Abstract: | Introduction: The material world and its limits / Guy Hedreen -- Plato's attitude toward painting and mathematics / Ernesto Paparazzo -- The Vitruvian body in De architectura's third preface : architecture and rhetoric between nature and art / Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols -- Cera d'api : la storia naturale di un medium archetipico / Verity Platt -- 'We penetrate the Earth's innards and search for riches' : Pliny's hierarchy of materials and its influence in the Renaissance / Sarah Blake McHam -- Moving wood, man immobile : Hero's Automata at the Urbino Court / Courtney Roby -- Terremoti artificiali. La sismologia aristotelica nella guerra sotterranea del Rinascimento / Morgan Ng -- The Heptaphonon and the architecture of echoes / Carolyn Yerkes -- A changing Earth : Strabo and Leonardo's scientific humanism / Domenico Laurenza -- Into the wild : living landscape and wonderment in Renaissance art / Dennis Geronimus -- Botticelli's Venus and Mars, Lucretius and Empedocles / Gordon Campbell -- Fantasia and speciation : traces of empedocles in ancient poetry and Renaissance art / Guy Hedreen -- Coda: Temporality and the reception of ancient culture : an example from Dürer / Guy Hedreen. "The interplay between nature, science, and art in antiquity and the early modern period differs significantly from late modern expectations. In this book scholars from ancient studies as well as early modern studies, art history, literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science, explore that interplay in several influential ancient texts and their reception in the Renaissance. The Natural History of Pliny, De Architectura of Vitruvius, De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, Automata of Hero, and Timaios of Plato among other texts reveal how fields of inquiry now considered distinct were originally understood as closely interrelated. In our choice of texts, we focus on materialistic theories of nature, knowledge, and art that remain underappreciated in ancient and early modern studies even today"-- |
