The Heritage Of Giottos Geometry

Winner of the 1992 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize from the American Historical Association "Edgerton's interdisciplinary study is a bold attempt to show how the perception of the world, as slowly refined by the Renaissance artists, provided the impetus behind the scientific revolution. . . . An ambitious and largely persuasive book." --Nature "Edgerton's book is learned and richly illustrated with paintings and drawings from the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, and contemporaneous Chinese dynasties. . . . [His] argument is intricate and flawless." --American Historical Review

This ambitious book explores the relationship between the Western "scientific revolution" that began with Galileo in the early seventeenth century and the Renaissance "artistic revolution" inaugurated by Giotto three hundred years earlier. The fruit of many years of thought and research, it demonstrates the crucial role that Italian Renaissance painting, sculpture, and architecture played in what we call "modern science". Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., shows that rather than being symptomatic in nature, the arts served as a catalyst for the transformation in perception which occurred in the West in the fourteenth century. According to Edgerton, the new way in which "reality" was represented, through the use of the unique Renaissance tools of perspective and chiaroscuro, set the stage for modern scientific practice.

Expanded to twice as many entries as the 1985 edition, and updated with new publications, new editions of previous entries, titles missed the first time around, more of the artists' own writings, and monographs that deal with significant aspects or portions of an artist's work though not all of it. The listing is alphabetical by artist, and the index by author. The works cited include analytical and critical, biographical, and enumerative; their formats range from books and catalogues raisonnes to exhibition and auction sale catalogues. A selection of biographical dictionaries containing information on artists is arranged by country. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Cyberspace may seem an unlikely gateway for the soul, but as science commentator Wertheim argues in this "wonderfully provocative" ("Kirkus Reviews") book, cyberspace has in recent years become a repository for immense spiritual yearning. 37 illustrations.

In the two centuries before Columbus, mapmaking was transformed. The World Map, 1300--1492 investigates this important, transitional period of mapmaking. Beginning with a 1436 atlas of ten maps produced by Venetian Andrea Bianco, Evelyn Edson uses maps of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to examine how the discoveries of missionaries and merchants affected the content and configuration of world maps. She finds that both the makers and users of maps struggled with changes brought about by technological innovation -- the compass, quadrant, and astrolabe -- rediscovery of classical mapmaking approaches, and increased travel. To reconcile the tensions between the conservative and progressive worldviews, mapmakers used a careful blend of the old and the new to depict a world that was changing -- and growing -- before their eyes. This engaging and informative study reveals how the ingenuity, creativity, and adaptability of these craftsmen helped pave the way for an age of discovery.

Vol. 1: Life Giotto (1334) is the first European artist about whom it is possible to write following the schema of "life and work". The situation of the sources, however, is complicated: On Giotto's life, there are – on the one hand – biographical accounts from the mid-fourteenth century onwards that responded to various ideological requirements (patriotism, humanism, Renaissance ideology, cult of the artist); on the other, there is extensive documentary material from Giotto's lifetime, which seems to reflect less the biography of an artist than that of a bourgeois businessman resolutely climbing the social ladder. The present volume focuses on this second aspect of the Giotto figure's double life relating it to the form of existence of the pre-modern artist. Vol. 2: Works The paintings examined and contextualised in this volume are those secured for Giotto through early written sources. These sources also help to reconstruct the sequence of his works and artistic inventions as is plausible in the context of media culture in the decades around and after 1300: while Giotto was spiritually and intellectually formed in the sphere of the Florentine Dominicans, his artistic path began in Rome in the shadow of the Curia. The breakthrough to his own artistic concept came immediately before and during his work in Padua. In addition to prominent churchmen, ecclesiastical institutions, and the King of Naples, his clients were predominantly members of Italy's urban and financial elites. The adoption and further development of his inventions by other - especially Sienese - painters pressured him in his later years to try new approaches again. Vol. 3: Survival Giotto is considered by many to be the founder of modern painting. This thesis is discussed and modified in the present volume on an empirical basis. What emerges is that Giotto's impact cannot be reduced simply to the introduction of the study of nature. Rather, his art was involved in the development of pictorial idioms that were attuned to the skills and interests of their audiences. The new approaches in his painting contributed in particular to the possibility of examining and communicating psychological, narrative and allegorical content of great complexity outside the media of language and text, which not only changed the face of European art but certainly contributed to the intellectual opening of Western societies.

Perspective has been a divided subject, orphaned among various disciplines from philosophy to gardening. In the first book to bring together recent thinking on perspective from such fields as art history, literary theory, aesthetics, psychology, and the history of mathematics, James Elkins leads us to a new understanding of how we talk about pictures. Elkins provides an abundantly illustrated history of the theory and practice of perspective. Looking at key texts from the Renaissance to the present, he traces a fundamental historical change that took place in the way in which perspective was conceptualized; first a technique for constructing pictures, it slowly became a metaphor for subjectivity. That gradual transformation, he observes, has led to the rifts that today separate those who understand perspective as a historical or formal property of pictures from those who see it as a linguistic, cognitive, or epistemological metaphor. Elkins considers how the principal concepts of perspective have been rewritten in work by Erwin Panofsky, Hubert Damisch, Martin Jay, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and E. H. Gombrich. The Poetics of Perspective illustrates that perspective is an unusual kind of subject: it exists as a coherent idea, but no one discipline offers an adequate exposition of it. Rather than presenting perspective as a resonant metaphor for subjectivity, a painter's tool without meaning, a disused historical practice, or a model for vision and representation, Elkins proposes a comprehensive revaluation. The perspective he describes is at once a series of specific pictorial decisions and a powerful figure for our knowledge of the world.

This book explores how machinery and the practice of mechanics participate in the intellectual culture of Renaissance humanism. Before the emergence of the modern concept of technology, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writers recognized the applicability of mechanical practices and objects to some of their most urgent moral, aesthetic, and political questions. The construction, use, and representation of devices including clocks, scientific instruments, stage machinery, and war engines not only reflect but also actively reshape how Renaissance writers define and justify artifice and instrumentality - the reliance upon instruments, mechanical or otherwise, to achieve a particular end. Harnessing the discipline of mechanics to their literary and philosophical concerns, scholars and poets including Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, George Chapman, and Gabriel Harvey look to machinery to ponder and dispute all manner of instrumental means, from rhetoric and pedagogy to diplomacy and courtly dissimulation.