Kinship and politics in the art of plaster decoration
KINSHIP AND POLITICS IN THE ART OF PLASTER DECORATION This thesis explores the flowering of decorative plasterwork in late renaissance Scotland, its main focus being what influenced its development, the motivation of its leading patrons, and its role in the culture of Scotland at this time. The thesis begins by assesses why plasterwork has received much less attention in Scotland compared with other building materials, primarily stone, and whether this is as a result of Scotland’s architectural history being misunderstood in its British context. Early seventeenth-century Scotland was experiencing a building boom, its patrons increasingly benefiting from government positions, better education and foreign travel, exposing them to a wide range of influences at a time when houses and estates, (the main signals of status and rank) were being much transformed and domestically improved. This period heralded a burst of decorative plasterwork patronage throughout the country. This thesis analyses the influences which existed in late renaissance interiors in Scotland and whether a native tradition of decorative plasterwork existed in Scotland, and what influence this had on later decorative plasterwork styles. This thesis also gauges the affect that an absent court had on patronage and whether significant cycles of patronage can be interpreted by a study of seventeenth century plasterwork schemes in Scotland, and the role that decoration played in the culture of Scotland at this time. Finally, this research assesses the evolution of plaster throughout the century and why it may have developed differently from English work, and considers the changing role of decorative plasterwork in the late seventeenth century.
Continuity, Transition and Change: Decorative Plasterwork of Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland
In the seventeenth century Scotland witnessed a flowering of decorative plasterwork. Examples range from elaborate hand-crafted ceilings in royal palaces to simple decorative casts embellishing modest rooms in town houses. This article maps the influences which impacted upon the stylistic development of this form of interior decoration during the transitional post-Restoration period.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.