. These are fountains, waterfalls, ruins, rock-work, shells, and pieces of architecture that produce bizarre, singular, and picturesque effects [effets bizarres singuliers et pittoresques] through their strange and enticing forms [ formes piquantes et extra- ordinaires], of which no parts agree with the others.”1 (2) “Such are the simple and primitive facts [ faits simples et primitifs] to which all known experiments on electricity may be reduced; the number of such principles will diminish as we acquire a more exact knowledge of electricity, which until now was known only by a few very complicated experiments [expériences très-compliquées] that de- pended on bizarre circumstances [circonstances bizarres]. Now we know that electricity is a general quality of matter that depends on invariable principles [ principes invariables]andissubjecttoexactlaws[loix exactes].”2 Michael Bycroft is Assistant Professor in the History of Science and Technology, University of Warwick. He is the author of “Iatrochemistry and the Evaluation of Mineral Waters in France, 1600–1750,” Bulletin for the History of Medicine, XCI (2017): 303–330; “Wonders in the Academy: The Value of Strange Facts in the Experimental Research of Charles Dufay,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, LXIII (2013): 334–370. © 2017 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_01162 1 Mercure de France, March 1734, 558–559, quoted in Alastair Laing, “French Ornamental Engravings and the Diffusion of the Rococo,” in Henri Zerner (ed.), Le stampe e la difusione delle immagini e degli stili, Atti de XXIV Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell’Arte (Bologna, 1979), 113–114. 2 Charles Dufay, “Sixième mémoire sur l’électricité: Où on examine quel rapport il y a entre l’électricité et la faculté de rendre de la lumière, qui est commune à la plupart des corps électrique, et ce qu’on peut inférer de ce rapport,” Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences (herein MAS) (Paris, 1736), 525–526. This volume of the Mémoires comprised papers read to the Academy in 1734. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01162 by guest on 28 September 2021 360 | MICHAEL BYCROFT Both passages appeared in 1734, but their similarities end there. For the reviewer in the Mercure de France, “bizarre” was a term of appreciation. For Dufay, the author of the second passage, it denoted dissatisfaction. For the reviewer, the value of the engravings under review, executed by Gabriel Huquier but inspired by the goldsmith Juste Aurèle Meissonnier, lay in their irregularity, that is, in the strangeness of their forms and the disagreement between their parts. For Dufay, the value of electricity lay in its regularity, that is, in the generality of its phenomena and the exactness and invariability of its laws. The point of Dufay’stheoryofelectricitywastodiscover a small number of principles—the fewer the better—that framed the known facts about electricity. By contrast, the point of the engrav- ings was to overwhelm the frame with a profusion of detail: In Figure 1, the curvaceous structure on the left of the engraving ap- pears to frame the image, but it is overrun by the fountain in the center of the engraving, fading into the background on the right. Both the theory of electricity and this engraving were human cre- ations intended to represent the natural world. But the theory was meant to represent nature per se, whereas the engraving was an art- ful imitation of nature that blended natural bodies (rocks, shells, and waterfalls) with the fantasy of the artist. These antitheses—regularity versus irregularity, structure versus the play of surfaces, and the separation of art and nature versus the Fig.1 Engraving after Meissonnier SOURCE Gabriel Huquier, Oeuvre de Juste Aurèle Meissonnier (Paris, n.d.), reproduced in Fiske Kimball, The Creation of the Rococo Decorative Style (New York, 1980), 323, Figure 209. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01162 by guest on 28 September 2021 STYLE AND SUBSTANCE IN ROCOCO SCIENCE | 361 conflation of those two categories—were not peculiar to Dufay and Meissonnier. They apply broadly to the artistic productions of the rococo period and to the scientific productions of the early Enlighten- ment, most clearly in Paris between 1710 and 1740. This article shows that this divergence is merely apparent. The stylistic differ- ences between academic science and rococo art dissolve if we pay attention to their common concern with making and manipulating substances. Decorative substances—especially gold, gems, lacquer, porcelain, wrought iron, and dyestuffs—were central to experi- mental research at the Academy of Science during the three decades in question. René Réaumur and Dufay, two of the men who dom- inated this experimental program, examined these materials in their search for cheaper and more efficient techniques in the decorative arts. They were concerned as much with the beauty of their products as with cost and efficiency, and their notions of beauty resembled those of rococo artists. Moreover, their interest in the style and substances of rococo art was not merely utilitarian. Their study of these substances fed into fundamental research in what we now call chemistry, physics, and mineralogy, and this research was sustained not just by the substances themselves but also by the very properties that made those substances rococo—their irregularity, their spectac- ular surfaces, and their imitative qualities. “Rococo” and “science” are a natural pairing when we examine the substances that scientists and artists had in common and the ways these substances under- pinned the rococo style. ROCOCO ART AND ENLIGHTENMENT SCIENCE This article attempts to solve the historical paradox embodied in Dufay’s theory of elec- tricity and Meissonnier’s designs: How can we explain the co- existence of two such contrasting cultural products in the same city in the same year? The question is worth asking because Dufay and Meissonnier were men of their time. For intellectual historians, Dufay exemplifies an epistemological and metaphysical shift that occurred in the natural sciences during the early decades of the eighteenth century. Seventeenth-century natural philosophers had reveled in strange and anomalous phenomena, in the irreduc- ible complexity of nature, and in the interaction between natural bodies and human artifacts. Their eighteenth-century counterparts replaced anomalies with generalities, favored simple rules over rich descriptions, and drew a sharp line between artifacts (the direct Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01162 by guest on 28 September 2021 362 | MICHAEL BYCROFT products of human action) and natural bodies (now understood as the products of laws decreed by a remote God). This new approach to nature, which emerged in the latter part of the seventeenth cen- tury, was firmly in place at the Academy of Science in the second decade of the eighteenth century.3 For historians of art, Meissonnier’s sinuous candlesticks are typ- ical of the French rococo, a stylistic movement with a similar time- table to that of early Enlightenment science. According to most standard accounts, this movement had its origins among interior decorators working for Louis XIV late in his reign. It gained momen- tum during the Regency of Philippe II (1715–1723), in the redeco- ration of the Regent’s Paris residence the Palais Royal, in Parisian interiors commissioned by such wealthy financiers as John Law and Pierre Crozat, and in the paintings of Jean Antoine Watteau and Jacques de la Joue. It climaxed during the 1730s and 1740s with the interiors designed and executed by the sculptor Nicolas Pineau, the paintings of François Boucher and Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, and, above all, the gold- and silverwork of Meissonnier, which were, in the words of one authority, “the most extreme, characteristic, and novel expression” of the movement. Known at the time as “le goût moderne,”“le goût du siècle,” the “genre pittoresque,” or the “rocaille,” the movement has been known since the end of the eighteenth century as the “rococo,” a term that began as a slur but evolved into a neutral descriptor for a distinctive phase in French painting and decoration.4 3 For an influential statement of this view, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998), 352 (Dufay). See also Daston, “The Cold Light of Facts and the Facts of Cold Light: Luminescence and the Transformation of the Sci- entific Fact, 1600–1750,” Early Modern France, III (1997), 1–27; idem, “Nature by Design,” in Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (eds.), Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York, 1998), 233–253; idem, “Preternatural Philosophy,” in idem (ed.), Biographies of ScientificObjects(Chicago, 2000), 40 (Dufay); Christian Licoppe, La formation de la pratique scientifique: le discours de l’expérience en France et en Angleterre (1630–1820) (Paris, 1996), 46, 98, 113–116, 118–119. 4 Fiske Kimball, The Creation of the Rococo Decorative Style (New York, 1980), 161 (“most extreme”).
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