The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History

Portada
University of Chicago Press, 2003 M08 1 - 528 páginas
Some years ago, David Freedberg opened a dusty cupboard at Windsor Castle and discovered hundreds of vividly colored, masterfully precise drawings of all sorts of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds. Coming upon thousands more drawings like them across Europe, Freedberg finally traced them all back to a little-known scientific organization from seventeenth-century Italy called the Academy of Linceans (or Lynxes).

Founded by Prince Federico Cesi in 1603, the Linceans took as their task nothing less than the documentation and classification of all of nature in pictorial form. In this first book-length study of the Linceans to appear in English, Freedberg focuses especially on their unprecedented use of drawings based on microscopic observation and other new techniques of visualization. Where previous thinkers had classified objects based mainly on similarities of external appearance, the Linceans instead turned increasingly to sectioning, dissection, and observation of internal structures. They applied their new research techniques to an incredible variety of subjects, from the objects in the heavens studied by their most famous (and infamous) member Galileo Galilei—whom they supported at the most critical moments of his career—to the flora and fauna of Mexico, bees, fossils, and the reproduction of plants and fungi. But by demonstrating the inadequacy of surface structures for ordering the world, the Linceans unwittingly planted the seeds for the demise of their own favorite method—visual description-as a mode of scientific classification.

Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, Eye of the Lynx uncovers a crucial episode in the development of visual representation and natural history. And perhaps as important, it offers readers a dazzling array of early modern drawings, from magnificently depicted birds and flowers to frogs in amber, monstrously misshapen citrus fruits, and more.
 

Contenido

Saving the Appearances
1
BACKGROUND
13
ASTRONOMY
79
NATURAL HISTORY
149
PICTURES AND ORDER
347
Notes
417
Abbreviations
479
Bibliography
481
Headings
501
Index
503
Derechos de autor

Otras ediciones - Ver todas

Términos y frases comunes

Pasajes populares

Página ix - Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Página 16 - ... bric-a-brac: a petrified crayfish, a dried-up chameleon, a fly and a spider embedded in a piece of amber, some of those little clay figures which are said to be found in the ancient tombs of Egypt.

Acerca del autor (2003)

David Freedberg is a professor of art history and director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. His books include The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, also published by the University of Chicago Press; The Prints of Bruegel the Elder; Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture (with Jan de Vries); Rubens: The Life of Christ after the Passion; and Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century.

Información bibliográfica