1media/DSC_0734 copy.jpg2020-07-10T17:18:08+00:00Imagine Temperaments18structured_gallery2020-07-28T15:11:03+00:00 In the early modern period, the beginnings of empirical science competed with Platonic distrust of the senses. Could the senses be trusted? Where do the things seen in the mind’s eye come from? Thomas Hobbes considered imagination (phantasia) to be a particularly dangerous faculty of the mind for its ability to cloud reason and deceive the sense of sight (Leviathan, 1651). He feared an imagination ungoverned by reason, which plunged the mind into darkness and left it vulnerable to witchcraft and the Devil. As both Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621) and Timothy Bright (Treatise of Melancholy, 1586) earlier cautioned, the melancholic temperament was especially vulnerable to the “monstrous fictions” of imagination.
Even earlier, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Cennino Cennini (c.1360–before 1427) recognized the generative potential of the imagination’s chimerical images. “Painting...,” Cennini wrote, "calls for imagination ... in order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects, and to fix them with the hand, presenting to plain sight what does not really exist.” The works in this section represent the outcomes of artistic imagination, yet they require the viewer to complete their interpretation. These prints beckon the mind to “discover things not seen”: to experience beauty, sadness, and rage; to interpret meaning; to finish an image for the artist, and even to envision our own.
