The Eye of the Lynx

《The Eye of the Lynx》是2003年9月1日University of Chicago Press出版的圖書，作者是David Freedberg。

基本介紹

• 中文名： The Eye of the Lynx
• 作者：David Freedberg
• 出版社：University of Chicago Press
• 出版時間：2003年9月1日
• 頁數：528 頁
• 定價：43.00 美元
• 裝幀：Paperback
• ISBN：9780226261485
• 副標題：Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History

內容簡介

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.

圖書目錄

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

作者簡介

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.