The Harvard Art Museum will organize, present, and circulate a groundbreaking interpretive exhibition that will transform traditional assumptions about the role of artists in the production of new forms of knowledge during the Renaissance’s Scientific Revolution. The museum will create a major traveling exhibition, Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, and related publications and public programming. The exhibition, which opens jointly at Harvard’s Sackler Museum and Wellesley College’s Davis Art Museum, addresses the participation of such celebrated northern European artists as Albrecht Dürer, Hendrick Goltzius, and Hans Holbein in the scientific inquiries of the sixteenth century, especially as manifested in their printed works. Such an investigation reveals the previously unexamined close working relationships between the artistic and scientific communities, and the exchanges of influence between them.
Although studies in a variety of settings suggest that participant reactions to the research context can threaten the validity and generalizability of study findings, there have been almost no investigations of participant reactivity in museums. In this experimental study, the authors compared the behaviors and learning outcomes of visitors at two versions of an interactive mathematics exhibit who had either been actively recruited by a data collector or passively recruited using posted signage. They assessed the amount of time visitors spent at the exhibit, the number of mathematical exhibit