Join artist Kate Samworth for this introduction to the art of natural history. We will explore how the spice trade, the Greco-Arabic translation movement, and the printing press shaped Renaissance artists and scientists, and how images of the era reveal their scientific, artistic, social, political, economic, and religious motives—as well as the challenges they faced in sorting fact from fiction. Frenzied collecting of natural and man-made objects became a primary occupation of 16th-century nobility, merchants, apothecaries, and natural philosophers. For some, such collections displayed wealth; for others, they offered opportunities for spiritual contemplation. Natural philosophers used them to study connections between organic beings and to find order in the natural world, helping to lay the foundations of modern science.