Introduction

This book is a study of a single image – though arguably one of the best known that has come down to us from seventeenth-century science. This is the plate that was published as the frontispiece to Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society of London (1667). It was designed by the virtuoso and diarist, John Evelyn, and etched by Wenceslaus Hollar, the Bohemian artist long domiciled in England. 1 Within an architectural setting surmounted by the Royal Society’s coat of arms and festooned with scientifi cally signifi cant books and objects, it shows a bust of King Charles II, the society’s founder and patron, placed on a pedestal and being crowned with a wreath by the goddess Fame. The column on which Charles’s bust stands is fl anked to the right by the society’s fi rst President, William, Viscount Brouncker, and to the left by Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, the fi gure from the early seventeenth century who more than anyone else was the society’s intellectual inspiration. Bacon provided a mandate for the complete reformulation of knowledge about the natural world, not least through the collection of a great inductive ‘natural history’, and he also emphasised the desirability of the application of science to practical use. Here, he is shown in his robes as Lord Chancellor.