The eye of the Lynx : Galileo, his friends, and the beginnings of modern natural history / David Freedberg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Freedberg, David.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Accademia nazionale dei Lincei--History.

Accademia nazionale dei Lincei.

Science--Italy--History.

Science.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (526 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note to Historians of Science

Introduction

PART I. BACKGROUND

PART II. ASTRONOMY

PART III. NATURAL HISTORY

PART IV. PICTURES AND ORDER

Notes

Abbreviations

Bibliography

He a d i n g s

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 481-500) and index.

ISBN:

9786612504198

9781282504196

1282504193

9780226261539

0226261530

OCLC:

659561164