Early in the second chapter of Wicked Intelligence, Matthew C. Hunter makes the following self-reflexive claim: “Neither a comprehensive history of scientific drawing in the early Restoration nor even a systematic study of Hooke's draftsmanship, I see this chapter as a set piece—a framed construct through which to analyze the violent unfolding of experimental intelligence rippling outward though graphic practice” (72). I quote this passage because, though it concerns only one of his chapters, I think it is microcosmic of Hunter's entire project. The statement is at once an admission of Wicked Intelligence's limitations, a demonstration of its considerable strengths, and, above all, a prime example of its ambitious, confident, and (occasionally) distracting rhetoric.

Though absent from its title, Wicked Intelligence has, in fact, a central character: the late seventeenth-century English scientist and architect Robert Hooke. He dominates the book, and much of the visual material that Hunter explores was produced by Hooke or his close associates. It would be fair to say that Hooke has not always been well treated by scholarship and any serious new monograph on him and his circle—particularly one that deals with their little-studied graphic practices—is to be welcomed. But readers hoping for detailed archival study of Hooke's drawings and his relationship with the various draftsmen he employed will be disappointed (although Hunter has written on these subjects elsewhere). Neither is there any discussion of Hooke's architectural drawings, which survive in greater quantities than his scientific illustrations.

To complain about this, however, is to miss the point of Wicked Intelligence. For if Hunter presents little in the way of new evidence for the activities of Hooke and his circle, he more than makes up for it with the vivacity of argument that he brings to the subject. As hinted in the above quotation, there are some seriously impressive analytical set pieces in this book, and they are often driven by thoughtful, close readings of images. For example, in chapter 2, Hunter convincingly links Hooke's concerns about the pain inflicted on animals during vivisection with the deployment of microscopic imagery to circumvent the destruction or torture of scientific evidence. His pairing, in chapter 3, of Hooke's images of drugged ants in Micrographia with Peter Lely's sleepy-eyed sitters is a bravura cultural-historical comparison that makes an important point about empowered viewing in the period; it's also genuinely funny.

Hunter's fourth chapter represents a useful rethinking of the strange illustrative combinations of specimens and inventions that litter the pages of the Philosophical Transactions and the Philosophical Collections. It makes the bold claim that the shifts in the editorial tone and in the use of graphic techniques in the later Philosophical Collections can be understood alongside Hooke's metallic experiments of the late 1670s. Both were “compounded” procedures: the various metals melted down to form apparently different substances—the society reimagined as more selective, more critical, and more interconnected. Elsewhere, he shows how objects in the Royal Society repository were “reworked” through chemical preservation, experimental damage, or neglect. This process, says Hunter, resembled that which sensory data underwent in the human brain, according to Hooke's theories of cognition and memory that he formulated in the 1680s. Hunter then compares the role played in this process by the organizing, rational soul to the period's conception of the master architect.

As sophisticated as these arguments are, some readers may be alarmed by the book's prose, which is creative throughout. From the title onwards, Hunter uses a highly distinctive phraseology (usually consisting of adventurous adverb-adjective combinations, all essentially denoting “clever” and its derivatives) to describe both Hooke and his associates' intelligence and, importantly, the intelligence of the images they produced. Thus, Hunter routinely accuses the period's scientific image makers and their illustrations of possessing “cunning, furtive intelligence,” “audacious, mercenary cleverness,” and of being “devilishly clever”; they are also described as harboring violent tendencies. As epistemological rhetorical devices, these descriptors would have possessed no currency in early modern England and they may well seem alien today. Many historians of science will not recognize this way of writing history, and Wicked Intelligence's tone is entirely art-historical. Indeed, in both its language and content, Hunter's book reflects a recent strand of art-historical research that has sought to ascribe a lifelike agency to images and to do so using playful language. In fairness, Hunter does justify the use of the phrase “wicked intelligence” (and, by implication, others like it) in his introduction, where he suggests that it appropriately describes the “acrimonious and nefarious tactics” by which these images were made and by which they subsequently operated. But this line of reasoning hardly reappears in the book thereafter, though the language remains. Furthermore, very little evidence is marshaled in favor of these images possessing any underhand or sly qualities in the first place, though it is undeniable that they were produced by very clever people.

While I question whether this justification is adequate, I am conscious, too, that I might be behaving as squeamishly as Hooke did in the vivisection room. It is telling that Hunter's prose seems less intrusive in chapter 3, when he deploys it in the analysis of traditional art-historical subjects (Lely canvases) rather than the visual material of intellectual history that represents the focus of the rest of the book. This suggests that it might be up to Hunter's readers (and his reviewers) to overcome their own scruples about this form of historical (or art-historical) writing, and to approach Hunter's arguments from a more cross-disciplinary and transhistorical position. At the end of the second chapter, and in reference to his fairly daring use of a gravitational metaphor to describe the intellectual reciprocity that might have existed between the viewer and an engraving of a micrometer, Hunter expresses the hope that he has unsettled his readers. In the case of this reviewer he has succeeded, but given the dryness of much previous scholarship on Hooke, maybe that is no bad thing.