Freedberg, David. 2002. The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. xii+513. $50/$30
The Eye of the Lynx is primarily about the research into natural history carried out by the members of the Accademia dei Lincei. The Academy was founded in 1603 by a young Roman nobleman, Federico Cesi (1585-1630), the prince of Aqauasparta. Galileo was the group’s sixth member. Often called the first modern scientific academy, it preceded the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, the Royal Society in Britain, and the Académie des sciences in France. The book tells the story of the Linceans’ attempt to observe, collect, classify, and disseminate terrestrial nature. Cast as an account of the origins of ‘modern’ natural history, Freedberg retells the history of Galileo as the story of a star among a collaborative and supportive scientific community of scholars.
The primary evidence for the book comes from several large collections of natural history drawings. In 1986, Freedberg discovered hundreds of drawings in ‘a cupboard’ in Windsor Castle. A search into their origin developed into a much larger research project. It turned out that they were originally commissioned by Cassiano dal Pozzo, a Roman antiquarian and collector, for his museo cartaceo or ‘paper museum.’ Others Lincean pictures in turn were found in the British Museum, Montpellier medical school library, and the Institut de France in Paris. Much of the evidence Freedberg draws upon is unpublished and will be new to scholars of natural history and to historians of science. Many of the Lincean pictures and documents have only become available since the 1980s. Altogether, Freedberg examined over 6,000 drawings of nature, some loose, some bound together. Taken as a whole they are an attempt to visually document and classify all of nature in the Old World and New. Up to that point in time, the only other collection of illustrations of similar size was the encyclopedic documentation of nature by the Bolognese doctor Ulisse Aldrovandi. Most of these pictures, Freedberg claims, have never previously been studied or even photographed. Among the most important are a large number of the first drawings ever made with the aid of a microscope including the very first botanical illustration made this way: the seed of a Chinese rose (Hibiscus mutabilis L.) by Cornelis Bloemaert. The scroll in Latin beneath the seeds reveals its origins: “the same seed presented in threefold view beneath a microscope.” This illustration gives some idea of how the Linceans used visual images as part of their natural history research program and hints at their larger interest in reproduction and generation. The seed is carefully and realistically rendered with great care and attention to detail. It is presented from the front, side, and back to give as complete as possible visual account.
This book crosses disciplinary boundaries. As Freedberg is a professor of art history at Columbia University, understandably, it draws most heavily upon art history; yet it also crosses over into the history of science, and the history of the book. One of the most appealing features of the book is its abundance of pictures. To grasp the essence of what they were doing, it was helpful to have so many of the Lincean drawings included—and many are skillfully rendered and delightful to view. This is not to suggest that the illustrations are merely decorative. It could be said that Freedberg is in his own right a generous curator and helpful docent for what is a kind of modern museo cartaceo. The role of the visual in the study of nature is in fact one of the principal themes of the book. Freedberg reaches some interesting conclusions about the role of observation in sixteenth-century science. The Linceans put a strong emphasis on observation and start out believing in the usefulness of illustrations in the study of nature. In the end, however, he argues they came to see the limits of vision as a reliable guide to knowledge. Sight was essential but not sufficient for good science. Our senses, Cesi concluded, cannot reveal the essence of things.
Cornelis Bloemaert, seed of a Chinese rose (Hibiscus mutabilis L.) seen under a microscope. Engraving, Ferrari, De Florum Cultura, p. 499.
