Psychology of Color ed. by S.L. Udovik (review)

334 Leonardo Reviews for Leonardo and later artists and illustrators to portray a realistic Moon. Growing out of late medieval naturalism , which often entailed an obsession with the minutiae of organic nature, van Eyck extended his range across the “physical cosmos whose details are presented with a fidelity that far exceeds anything achieved by the whole of the Italian Renaissance—a period for which such things as rocks, rivers, mountains and so forth were most often elements of staging.” Montgomery is a geologist by training, and this is clear when he continues: “In general, van Eyck’s strata and landforms permit geologic analysis; his clouds, meteorological forecasting; his topography, geographic investigation; his Moon, astronomical inquiry” (p. 91). When William Gilbert, famous for discovering that the Earth is a magnet, made a naked-eye “map” of the Moon, he named the various regions bays, capes and so forth— like features on the Earth. Likewise Galileo, when depicting his telescopic observations of 1610, “drew the Moon according to certain conventions of pictorial rhetoric in late Renaissance mapmaking that governed the delineation of coastlines, islands, peninsulas, headlands, basins, and so forth” (p. 125). All this reflects the fact that this period was also the age of exploration, when cartography was a necessary and flourishing enterprise. Nevertheless Galileo’s “scientific” observations sometimes stimulated further literary explorations of the Moon—one being Kepler’s Somnium, a fictitious journey to the Moon. Although Galileo’s drawings and engravings of the Moon are landmarks in this history, the maps by others who followed were closer to true maps, depicting the varied and various features of its surface. Van Langren’s map of 1645 is generally considered the first true map of the Moon; nevertheless, when seeing it in its full context one finds that the naming of the labeled features betrays the socio-political climate of its creation, with many of the lunar seas and craters named after kings and princes. “The lunar surface,” writes Montgomery, “did not belong to astronomy ; astronomy, however, belonged entirely under royal power” (p. 167). Montgomery clearly reveals the role of patronage: the king of Spain appears five times on the Moon! Van Langren’s map was followed by Hevelius’s famous work, the monumental Selenographia, which became the standard reference for the next century and a half. I am pleased to say that such political nomenclature did not stick. The scheme put forth by Riccioli, in his Almagestum Novum, using primarily names of scientists, became standard by the eighteenth century. Accordingly, upon studying a map of the Moon while reading this book, I was pleased to find that Caroline Herschel has a crater (albeit a very small one) named after her, not far from one (much larger, of course) dedicated to her famous brother, William . This is much more appropriate than the king of Spain (this betrays my present-day bias). The book ends with a sort of coda, devoted to a brief survey of the naming of the new planets and moons in the last two centuries. With humankind’s thoughts, feelings and beliefs projected upon the Moon as its focus, this wonderful book—masterful in scope, rich in detail, and a pleasure to read—takes the reader on a sometimes surprising and often fascinating and enlightening journey across the arts and sciences. (For further references to material on various interrelationships between art and science see my article “The Visual Arts and the Natural Science: An Annotated Bibliography,” in Leonardo On-Line: .) OBRAS MAESTRAS DEL MUSEO NACIONAL DE BELLAS ARTES (MASTERWORKS OF THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS) by Jorge Glusberg et al. 2nd Ed., Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires, Argentina , 1999. 186 pp., paper. (In Spanish) Reviewed by Paul Hertz, Academic Computing and Network Services, Northwestern University, 2129 N. Campus Dr., Evanston, IL 60208-2850. E-mail: . This full-color survey of works in the Argentinean National Museum of Fine Arts presents highlights of the collection under two rubrics: (1) International Artists and (2) Argentinean and Latin American artists. The division is clearly artificial, particularly regarding Argentinean artists, who actively participated in European trends both at home and abroad; nevertheless, it may serve to focus some needed attention on...