“A long overdue reassessment of the early English virtuosic sensibility. Hanson shows how virtue was to be found in the erudite knowledge of all of life’s resemblances, reuniting art, medicine, and science in a manner that would have been understood in earlier centuries, and remains of interest today.”

Hal Cook, director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine

“The aim of The English Virtuoso—to provide a new narrative for British art in the 1600s and 1700s by examining the relationship between the arts, empiricism, and medicine in seventeenth-century England—is original and persuasive. Following a chronological trajectory that charts the medical community’s active interest in the arts, it is gracefully written and brings to light large quantities of important yet previously unknown or neglected material. This book is an impressive achievement.”

Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University

“An elegant and revelatory study, which vaults from discipline to discipline with enviable ease: Craig Ashley Hanson is almost as much of a polymath as his learned subjects. As befits a book partly about visual culture, the design is lovely too.”

Lucy Worsley, chief curator, Historic Royal Palaces

"Hanson’s reconstruction of the intellectual passions of these men shows that the figure is still worthy of serious attention from modern scholars."

Jan Golinski | Times Higher Education

“This is a vigorously intelligent book, its spare text supported by weighty footnotes, its extensive range of arguments leading to a convincing conclusion.”

The Burlington Magazine