ABSTRACT
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a shift towards a secular world picture in which scientific innovation and economic individualism combined to transform human society. The social, economic, and religious conflicts that traversed Western Europe during the revolutionary period were the conditions that formed not only the legal relations of bourgeois society, but also a scientific imagination that presented nature as a resource available for human manipulation. I will examine the increasing public awareness of science that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries – particularly in the cult of the scientist as it was reproduced in contemporary portraiture, detailed depictions of practical experimentation, and analytical drawings of nature and scientific equipment. The chapter develops the idea that this aesthetic formation is the basis of a new ideology in which ‘science’ is understood as a primarily utilitarian pursuit whose purpose is the maximization of human productivity and economic growth.
