GSA Thirty-First Annual Conference, October 4 - October 7, 2007, San Diego

German Studies Association

Thirty-First Annual Conference 

October 4 - October 7, 2007 

San Diego, California

Presenter: Vera Keller, Princeton University

Paper Title: Moving Pictures: Circulating Drebbel’s Perpetuum Mobile

Abstract: The perpetual motion machines Cornelis Drebbel (1572–1633) devised in Stuart

London and Rudolfine Prague became a byword for invention in early modern Europe. Reports

of the device spread rapidly as a commonplace in arguments concerning human ingenuity.

Images of the perpetuum mobile also circulated in the new Southern Netherlandish genre of the

cabinet d’amateur. Such works depicted fictional and repetitive assemblages of paintings,

statuary, and machinery. Painters manipulated collections of drawings to generate this visual

copia just as writers deployed commonplace-books to produce rhetorical copia. “Commonplace”

drawings of Drebbel’s perpetuum mobile did not provide technical details; rather, such

drawings were used to make a rhetorical point concerning the power of art. I show how this

medium not only served to advertise Drebbel in particular as the inventor of the device, but to

engage circles of amateurs in affective associations celebrating human art in general.