Some years ago, David Freedberg opened a dusty cupboard at Windsor
Castle and discovered hundreds of vividly colored, 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 seventeenth-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 favorite method--visual
description-as a mode of scientific classification.
Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, Eye of the Lynx uncovers
a crucial episode in 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.
