This project explores the role and meaning of miniaturized objects and scale-altering models in 17th- and early 18th-century Europe. This period was a crucial historical moment in the history of the micro, manifested in a wave of miniaturization of numerous new kinds of objects taken out of scale: miniature models, Dutch silver domestic miniatures, dollhouses, tin and subsequently porcelain figurines, optical devices with minute images, models of various types, and the like. The project maps this distinctive and new investment in scale-altering micro-objects across Europe, and situates it within our understanding of several key developments of the 17th and early 18th centuries, developments that we associate with the crucial contributions of this period to Western culture. Micro objects, I want to suggest, illuminate anew questions such as the changing role of God in people's lives; the emergence of play in relation to the sacred; the increasingly pressing question of replicability and the uniqueness of art; the evolution of bourgeois privacy, and with it certain distinctive characteristics of the bourgeois individual; the interplay – during the era of the scientific revolution – between art and artifice on the one hand and science and knowledge on the other; the early formation of Enlightenment pedagogy; and more broadly the transition from Baroque to the Enlightenment.