Apin's cabinet of printed curiosities -- Thinking through plural images of logic -- The visible order of student lecture notebooks -- Visual thinking in logic notebooks and Alba amicorum -- The generation of art as the generation of philosophy.

Written by an eminent authority on the Renaissance, this collection of essays focuses on topics such as humanist learning, humanist moral thought, the diffusion of humanism, Platonism, music and learning during the early Renaissance, and ...

Piero della Francesca is best known as a painter but he was also a mathematician. His treatise De prospectiva pingendi is a superb example of a union between the fne arts and mathemati‑ cal sciences of arithmetic and geometry. In this paper, I explain some reasons why his paint‑ ing is considered as a part of perspective and, therefore, can be identifed with a branch of geometry.

Did the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) influence the art of his time? Art historians have been fiercely debating this question for decades. This book starts with Ficino's views on the imagination as a faculty of the soul, and shows how these ideas were part of a long philosophical tradition and inspired fresh insights. This approach, combined with little known historical material, offers a new understanding of whether, how and why Ficino's Platonic conceptions of the imagination may have been received (...) in the art of the Italian Renaissance. The discussion explores Ficino's possible influence on the work of Botticelli and Michelangelo, and examines the appropriation of Ficino's ideas by early modern art theorists. (shrink)

Introduction -- Great Mother Nature -- The gendering of nature as female : from prehistory through the Middle Ages -- Nature and art in the Quattrocento : from pupil to equal -- Technology and the mastery of physical nature : Brunelleschi and Alberti -- Genesis and the reproduction of life : Masaccio and Michelangelo -- The rebirth of Venus and the feminization of beauty : Botticelli -- A balance of power : pictorial metaphors for nature in transition -- Nature's special (...) child : Leonardo da Vinci -- The goddess in Arcady : Giorgione -- Art and nature in the Cinquecento : from competitor to master -- Love and death in Venice : Titian -- Art against nature : Raphael, the early Mannerists, and late Michelangelo -- Natura bound : the later Tuscan Mannerists -- Epilogue. (shrink)

Karl Morrison discusses historical writing at a turning point in European culture: the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century. Why do texts considered at that time to be masterpieces seem now to be fragmentary and full of contradictions? Morrison maintains that the answer comes from ideas about art. Viewing histories as artifacts made according to the same aesthetic principles as paintings and theater, he shows that twelfth-century authors and audiences found unity not in what the reason read in a text (...) but in what the imagination read into it: they prized visual over verbal imagination and employed a circular, or nuclear, spectator-centered perspective cast aside in the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Twelfth-century writers assimilated and transformed a tradition of the conceptual unity of all the arts and attributed that unity to the fact that art both conceals and discloses. Recovering that tradition, especially the methods and motives of concealment, provides extraordinary insights into twelfth-century ideas about the kingdom of God, the status of women, and the nature of time itself. It also identifies a strain in European thought that had striking affinities to methods of perception familiar in Oriental religions and that proved to be antithetic to later humanist traditions in the West. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

© Mind Association 2018Some time ago I was at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris investigating the teaching of philosophy during Descartes’ time. Fine monographs had already been published on the various regimens and practices at Descartes’ college at La Flèche, and Jesuit institutions in general, as well as the collegiate curriculum in seventeenth-century France. But as interested as I was in the form of the teaching—how philosophy was taught, where, and when—I was more interested in its content—what was actually taught. (...) A fair number of early modern textbooks and some manuscripts of lectures and student notebooks were still available; beyond that, one could find reports of weekly or monthly disputations, condemnations of specific doctrines, various broadsheets, manifestos, and student theses and dissertations. After overcoming some administrative resistance, I found myself in a room at the Cabinet d’Estampes looking at a... (shrink)

In the Renaissance, educating for philosophy was integrated with educating for an active role in society, and both were conditioned by the prevailing educational theories based on humanist revisions of the trivium. I argue that women's education in the Renaissance remained tied to grammar while the education of men was directed toward action through eloquence. This is both a result of and a condition for the greater restriction on the social opportunities for women.

