The Discovery of Nature: Art of the Netherlands & Low Countries. 5

Protestantism in the Netherlands.

There was a view introduced in modern academia that pious protestantism increased due to the seventeenth-century’s growing interest in science; members of the Royal Society in England were primarily Puritans and sought to minimise the importance of spiritual thought, though that could not be completely divorced from divinity.¹ This “Merton thesis” has been questioned in recent years, though it did open a debate about the relationship between scientific experimentation and the puritan faith by which is meant “a strong utilitarian strain, a work ethic and a mistrust of system” in the words of Alpers.² The scientific puritans in England were inspired by Sir Francis Bacon; but in Holland, it was a “Dutch reading of Bacon” that grew, fuelled by his interest in the role of experimental science which Alpers related to the country’s interest in general of ways of seeing, and specifically craft and design which is suggested in works like David Bailly’s Still-Life of of 1651 (above). And it was far from the Netherlands's intention to harness Bacon in order to build huge systems of thought based on a knowledge of nature; what the Dutch took from Bacon was “the experimental program and its taxonomic format” that drew followers since his work began to appear in Holland. The Dutch were interested in “seeing right” as set out by Baconian- influenced members of the Royal Society such as Robert Hooke (1635-1703) who recorded that observing and accurately recording things was the basis of a new form of knowledge, ideas taken on board by artists such as Jacques de Gheyn with his involving treatment of objects and nature.³ Within the domain of art, the Dutch would produce a new kind of art that is striking because of its emphasis on what can be seen rather than just represented, though the issue of representation is a complex one to explain.

1Peter Harrison, “Religion and the Early Royal Society” Science & Christian Belief, Vol 22, No. 1 21

2 Alpers, The Art of Describing, 24. R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, enlarged edn, New York: Free Press (1969), pp. 574F: ‘that the Puritan ethic, as an ideal-typical expression of the value attitudes basic to ascetic Protestantism generally, so canalized the interests of seventeenth century Englishmen as to constitute one important element in the enhanced cultivation of science.”

3 Ibid, 85.