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The Eye of the Lynx - Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Paperback, New edition)
Loot Price: R1,357
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The Eye of the Lynx - Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Paperback, New edition)
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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.
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