Additionally Freedberg addresses the interrelated concerns of the Linceans with the use of illustrations and the problem of classification. Cesi was committed to using pictures in his investigation of nature. A tension existed, however, between Cesi’s desire to record everything as a picture and the desire for order. Pictures conveyed texture, color, irregularity, and anomaly better than what was regular and essential in nature. Freedberg argues that recording and describing was in a kind of fundamental tension with reducing and classifying. Illustrations of the surface of things eventually gave way to finding the essence of things by counting and by geometrical abstraction. Freedberg traces the move from a belief in the importance of pictures for knowledge of the world—which the Linceans shared with earlier men such as Aldrovandi and Gesner—to an increasing reliance on geometry and mathematics. As in so much else, Galileo was an inspiration and model for the Linceans. One of Freedberg’s central arguments is that the descriptive and synthetic aspects of picture making stood at odds with the need for order and analysis. The old Aristotelian notion of difference as a means of distinguishing between species was not proving helpful. Freedberg adopts Foucault’s argument that difference and identity replaced similitude and resemblance as the primary ways to classify and order the world. According to this theory, the doctrine of similitude was the leading episteme of pre-classical science. (For example, a walnut being good for curing head ailments since its kernel is similar to the brain.) Perhaps overstating his case, Freedberg, see Cesi’s work as making an epistemological rupture with its sixteenth-century predecessors akin to the “geometrization of the world” by Galileo’s physics. (p. 4) “Cesi began to move away from reliance on similitude and resemblance, in the direction of number and geometry…. In this way, he was stimulated by his awareness that the geometrical diagram, more abstract that pictures, could tell one more about the essential aspects of things than pictures ever could.” (p. 385) The microscope offered the possibility to group species on the basis of their inner constitution rather than on surfaces and outer appearance. Influenced by Galileo’s example. Cesi and fellow Linceans tried to reduce the variety and complexity of the natural world to “structure, order, and number.” (p. 181) To substantiate this ‘rupture’ Freedberg places Cesi and Linceans on linear continuum toward ‘modern science.’ He also frames the story as a straightforward opposition between the empirical study of nature (the future) and the literary attachment to authoritative texts (the past). While both Galileo and Cesi rejected Aristotle, I would argue that this approach downplays their attachment to Plato, Pythagoras and other classical authorities.
In addition to observation, illustration, classification—and a concern with Foucauldian epistemes—Freedberg tackles the theme of patronage. The Lincean’s paid homage to Maffeo Barberini, Pope Urban VIII with three of their publications: Melissographia, Apes Dianiae, and Apiarium. Melissographia apparently was the first printed illustration to be made with the aid of the microscope. (p. 162) It is a large engraved sheet measuring 41.6 by 30.7 cm—about as large as copper sheets came at that time—celebrating the chief Barberini emblem, three bees. It also shows two putti hold aloft the papal tiara and the keys of St. Peter. Most importantly and originally it shows these three bees greatly magnified and illustrated with realistic detail. The illustration reveals details the naked eye cannot see. Like the seed of the Chinese rose, the bees are carefully arranged to show a top, bottom and side view. Melissographia also illustrates several bee body parts: a head, antennae, proboscis, eyes, stinger, mouth parts, and a pair of posterior legs. This illustration is meant to serve as a testament to the keen gaze of the Linceans and show that the Barberini and the bee were “worthy of wonder.” [1] It is a good example of the promise and the limits of their research program.
Johann Friedrich Greuter, Melissographia (1625). Engraved broadsheet showing trigon of bees under magnification, with details of microscopic examination of the bee.
For Galileo scholars, chapters 4 and 5 are likely to be the most interesting as they lay out the roles played by Cesi and the Academy of Linceans in the Galileo controversy. Freedberg covers Galileo in the years between the Starry Messenger (1610) and the Assyaer (1624). This account sheds some light on the intellectual community of which he was a part: Galileo appears less as a genius standing alone against the institutional church and as more of a star among a loose-knit and potentially subversive group of brilliant scholars. Galileo joined the Academy in 1611, and Freedberg does a convincing job of showing how from that point forward the Linceans did much to support Galileo in all his endeavors. For instance, Cesi played a crucial role in Galileo’s trip to Rome in 1611. “The young prince accompanied Galileo at every step of the way, was present at almost every important occasion, and helped him devise the strategy, sometimes successful and sometimes a failure, by which he presented his discoveries. It was he, more than anyone else,” Freedberg writes, “who stood alongside Galileo together as they fired the opening salvos of their pro-Copernican and anti-Aristotelian campaign.” (pp. 107-8) As is well known, The Linceans played a central role in some of his publications. Freedberg relates the important history of the editing and publication of Galileo’s books in great detail. Much of this will also be interesting and new to historians of the book. The Linceans believed in Galileo’s work and supported him when and where they could. They also helped disseminate Galileo’s ideas, and Cesi and others attempted to protect Galileo’s reputation in Rome. Freedberg documents these efforts convincingly but is largely silent on how effective or influential they were. For instance, as early as 1612 Cesi accepted Kepler’s elliptical orbits and wrote to Galileo urging him to do the same. Galileo at this time was still cautious about renouncing Ptolemaic epicyclic and eccentric orbits. Cesi’s also attempts to persuade Galileo to be cautions in Rome—warning him not to directly confront the philosophers and theologians of the Collegio Romano. If Cesi were more influential in this regard, of course, it would have been to Galileo’s benefit. Ironically, however, Freedberg’s careful reconstruction of Cesi’s warnings and his astronomical advice shows Cesi’s lack of effective influence as much as it supports Freedberg’s case for seeing the Academy’s as an important part of the Galileo story.
