Editor: Guy Hedreen (Williams College)
Publisher: Brill, 2021
The interplay between nature, science, and art in antiquity and the early modern period differs significantly from late modern expectations. In this book scholars from ancient studies as well as early modern studies, art history, literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science, explore that interplay in several influential ancient texts and their reception in the Renaissance.
The Natural History of Pliny, De Architectura of Vitruvius, De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, Automata of Hero, and Timaios of Plato among other texts reveal how fields of inquiry now considered distinct were originally understood as closely interrelated. In our choice of texts, we focus on materialistic theories of nature, knowledge, and art that remain underappreciated in ancient and early modern studies even today.
Contents
Director’s Remarks – Michael W. Kwakkelstein
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: The Material World and Its Limits – Guy Hedreen
Plato’s Attitude toward Painting and Mathematics – Ernesto Paparazzo
The Vitruvian Body in De architectura’s Third Preface: Architecture and Rhetoric between Nature and Art – Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols
Cera d’api: la storia naturale di un medium archetipico – Verity Platt
‘We Penetrate the Earth’s Innards and Search for Riches’: Pliny’s Hierarchy of Materials and Its Influence in the Renaissance – Sarah Blake McHam
Moving Wood, Man Immobile: Hero’s Automata at the Urbino Court – Courtney Roby
Terremoti artificiali. La sismologia aristotelica nella guerra sotterranea del Rinascimento – Morgan Ng
The Heptaphonon and the Architecture of Echoes – Carolyn Yerkes
A Changing Earth: Strabo and Leonardo’s Scientific Humanism – Domenico Laurenza
Into the Wild: Living Landscape and Wonderment in Renaissance Art – Dennis Geronimus
Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, Lucretius and Empedocles – Gordon Campbell
Fantasia and Speciation: Traces of Empedocles in Ancient Poetry and Renaissance Art – Guy Hedreen
Coda: Temporality and the Reception of Ancient Culture: An Example from Dürer – Guy Hedreen
Index of Primary Literary Sources
Index of Works of Art
General Index