The Discovery of Nature: Art of the Netherlands & Low Countries. 8

Huygens, Art & Science

In addition to his appetite for art, Huygens was keenly interested in science, especially advances made in optics. During his youth Huygens would have been aware of the links forged between art and the experiments and innovations made by such philosophers as Cornelis Drebbel whom Huygens visited in London. Born in Alkmaar, but mainly based in England, Drebbel was the epitome of an eccentric scientist, though some regarded him as a crank and/or sorcerer. Inventor, occasional entertainer at the English court, he created microscopes, made a perpetual motion machine, invented a “self-playing clavichord,” and built a submarine that submerged beneath the Thames with its inventor inside.¹ Unsurprisingly, Drebble gained a reputation as something of a charlatan rather than a reputable scientist; Rubens wasn’t convinced by him and astutely observed that the scientist might be seen better at a distance than close up.² Truth and deception were also to be found in de Gheyn’s art which occasionally juxtaposed precisely observed creatures of nature with superstitious themes like witchcraft and alchemy (above), of which Huygens was deeply suspicious. Looking through microscopes and the box known as the camera obscura were scientific activities that complimented the art of painting, not alchemical distractions. Huygens owned a camera obscura which he obtained from Drebble, and he observed, not without some amusement the painting duel between the elder De Gheyne (I) and the controversial artist Johannes Torrentius who claimed to use “magic paint,” and who might have employed a camera obscura in the creation of one of his few surviving works, a striking still-life in the Rijksmuseum. Perhaps this interest in the camera obscura even overlapped with Huygen’s private life as Alpers identifies a passage in the Daghwerck where the diplomat describes bringing news to his wife in terms of the operation of light entering a darkened room, like in a camera obscura.³ As this author observed, there is “something very Dutch about a poet using the intimacy of his own house and marriage as a central image of life, even as there is something Dutch about Huygen’s equanimity towards the implications of the new science.” It would be this new science that would allow Huygen’s son Christian to launch an illustrious scientific career for which he would become more famous than his father, especially in England and France.⁴

1Alpers, The Art of Describing, 4f.

2Ibid, 5.

3“I have agreeable tidings which I shall bring to you inside the house. Just as in a darkened room one can see by the action of the sun through a glass everything (though inverted) which goes on outside.” Cited in Alpers, Art of Describing, 11.

4 On Christian Huygens and the new science in England, Jardine, Going Dutch, 261f.