brought the relationship between the history of art and the history of science to a new level of intimacy. These, and a host of other scholars, built on the legacies of Julius von Schlosser, Edgar Zilsel, Erwin Panofsky, and, more recently, Michael Baxandall and Svetlana Alpers, in order to probe the relationship between the pictorial arts and the mathematical disciplines, the worlds of collecting, wonder, and the study of nature. Objects that had previously been dismissed or overlooked were brought to the fore: natural-historical drawings and specimens, geometrical diagrams, scientific instruments, and mechanical marvels were placed in dialogue with paintings and sculptures. In an approach influenced by Marxist traditions in the history of science and art, as well as by anthropology as practiced by Clifford Geertz and Marcel Mauss, these artifacts were carefully situated in their economic, social, and intellectual contexts. Most importantly, searching questions were posed about cultures and practices writ large. Modes of observing, recording, and representing; the technologies of investigating nature and producing art; the mixed communities in which such activities took placeall these took center stage. The net result was a radical expansion not only in the types of objects to be studied, but also in the range of the academic disciplines to be embraced and the kinds of historical narratives that could be written. The resulting drift away from the canonbe it of artworks, media, individuals, or notions such as progressmirrored the wider disciplinary change brought about by the rise of visual culture, the rumblings of which were just then starting to be heard. James Elkins's provocative Art Bulletin essay "Art History and Images That Are not Art" (1995) and October's "Visual Culture Questionnaire" (1996) offered a taste of things to come, but the German variety of visual studies-Bildwissenschaft (literally, "science of the image")was only dimly on the horizon of most anglophone scholars at the time. Since the millennium, this new research into early modern art and science has grown to such an extent that it warrants an analytical overview. This essay will