Learning about antiquarians and projects led by Accademia dei Lincei gives a look into how visual art projects might have taken shape in the early modern period. Such historical evidence unravels how modern-day projects are descendants of a long history of visual projects and also share similar biases in presenting the information. Cesi’s interest in natural history is recorded in drawings from Pozzo’s collection which offer detailed visual descriptions of flora and fauna. One striking feature to me was the individuality of each of the drawings, which becomes evident as one looks at the pictures of the flamingos with their mouths open (Freedberg 22) and oranges with excrescence (Freedberg 32). Artists might have chosen to draw common objects as such because of their interest in highlighting peculiarities, but this individual artistic choice also highlights a possible shortcoming of detailed visual art projects. First-time viewers or viewers in posterity might be unaware of the objective of highlighting peculiarities and might overlook important aspects of the subject or the artist’s intention.
The idea of individual artistic flair in visual projects becomes more clear when looking at modern reconstructions and early modern reconstructions. Early modern artists in Italy reconstructed frescoes found inside Roman tombs in their depictions of the tombs, while more modern archaeologists such as Arthus Evans reconstructed frescoes in Knossos, Greece, as he imagined they looked in the past. Such reconstructions or retelling of the pasts in modern times is a difficult task and modern art historians must be careful about how they choose to speak about and show their subjects in visual art projects. Peer-reviewed, academic projects help limit bias in many art projects, and we must strive to provide audiences with tools to recognize what is fact and what is opinion.
Knossos is a great example of a site that was restored based on individual interpretation, rather than objective investigation.