Science and Taste: Painting, Passions, and the New Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Leiden

This article argues that the art collection owned by Franciscus dele Boe, Sylvius, a professor of practical medicine at the University of Leiden from 1658 to 1672, gives insight into some aspects of the character and significance of the new philosophy in the midseventeenth century. Through his teaching, his advocacy, and his practice of the new experimental philosophy, Sylvius played a role in shaping and institutionalizing the practices of the new philosophy that spread throughout Europe in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sylvius's house design and large painting collection also exemplified the consumption and taste of the northern Netherlands in the seventeenth century. An examination of both Sylvius's science and his taste can help us understand what was at stake for Sylvius and his contemporaries in their practice of the new philosophy. This article finds that Sylvius's taste and his science both involved practices of social distinction, demarcation, and control. Moreover, both were enmeshed in controversy about the epistemological status of knowledge gained through the senses and about the practices by which that knowledge was gathered.