Historians of science may have thought that there was not much more to say about Robert Hooke after a slew of scholarly publications around the tercentenary of his death: Michael Cooper and Michael Hunter's edited volume Robert Hooke: Tercentennnial Studies (2006); Jim Bennett's edited volume London's Leonardo: The Life and Work of Robert Hooke (2003); M.A.R. Cooper's ‘A More Beautiful City’: Robert Hooke and the Rebuilding of London after the Great Fire (2003); and Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer's edited volume Robert Hooke: New Studies (1989). Matthew Hunter's book shows what more could be done by drawing on the insights of these earlier publications, spending much time in the archives of the Royal Society, and mastering the latest interpretive turns in art history.

Hunter's book is centered on Hooke – with Christopher Wren, John Evelyn, William Cole and others offering comparisons and foils – to make a larger point about ‘visual art and the science of experiment’ in Restoration London. It tracks how Hooke's experimental practice evolved from the 1660s to the 1680s, an evolution that was also accompanied by a change in Hooke's thinking about the the ideals, the methods and the mind of the experimental philosopher: from a Columbus-like philosopher who could draw well ‘to be able to express his own ideas better to himself, to enable him to examine them and ratiocinate upon them himself, and also for the better informing and instructing of others' (p. 51), to a master-architect, who all but gave up drawing (delegating such tasks to others) and whose task was to direct and guide a socially distributed and vertically integrated project of collective knowledge. Hunter closely examines Hooke's activities in the 1670s that led to these shifts in thinking and practice: his editing the journal Philosophical Collection, using his editorial voice to forge information from near and far into something worth knowing; his handling, burning, disassembling and remaking of artefacts in the Repository of the Royal Society, much to the chagrin of donors such as Leibniz; and the rebuilding of London.

Hunter uses the category of ‘wicked intelligence’ to argue that Hooke's experimental activities were embedded in, and inspired by, a larger visual culture of Restoration London. What Hunter means by ‘intelligence’ is close to the period sense of ‘wit’ or ‘ingenuity’, but it is also a category of analysis favoured by recent historians to emphasize the deep familiarity with the physical properties of matter and processes of production that enabled artists to craft their objects. Hooke learnt such an intelligence when apprenticed to Peter Lely and sharpened it in the coffee houses of London. It was a facility to work and think with ‘visual materials accessible to a range of contemporary readers' (p. 23). The adjective ‘wicked’ is used by Hunter to indicate the negative senses in which contemporaries saw Hooke's working methods that freely borrowed from others and ignored etiquettes of proprietorship. It was a form of experimental philosophy that went out of fashion as soon as Newton came to power in the Royal Society after Hooke's death. Ultimately, Hooke's exclusive, patron-funded mode of philosophizing developed in the Restoration had no place in the burgeoning consumer market of eighteenth-century London.

Hunter's book addresses both historians of science and historians of art. Historians of science will learn how Hooke learnt from Lely an Italianate form of drawing and a collective practice of using assistants; how he drew a snowflake using the principles of its pattern formation that he had worked out; how he applied the idea of a paper flap in the anatomical figures in Johannes Remmelin's Catoptrum microcosmicum (1639) to show the outside casing and inner mechanism of a micrometer in Philosophical Transactions; and how the stippling technique used in Johannes Bayer's Uranometria to fashion constellations were reapplied to draw a mobile, mutable head of a comet. Historians of art can read how Lely shared with Hooke a concern for posing the pliant, languorous body; how Wren's rebuilding of St Paul's can be seen as a ‘material expression of collective philosophy’ with unpredictable production by recalcitrant collaborators. The book is successful in showing how a cross-disciplinary study adds fresh insights into well-worn topics among specialists.

It is refreshing to see an author so enthusiastic about his historical subject – the liberal use of adjectives such as ‘quick-witted’, ‘clever’, ‘devilishly clever’, ‘explosively clever’ and ‘cunning’ suggests how impressed the author is with Hooke. Twenty-first-century readers may well concur with Hunter's exuberant (American) colloquial sense of ‘wicked’ – excellent, splendid; remarkable (OED).