The Moon and the Western Imagination by Scott L. Montgomery (review)

Leonardo Reviews 333 psychological core being of the star. From Baudrillard, the authors borrow the concepts of “simulation” (appearances without “depth”) and “seduction” (play with appearances) that would leave little space for “truth.” From Deleuze, however, the authors take up the importance of the power play that informs the effect of “truth.” “In this sense,” Bosma and Pisters write, “[Madonna’s] strategies well fit a postmodern critique of truth. Madonna is better related to Deleuze’s work, being also much more affirmative than Baudrillard’s views and post-apocalyptic visions. Whereas Baudrillard cynically holds that there is no truth anymore anyway, Deleuze points out that truth is a concept that is dependent on who is at play. It is not about an absolute relativization of truth, but about the specific ‘play’ that is played differently each time again.” Madonna: The Many Faces of a Popstar is a thought-provoking work; however, the book, published with a non-academic publisher, is much burdened by with the desire to be easily accessible. Hence, we look forward to a more thorough and sustained follow-up. However, I do have some doubt about the strategy seemingly adopted by the authors to turn Madonna into a veritable “auteur.” In the “introduction,” the authors write, “In 15 years, [Madonna] has built a large and versatile oeuvre. The more we listened to and looked at her work, the more discussions we read, the more Madonna’s work struck us.” The question would be, first, whether or not the attention to her work and oeuvre would hinder us in entertaining its rich cultural, political, and social resonances, and second, whether or not this emphasis on authorship and oeuvre flies in the face of a decisively postmodern evaluation of the “Madonna ”-text. In a way, it appears that the authors have turned “Madonna” into a modernist “auteur” in order for the text that surrounds her to warrant creative, serious, and profound attention . Finally, there seems to be something important missing from Bosma and Pisters’ interpretations: the strange way in which Madonna’s changing appearances suggest a localization of desire away from the requisite “tits and ass.” This move may have started with all the attention directed to her navel, but later performances suggest other displacements of the look. THE MOON AND THE WESTERN IMAGINATION by Scott L. Montgomery. The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, U.S.A., 1999. 265 pp., illus. ISBN: 0-8165-1711-8. Reviewed by David Topper, History Department , University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9, Canada. E-mail: . In 1994, Scott Montgomery published a wonderful little article revealing that the first naturalistic depiction of the Moon appeared in the early fifteenthcentury painting of the Crucifixion by the artist Jan van Eyck. Previously, Leonardo da Vinci was given credit for this. In some ways, this book is an expansion , historically forward and backward , of that article. It is the first such work that sweeps over the topic from ancient time through the scientific revolution , drawing on sources ranging across the sciences and the arts. As such, it may be compared with two other books on similar topics: Samuel Y. Edgerton’s The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry : Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (1991) and Eileen Reeves’ Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo (1997). (I reviewed the latter work in Leonardo Digital Reviews, Jan. 1998; an abridged version was published in Leonardo 31, No. 4 (1998), p. 328.) I should point out that there is a sense in which the following is less a “review” and more a “foreword,” since I read an early version of the manuscript of Montgomery’s book. My reason for writing this—independently of my relationship with the author—is simply to make readers of Leonardo aware of this book, which, along with the books by Edgerton and Reeves, form a marvelous “trilogy” on science, art and scientific illustration. A theme running throughout Montgomery’s book is that the Moon has been a screen upon which we have projected our earthly thoughts and passions . Even after the invention of the telescope, when visual knowledge of the Moon’s surface was magnified...