The Shroud and the Pineapple

The presentation will discuss some of the current research of Smith's Phd project on images in late 1500s Bologna, Italy. Taking her starting point from two objects created in Bologna in the early modern period: a pineapple painted by the Tuscan artist Jacopo Ligozzi and an illustration of the Shroud of Turin from Alfonso Paleotti's book on the image-relic. These  'images of images' depict copies of the original object, and are thus twice removed from their original source. The truth found in them however, says something about the function of images in the city's intellectual culture at the time and the image's importance in scientific research.