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Miracles and Machines - A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Hardcover)
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Miracles and Machines - A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Hardcover)
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This volume tells the singular story of an uncanny object at the
cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the
monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the
collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of
American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the
self-propelled robot. According to lore from the court of Philip II
of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a
humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be
agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay
dying in 1562. In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend,
the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the
United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical
object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified
seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue,
form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,”
unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional
realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the
Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late
Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling
the evolution of artificial life to come.
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