Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History

Years ago, David Freedberg stumbled across a group of drawings by the little-known Academy of Linceans, a seventeenth-century Italian group that took as its task nothing less than the pictorial documentation of all of nature. Moving across Europe, he encountered thousands of such drawings—of fossils, the species of the New World, or the heavenly bodies studied by the group's most famous member, Galileo Galilei. Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, this book reveals this crucial moment in the development of natural history.

Years ago, David Freedberg stumbled across a group of drawings by the little-known Academy of Linceans, a seventeenth-century Italian group that took as its task nothing less than the pictorial documentation of all of nature. Moving across Europe, he encountered thousands of such drawings—of fossils, the species of the New World, or the heavenly bodies studied by the group's most famous member, Galileo Galilei. Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, this book reveals this crucial moment in the development of natural history.

David Freedberg is a professor of art history and director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. His books include The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, also published by the University of Chicago Press; The Prints of Bruegel the Elder; Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture (with Jan de Vries); Rubens: The Life of Christ after the Passion; and Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century.