The Graphometer and the Book How Petronella Johanna de Timmerman (1723/1724-1786) Merged Science and Poetry

This essay unravels the dynamics between two types of objects - a scientific instrument and a book of poetry - of the sort usually studied by different kinds of specialists. Working at their intersection, the authors of this essay reveal how the eighteenth-century invention of the ‘general graphometer’ created new possibilities for the production of silhouette portraits, and they investigate how these possibilities interacted with a volume of poems by Petronella Johanna de Timmerman (1723/1724-1786). The essay successively focuses on the volume’s portrait produced by the graphometer, the biographical introduction reflecting on the graphometer and poems that share the graphometer’s ambition to capture nature. Objects that have never been studied in relation to one another turn out to share the same ambition: to arm the eyes with innovative observational instruments.