The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his friends, and the beginnings of modern natural history by David Freedberg, University of Chicago Press, 拢35/$50, ISBN 0226261476 Reviewed by Maggie McDonald
A NEW twist on tales about cabinets of curiosities is a story about a cupboard of uncuriosity at Windsor Castle. For years, no one had opened it. Curiosity, happily, is the hallmark of David Freedberg. When he opened the door, he discovered wonderful things: pages from a 17th-century attempt to assemble all that was known about the world into a single 鈥減aper museum鈥�.
Freedberg鈥檚 book title, The Eye of the Lynx, reflects the name these knowledge hounds gave themselves, Frederico Cesi鈥檚 Academy of Lynxes. Cesi鈥檚 desire may strike a hubristic note with us moderns. We live in an age of specialists and experts, with only a dwindling band of scholars taking a broad view. Cesi, of course, relied on his experts, a stellar bunch that included Galileo. Letters on Sunspots, Galileo鈥檚 seminal work, was pushed into print by Cesi and the Linceans, who took on the struggle of getting the work past the censors.
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At the time he was writing most of this book (it took 15 years in all), Freedberg was a professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at Washington DC鈥檚 National Gallery of Art. His book is an attempt to make sense of how the Linceans managed to free themselves from 鈥渢he traditional forms and practices of science鈥�.
Who is the book for? Anyone with a curiosity about science鈥檚 history. And the illustrations are extraordinary 鈥� lignified wood, sunspots, dissected rat and all.
Keep checking the cupboards at Windsor.