Full Description
Starting with Brunelleschi's invention of perspective and Galileo's invention of the telescope—two inaugural moments in the history of vision, from two apparently distinct provinces, art and science—this volume of essays by noted art, architecture, science, philosophy, and literary historians teases out the multiple strands of the discourse about sight in the early modern period. Looking at Leonardo and Gallaccini, at botanists, mathematicians, and artists from Dante to Dürer to Shakespeare, and at photography and film as pointed modern commentaries on early modern seeing, Vision and Its Instruments revisits the complexity of the early modern economy of the image, of the eye, and of its instruments. The book explores the full range of early modern conceptions of vision, in which mal'occhio (the evil eye), witchcraft, spiritual visions, and phantasms, as well as the artist's brush and the architect's compass, were seen as providing knowledge equal to or better than newly developed scientific instruments and practices (and occasionally working in conjunction with them). The essays in this volume also bring a new dimension to the current discourse about image production and its cultural functions.
Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction, Alina Payne
I. Epistemic Images
1 Epistemic Images, Lorraine Daston
2 Drawing as an Instrument of Knowledge: The Case of Conrad Gessner, Sachiko Kusukawa
3 Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature in Early Modern Science, Catherine Wilson
II. Seeing the Unseeable
4 Leonardo's Point, Frank Fehrenbach
5 Beyond the Eye: Observing the Unseen in Mathematics and Architecture, Alina Payne
6 Dante's Eyes and the Abysses of Seeing: Poetical Optics and Concepts of Images in the Divine Comedy, Gerhard Wolf
7 The Invisible Element in Art: Dürer, Shakespeare, Donne, Carla Mazzio
III. The Painter's Brush and the Mind's Eye
8 "Art on the Tip of the Brush": A Blind Manœuvre? Reflections on Correggio's Brush, Arent de Gelder's Spatula, and Pietro Testa's Figure of Practice, Nicola Suthor
9 White Earth, or How to Cultivate Color in the Field of Painting: Still Life and Baroque Color Theory, Karin Leonhard
10 Counterfeit Chimeras: Early Modern Theories of the Imagination and the Work of Art, Claudia Swan
IV. Looking Back: From Photography and Film to Alberti
11 Sculpture Before Photography, Michael Cole
12 From Alberti's Finestra Aperta to Hitchcock's Rear Window: Avatars of the Scopic Drive in Painting and Film, Victor I. Stoichita
List of Contributors
Index
