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

by D Freedberg (Author) "This book tells of a forgotten yet exalted episode in the history of science and art ..." (more)

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Product details

Hardcover: 528 pages
Publisher: Chicago University Press; 2003 edition (13 Dec 2002)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0226261476
ISBN-13: 978-0226261478
Product Dimensions: 24.9 x 19.8 x 3.6 cm
Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,453,836 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in this category:
#22 in Books > Art, Architecture & Photography > Graphic Arts > Science Illustration

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Product Description

Some years ago, David Freedberg opened a dusty cupboard at Windsor Castle and discovered hundreds of vividly coloured, 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 17th-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 favourite method - visual description - as a mode of scientific classification. Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, "The Eye of the Lynx" uncovers a crucial episode n 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.

About the Author

David Freedberg is professor of art history at Columbia University. He is the author of The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture.

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