Fabrizio Meroi and Claudio Pagliano, eds. Immagini per conoscere: Dal Rinascimento alla Rivoluzione scientifica.

Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2001. Pbk. xii + 134 pp. index. 18.08 [euro]. ISBN: 88-222-5029-X.

A collection of the essays delivered at the one-day symposium hosted by the Centro nazionale di studi rinascimentali, Florence, in 1999, the book under review is dedicated to one of the most fascinating and highly debated topics of Renaissance studies, namely the role of images in the investigation of the natural world and the rise of modern science.

Long ago Erwin Panofsky wrote about the relationship between art and science in the Renaissance, proposing a causal relationship between the rise of modern science and pictorial illusionism, which Renaissance artists achieved through linear perspective. For decades, his approach has influenced the study of art and science, and only recently it has been fundamentally revised by numerous studies investigating the relationship between word and image in Renaissance books on anatomy, botany, zoology, geography, and astronomy. Giuseppe Olmi looked at the images of plants and animals produced by Ulisse Aldrovandi for his museum. Lucia Tongiorgi Tomassi produced an impressive array of essays on botanical images. Martin Kemp stressed the synthetic rather than naturalistic character of anatomical, astronomical, and botanical images. Thomas Da Costa Kaufaman and Paula Findlen reconstructed the spaces of collections and museums, and the intellectual exchanges that took place in them. Horst Bredekamp investigated the visual experience gained in these collections and its role in modern science. Eileen Reeves placed Galileo's images of the moon in their philosophical, theological, and artistic context. David Freedberg showed the contradictory role of images in the Academy of the Lynx, whose members produced some of the most spectacular illustrated books of the early modern period but also wrote some of the most disparaging comments on the use of images in the understanding of the order of things. In different ways, these modern studies integrated the analysis of scientific images within such revered topics of Renaissance studies as artistic and scientific patronage, book production, visualization of knowledge, pictorial illusionism, university teaching, observation and natural philosophy, collecting, and court culture.

Unfortunately, the book under review takes minimal advantage of this booming scholarship. It offers, at best, a diachronic overview of illustrated manuscripts and books on astronomy, botany, and anatomy; portraits of natural philosophers, astronomers, and cosmographers; and frontispieces of philosophical treatises. Isabelle Pantin's contribution, "L'illustration de livres d'astronomie a la Renaissance: l'evolution d'une discipline a travers ses images," is an informed excursus on the illustrations of astronomy books, from the small, diagrammatic images of early printed texts to the magnificent illustrations of Kepler and Galileo. Ilva Beretta's long survey on botanical images from medieval manuscripts to Linneus' treatise, "Illustrations and Representation: Botany in the Renaissance," presents important materials, but it is undermined by her reading of medieval diagrams as striving for illusionism. More attuned to the composite and synthetic nature of scientific images is Vivian Nutton's essay on "Representation and Memory in Renaissance Anatomical Illustrations." Perceptively, Nutton suggests that most of these images were not meant as a faithful representation of the human body but rather as mnemonic images to help students to memorize the parts of the body. Luisa Simonutti contributes a miscellaneous and eclectic essay on the illustration of philosophy, entitled "La filosofia incisa: il segno del concettuale." Simonutti's illustration of philosophy includes many different images, the relation to each other remaining unclear: allegorical personifications of philosophy, of which she provide a survey from Pietro Lorenzetti (mid-fourteenth century) to Cesare Ripa (1603) via Raphael (1508), all in two pages; portraits of philosophers, particularly ancient ones, whose facial features were invented according to the themes of their philosophy; and frontispieces of philosophical works from Erasmus to Vico. Alessandro Tosi's essay on "La scienza dipinta: modelli rinascimentali di arte e scienza" is an abridged version of his extensive study on the portraits of humanists, who were also interested in mathematics and its applications. Tosi selected the images of his study according to the objects that accompany the sitters: astrolabes, regular bodies, solar clocks, armillary spheres, globes, astronomical instruments, and mathematical texts. These attributes indeed appear in such different paintings as Botticelli's St. Augustine and Ghirlandaio's St. Jerome, both painted for the church of Ognisanti in Florence, Jacopo de Barbari's Luca Pacioli, Hans Holbein's The French Ambassadors, Giorgione's The Three Philosophers, and Campagnola's The Astrologer, paintings which are all discussed together in this essay. Here is a study of iconography with neither patronage nor context, let alone meaning.

The book offers a panoramic view of the wealth of materials available for the study of scientific illustrations in early modern Europe, but readers should be advised to turn elsewhere for an updated methodological approach to the interpretation of these marvelous images.

FRANCESCA FIORANI

University of Virginia