Eye Of The Lynx Galileo His Friends

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 Galileiand#8212;whom they supported at the most critical moments of his careerand#8212;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 methodand#8212;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.

Years ago, David Freedberg stumbled across a group of drawings by the little-known Academy of Linceans, a seventeenth-century Italian group that took as its task nothing less than the pictorial documentation of all of nature. Moving across Europe, he encountered thousands of such drawingsand#8212;of fossils, the species of the New World, or the heavenly bodies studied by the group's most famous member, Galileo Galilei. Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, this book reveals this crucial moment in the development of natural history.

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.

Acknowledgments

A Note to Historians of Science

Introduction Saving Appearances

PART I - BACKGROUND

1. The Paper Museum

2. Lynxes

PART II - ASTRONOMY

3. The New Star

4. The Telescope: Imperfection in the Heavens

5. The Conflict of Truths

PART III - NATURAL HISTORY

6. The Chastity of Bees

7. The Microscope and the Vernacular

8. Plants and Reproduction

9. The Mexican Treasury: Taxonomy and Illustration

10. The Doctor's Dilemmas: Description, Dissection, and the Problem of Illustration

11. Fossils

PART IV - PICTURES AND ORDER

12. The Failure of Pictures

13. The Order of Nature

14. The Fate of Pictures: Appearance, Truth, and Ambiguity

Notes

Abbreviations

Bibliography

Headings

Index