For readers primarily interested in natural history, the book offers up several tantalizing ‘discoveries.’ Chapter 6 outlines the Linceans’ “pathfinding and as yet largely unknown” use of the microscope. (p. xi) Freedberg claims that analogous to Galileo’s discoveries of astronomical nature using the telescope, Cesi and the Lynceans were the first to systematically use the microscope to observe and record terrestrial nature. “The telescope had helped Galileo discover not just how new stars were born, but also stars that could otherwise not be seen; now the microscope was helping Cesi and his friends discover things hitherto unseen on earth and resolve the problems of how they were generated.” (p. 232) Another ‘first’ comes with the Lyncean investigations into fungi, lichens, mosses and other exotic plants. ‘Modern mycology,’ Freedberg claims, begins with the researches illustrated in the Lyncean volumes in the Institut de France, and his discoveries in the Paris volumes means that the history of mycology and “other critical botanical issues” has to be rewritten. (p. 226)
Arguably more pathbreaking than rewriting the history of mycology—as interesting to some specialists as that may be—is Freedberg’s revisionist attempts to show that the Linceans, who he argues have been misunderstood by modern scholars, represented an important Foucauldian ‘epistemic rupture’ with the science of the past. Their importance lay with their break from predecessors by their recognition of the importance of classification based on reproduction, dissection, and examination by microscope. This would put the Linceans’ natural history research into the main story of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century alongside (and equal to) the advances in astronomy, physics and mathematics associated with Galileo. This larger claims is less convincing and less likely to succeed than his more modest claim that “the achievements of Federico Cesi are still far from having received their due.” This book will certainly help rectify Cesi’s neglect. (p. 66)
Overall this is an excellent and seemingly important study with several ‘discoveries’ and insights that should interest art historians, historians of science, and historians of the book. Freedberg has read widely and done original and extensive primary research for his study. I suspect his knowledge of astronomy is limited, however, as he naively claimed that Copernicus had only proposed the heliocentric system as a hypothesis. (p 85) Perhaps, like many others, he did not read beyond the introduction to De Revolutionibus—or did not read it at all: the book does not even appear in the bibliography. As if to make them more ‘modern’ than they were, we are told that the Academy appeals to ‘experiment’ rather than the authority of antiquity, but are not given substantial evidence of experiments they conducted. My main criticism of the book though is not with its factual errors but with the larger vision of the history of science that frames the study. While Foucault is invoked at the start of the book, it is never made clear what Freedberg’s philosophy of science is. Without further explanation or support, we are told Galileo separated physics from metaphysics. This claim is interesting but does not seem to me at least to be self-evident. Equally mystifying (and equally unsupported) is the assertion that Urban VIII must have seen Cesi’s theories as undermining the Church. His own evidence suggests that Cesi’s research supported the Church, or at least by linking the Barberini to the wonder of nature, added to their prestige. The book repeatedly evaluates the Linceans along a continuum leading to modern science therefore they are described as “forward-thinking” (p. 105) and their contemporary historical impact is less important than their precedence in historical discovery. Their portrayal as breaking a Medieval attitude bound to ‘authority and tradition’ is unconvincing. This larger philosophical framework, however, does not detract significantly from the new historical insights that are well grounded on a huge collection of fascinating visual materials.
[1] The engraving in Latin says “O great Parent of Things, to whom Nature willingly submits itself, behold the BEE in the BARBERINI escutcheon. NATURE has nothing more remarkable than this. Surveying it with a keener gaze, the work of the Linceans has set it forth in these pictures, and explained it. The genius of the Cesi family has stimulated this sacred labor; the art of Pallas has aided these willing men. Great miracles have emerged as a result of their work with the polished glass, and the eye has learned to have greater faith. Had it not been for the divine discoveries of the new art, who would have known that there are five tounges on the Hyblean body [i.e. the bee’s], that the neck is similar to a lion’s mane, that the eyes are hirsute, and that there are two sheaths on each mandible? Thus it is fitting that while the world looks up to you in wonder, your BEE shows itself even more worthy of wonder.” (p. 162)
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