Vision and Its Instruments

Starting with Brunelleschi’s invention of perspective and Galileo’s invention of the telescope—two inaugural moments in the history of vision, from two apparently distinct provinces, art and science—this volume of essays by noted art, architecture, science, philosophy, and literary historians teases out the multiple strands of the discourse about sight in the early modern period. Looking at Leonardo and Gallaccini, at botanists, mathematicians, and artists from Dante to Dürer to Shakespeare, and at photography and film as pointed modern commentaries on early modern seeing, Vision and Its Instruments revisits the complexity of the early modern economy of the image, of the eye, and of its instruments. The book explores the full range of early modern conceptions of vision, in which mal’occhio (the evil eye), witchcraft, spiritual visions, and phantasms, as well as the artist’s brush and the architect’s compass, were seen as providing knowledge equal to or better than newly developed scientific instruments and practices (and occasionally working in conjunction with them). The essays in this volume also bring a new dimension to the current discourse about image production and its cultural functions.

“The book’s subject is also part of the experience of reading it: the generous provision of illustrations offers patterns of analogy and juxtaposition that present the reader with their own epistemic images. Payne’s introduction proposes that Renaissance art and science conceived of sight as performance and event. In the complex acts of seeing performed in these essays, and those they encourage in the reader, the book illustrates as well as argues its own propositions.”—Kathryn Murphy, Apollo Magazine, “A highly rewarding volume, brimming with exciting ideas and findings. It is also beautifully illustrated.”—Stuart Clark, Renaissance Quarterly, “Originating in the seemingly disconnected provinces of art and science with the development of perspective by Filippo Brunelleschi and of the telescope by Galileo Galilei, these carefully textured analyses of vision continue the conversation from the processes of image making and reception to the physiology of the body and the mechanics of technology. Beyond the predictable methodological and disciplinary concerns, these authors incorporate the range of early modern cultural and religious considerations of vision, including mal occhio (evil eye), witchcraft, spiritual visions, and phantasms as they extend the early-20th-century debate between the objects being seen versus the process of seeing.”—Choice, “Any scholar who is seriously interested in the intertwined histories of art and science, the scientific revolution, the philosophy of science, the history of the idea of objectivity, the concept of nature, the theory of art, the role of photography in art history, the limits of visibility, the place of vision in Dante, vision and the visionary, the epistemology of drawing, theories of the imagination, botanical illustration, semiotics, aesthetics, and optics (among many other related topics) will need to read this beautifully designed, copiously illustrated, and challenging collection of dovetailing essays gathered by the estimable Alina Payne. Taken together, these essays point toward a synthetic understanding of the history of vision, to which the history of art belongs.”—Paul Barolsky, University of Virginia , “This remarkable collection of essays, gathered together with an illuminating introduction by Alina Payne, ranges from Dante to Alfred Hitchcock, from Leonardo da Vinci to Marcel Duchamp. Yet, though the particular focus continually shifts, the central questions remain the same: What is the relationship between seeing and knowing? Between image and reality? Between art and science? Vision and Its Instruments is an important book for anyone interested in these questions and in the particular changes that Renaissance art brought to the representation of the visible and invisible world.”—Stephen Greenblatt, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and 2011 National Book Award for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern and author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

Alina Payne is Alexander P. Misheff Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University.