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236 The Mediterranean of Louis XV
the apparatus of commercial administrations and the impact of
new scientific techniques were nowhere more apparent than in
representations of the Mediterranean Sea.
This chapter examines the emergence in the mid-eighteenth
century of a new model for conceptualizing the properties of
cognition based on the concept of the scientific traveller-observer
or voyageur-philosophe, in contrast to the more dominant
but static camera obscura model of visual perception. 4 In the
Mediterranean Sea, the idea of travel as a dynamic form of
perception emerges against the backdrop of cartographic missions
coordinated by the French Ministry of Maritime Affairs
and in the context of private, proto-archaeological missions to
the Levant. The ground-breaking work of the French architect
Julien-David Leroy on the ruins of Greece (1758; 2nd edn.
1770) and the British scholar Robert Wood on the poetry of
Homer (1767; 2nd edn. 1769) are two important examples of a
radical reinterpretation of antiquity based on the model of the
voyageur-philosophe, emphasizing the subjectivity of judgement
and the primacy of individual points of view in analysis and
representation.
2. constructing the scientific
traveller-observer
Following the creation of the Royal Society in 1660 and the
Académie Royale des Sciences in 1666, the need for a new form
of specialized, itinerant researcher or traveller-observer rapidly
emerged as an essential component of these institutions. Before
the invention of such categories as the archaeologist and the
scientific explorer in the nineteenth century, the combined
activities of travel and research encompassed a more disparate
range of objectives and practitioners. Variations in the competence
and scrupulousness with which travel accounts were produced
undermined the principal objective of scientific enquiry,
4 See J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 25–66.
The idea of the voyageur-philosophe might be contrasted with the idea of the
‘romantic traveller’ of the nineteenth century. See R. Cardinal, ‘Romantic
Travel’, in R. Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to
the Present (London and New York, 1997), 135–55.