The mid-twentieth century saw a change in paradigms of art history: iconology. The main claim of this novel trend in art history was that renown Renaissance artists created imaginative syntheses between their art and contemporary cosmology, philosophy, theology and magic. The Neo-Platonism in the books by Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola became widely acknowledged for their lasting influence on art. It thus became common knowledge that Renaissance artists were not exclusively concerned with problems intrinsic to their work, but (...) that their artifacts encompassed a much larger intellectual and cultural horizon. This volume brings together historians - both those concerned with the history of their own discipline and also those whose research is on the art and culture of the Italian Renaissance itself - with historians from a wide variety of specialist fields, in order to engage with the contested field of iconology. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance history, Renaissance studies, historiography, philosophy, theology, gender studies, and literature. (shrink)

In this Volume, published in1998, Fifteen scholars reveal the ways of preserving, conceiving and creating beauty were as diverse as the cultural influenced at work at the time, deriving from antique, medieval and more recent literature and philosophy, and from contemporary notions of morality and courtly behaviour. Approaches include discussion of contemporary critical terms and how these determined writers' appreciation of paintings, sculpture, architecture and costume; studies of the quest to create beauty in the work of artists such as Botticeli, (...) Leonardo, Raphael, Parmigianino and Vasari; and the investigation of changes functioning of the eye and brain, or to technical innovations like those found in Venetian glass. (shrink)

Hans Belting, _Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science_, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 303 pp.

This article explains the philosophy of Leonardo da Vinci, who through his writings, designs and pictorial work, shows a tension and rupture on the art, beauty and truth of his time. Painting is scientific and therefore a liberal art, but it does not manifest the sacred truth of the icon of the medieval finalist worldview, but it will be the scientific truth of Modernity.

La « figure vitruvienne », héritée du traité De architectura de Vitruve, et les variations auxquelles elle donne lieu dans les arts à la Renaissance révèlent une grande diversité de formes et un remaniement du canon antique. En s’appuyant sur une méthode historique et conceptuelle, l’article entend mettre à jour les enjeux esthétiques suscités par la représentation du corps humain dans les arts, en tenant compte de la diversité des voies empruntées par les artistes de la Renaissance, influencés qui plus (...) est par la tentation de la mathématisation, la physiognomonie et la recherche de l’expressivité. (shrink)

Johannes Jessenius became known by his contemporaries mostly as an exponent of the Italian anatomical Renaissance in Central Europe at the end of the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The image of Jessenius in the twentieth century was also created with respect to his activities in the area of anatomy in Wittenberg and Prague in particular. The aim of this article is to put Jessenius into the context of the development of anatomy in the sixteenth century. (...) An important point in this progression can be seen in the change of the definition of anatomy from the art of dis- secting bodies and a “method” of instructing students to the way of acquiring knowledge of bodies and nature. The crucial role in this process played anatomical writings of the second half of the 16th century and the development seems to be connected with methodological discussions at the University of Padua. Jessenius, in his anatomical writings, primarily followed the Paduan anatomist Andreas Vesalius, whose work De humani corporis fabrica expresses the fundamental change in Renaissance anatomy. In addition, the methodological background of the anatomical Renaissance, which Jessenius became acquainted with during his studies in Padua, also echoes in Jessenius’ works. (shrink)

Andrew Marr has built this masterful study of Mutio Oddi on a set of ironies. He begins with a bitter blow of fortune: Oddi, in the middle of an apparently promising life as mathematician and architect in his native Urbino, had fallen afoul of his lord the Duke, accused of participating in a plot to depose him. After years of apparently unjust imprisonment, he was released in 1610, but into exile. Yet Oddi managed to recast his career in Milan and (...) then in Lucca, building upon a varied set of skills, and even returned eventually to Urbino. That varied set of skills had resulted from yet another, earlier, set of reversals and recoveries: he had turned to mathematics only after first training as an artist in the studio of Federico Barocci, a field he had been forced to abandon due to problems with his eyesight. Oddi was widely respected in his day, not only for his achievements themselves but also for his persistence and ingenuity in overcoming such obstacles. Yet to modern historians of .. (shrink)