UCL Science and Technology Studies (STS) (@stsucl.bsky.social)

Congratulations to UCL STS’s Professor Simon Werrett on the publication of his new paper exploring the rich intersections of art and science in eighteenth‑century Russia. A fascinating contribution to the field. Read it here:

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Enlightened Icons: Mikhail Vasil'evich Lomonosov and Glass Mosaics in 18th-Century Russia | Brepols Online Abstract In the 1750s the Russian academician and chemist Mikhail Vasil'evich Lomonosov experimented with making coloured glass in his laboratory at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Lomonosov went on to open a manufactory nearby at Ust-Ruditsa, where he produced coloured glass mosaics. This enterprise has been represented variously as the work of a lone genius, as a failed business enterprise, and more recently as a form of projecting. The present essay places Lomonosov's glass work in a courtly context, as in part a continuation of the Academy's role of celebrating the Russian sovereign through spectacles such as fireworks and illuminations. Lomonosov sought to shape and contribute to a ‘ruling image” for the empress Elizabeth Petrovna, turning to mosaics owing to their capacity to interweave Russian tradition, Orthodox religion, and enlightened chemistry. Glass was a business, to be sure, but also a courtly, political, and religious material in Lomonosov's experiments. http://bit.ly/3LBg0cH