The artificial and the natural: an evolving polarity

Introduction

Physis and technē in Greek medicine

The three pleasures of mimesis according to Aristotle's Poetics

Art and nature in ancient mechanics

Art, nature, alchemy, and demons

Forms of art in Jesuit Aristotelianism (with a coda on Descartes)

The artificial and the natural

Renaissance histories of art and nature

Leibniz's theatre of nature and art and the idea of a universal picture atlas

Spinoza on the natural and the artificial

Eighteenth-century wetware

Overtaking nature? the changing scope of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century

Reconfiguring nature through syntheses

Concluding comments.