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Technology and Culture 45.1 (2004) 171-173



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The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History. By David Freedberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. xii+513. $50/$30.

Art historian David Freedberg writes: "In 1986, in a cupboard in Windsor Castle, I came across hundreds of the finest natural historical drawings I had ever seen" (p. 15). While one key detail of this discovery is left unexplained (how does one get to rummage through cupboards in Windsor Castle?), the magnificence of the drawings themselves cannot be disputed, and some of them are vividly reproduced in this opulent and fascinating study of the Accademia dei Lincei, The Eye of the Lynx. [End Page 171]

The Accademia, considered by many to be the first scientific society, was founded in 1603 by a young Roman nobleman, Federico Cesi (1585-1630). The Linceans became ardent investigators of the natural world, choosing the lynx for their emblem because of its reputedly sharp eyesight. They studied myriad flora and fauna around Rome and in other parts of the world where they traveled—willingly or in exile—and recorded their observations. They also followed and participated in cosmological debates spawned by Copernicus and his successors that intensified on occasions of remarkable celestial phenomena, such as the appearance of a new star (now known to be a supernova) in 1603.

Freedberg details the extensive activity of the Linceans in support of their most famous member, Galileo, including their central role in some of his publications. When Galileo came to Rome in 1611 to show his new spyglass to a commission of Jesuits, Cesi accompanied him about the city and was present at Galileo's all-night demonstration of the instrument on the Janiculum, the highest hill of Rome. Freedberg's recounting of Galileo's activities is familiar territory. What is original here is the detailed story of the involvement of Cesi and other members of the Lincei in protecting and defending Galileo's position in Rome, and in publishing his writings.

Far less known are the extensive researches of academy members on flora, fauna, and other natural objects such as petrified woods, as well as the hundreds of pictorial records that they made (now at Windsor or scattered among many other places) of plants and plant parts, mushrooms, lichen, fungi, fossils, petrified wood, animals, and much else. Their use of the microscope—developed in the wake of the telescope—expanded their range. At a fundamental level, Freedberg's study concerns the technologies of seeing and the philosophical and epistemological problems that came about in the wake of extensive observations and pictorial representations of natural objects, such as plants, combined with the attempt to order such objects into a rational classification scheme that captured their essence. For the Linceans, especially Cesi, generation and reproduction became key issues. Hermaphroditic and other borderline examples defied both the Aristotelian notion of difference as a means of distinguishing species and Lincean attempts at devising new classification schemes.

Freedberg focuses on several of the academy's diverse activities. He explores the Lincean investigations of the bee (including their wonderful microscopic studies) and the relationship of these studies to the patronage of Maffeo Barberini, who became Pope Urban VIII and whose coat of arms featured bees. He details the highly fraught Lincean effort to publish the "Mexican Treasury" based on a huge compendium of drawings of flora and fauna made by Francisco Hernández at the behest of Philip II of Spain. (This enterprise was complicated by the Linceans' lack of access not only to the actual specimens but also to many of the original illustrations.) Freedberg also introduces a remarkable set of drawings of fossilized wood, made [End Page 172] from specimens found around several Umbrian villages, the remnants of Cesi's unfinished book on fossils and fossil woods. He notes that these images were "the first extensive set of field drawings of a fossil site or set of geological features ever made" (p. 310).

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