Schöne Wissenschaften

With "Schöne Wissenschaften" (Beautiful Sciences) in the title of the volume, a central philosophical term of the Enlightenment is taken up, with which various ideas of beauty and science are connected. 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. "Beautiful Sciences" focuses on the art and natural science collections under Emperor Joseph II (r. 1765-1790), and makes them the entry point to a far-reaching analysis of their history, and of how they were understood scientifically and by the public in Vienna during the Enlightenment. Going beyond the field of collections, the essays are also devoted to the initiatives that at the same time were concerned with systematizing and ordering, and provided impulses for the arrangement and presentation of the imperial collections. From the perspective of collecting, organizing, and presenting, the book explores the extent to which the Josephine collections concentrate the ideas of the Enlightenment and translate them into practice, and thus turn them into places of knowledge and learning. 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.