Beauty and the beast: Art and science in early modern European equine Imagery

This article analyses artists' manuals and veterinary texts in order to understand some of the assumptions attending the production of art and the practice of science in early modern Europe. These sources, several of which have remained largely unstudied, share a similar focus on the horse: how artists can best render them and how horse-owners and stable-masters can best care for them. The article considers these sources within their artistic, scientific and hippological contexts, but pays special attention to how the discursive practices of art and science overlap. The artists' manuals promote mathematically oriented techniques and aesthetics, while the illustration to the veterinary texts are fundamentally informed by artistic and iconographic traditions. Art and science thus mutually elucidate each other while simultaneously highlighting the social and economic importance of the horse in early modern history.