Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Winner of the 1992 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize from the American Historical Association

"Edgerton's interdisciplinary study is a bold attempt to show how the perception of the world, as slowly refined by the Renaissance artists, provided the impetus behind the scientific revolution. . . . An ambitious and largely persuasive book." --Nature

"Edgerton's book is learned and richly illustrated with paintings and drawings from the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, and contemporaneous Chinese dynasties. . . . [His] argument is intricate and flawless." --American Historical Review

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

For more than 25 years, Samuel Edgerton has been publishing provocative and somtimes controversial work on various scientific and technological aspects of art from the late Middle Ages through the scientific revolution. The core of much of his research is linear perspective the topic of his important book, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (CH, Jan'76). Edgerton is unabashedly laudatory about the ability of Renaissance art to communicate visual information. While being sensitive to pluralistic trends today regarding such ethnocentric matters, Edgerton shows how European realistic techniques (unique in world art) profoundly influenced engineering, architecture, anatomy, astronomy, mining, mechanics, and so forth. The material in this book (some of which has been published before) primarily explores the role of linear perspective both as a geometrical system for producing a realistic image and as a metaphor for religious symbolism. The subtitle, however, is a bit of an overstatement. The eight chapters do not constitute a continuous narrative on "Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution"; rather, each contains an episode much of it fascinating, to be sure in that history.-D. Topper, University of Winnipeg