Beautiful Sciences

With "Schöne Wissenschaften" (Beautiful Sciences) in the title of the volume, a central philosophical term of the Enlightenment is taken up, in which different ideas of beauty and science are combined. These ideas played a role in art and natural science collections in the late 18th century and direct the attention to the revealing and interesting structures of knowledge and cognition of that time. "Schöne Wissenschaften" is dedicated to the art and natural science collections of the time of Emperor Joseph II (reigned 1765-1790). The Imperial Coin Cabinet, the Physical Cabinet and the Natural History Cabinet, the collection of wax anatomical models in the Josephinum and the Imperial Picture Gallery in the Upper Belvedere form the starting point for far-reaching questions on the history of the collections and the public and scientific understanding in Vienna during the Enlightenment. The development of ideas and concepts for the ordering and presentation of these collections was closely related to simultaneous projects of very different disciplines. These projects beyond the collection field programmatically dealt with the scientific, systematizing and ordering aspects and provided essential theoretical and practical impulses for the collections. "Schöne Wissenschaften" is also concerned with these initiatives, the content of which ranges from the search for the origins of oil painting and engraving, the development of art history as a historical discipline, to questions of Habsburg representation in art, to standardization efforts in architectural drafts and the cataloguing of books. The ideas of the Enlightenment were mainly disseminated by journals, networks of scholars and academies. In analogy to this, from the perspective of collecting, organizing and presenting, the question will be discussed to what extent the Josephinian collections also bundle these ideas, translate them into practice, convey and popularize them, and thus exemplary for the paradigm shift of that time that is still resonating today make them places of knowledge and cognition. The aim of this volume is to relate the collection and ordering projects and their public presentation to one another beyond a single case study showing that an interdisciplinary reflection can lead to a deeper understanding of art and natural science collections and of the fundamentally new quality of view of the world during the Enlightenment. With contributions by Elisabeth Hassmann, Christa Riedl-Dorn, Anna Maerker, Nora Fischer (Ed.), Gernot Mayer, Hans C. Hönes, Werner Telesko, Anna Mader-Kratky (Ed.), Markus Krajewski, Andrea Seidler, Thomas Wallnig, Debora J. Meijers, Eva Kernbauer.