Mathematics and Material Culture in Late Renaissance Italy

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The main aim of my research project is to examine the ways in which two key aspects of cultural and intellectual life (mathematics and material culture) shaped and responded to knowledge, society, and the visual arts in late Renaissance Italy. In particular, I seek to show how interactions between these fields facilitated the substantial changes in knowledge known as the Scientific Revolution. The vehicle for this exploration is the architect-engineer Mutio Oddi of Urbino (1569-1639). Although largely unknown today, during his lifetime Oddi was esteemed highly as a scholar and practitioner of a wide range of disciplines related to mathematics. His diverse and peripatetic career (which took him from Urbino to exile in Venice, Loreto, Milan, and Lucca) embraced civil and military architecture, the design and retail of mathematical instruments, trading in pictures and objects of virtu, writing, publishing, and teaching. As such, he is a prime example of the polymathic 'artisan-scholar' so prevalent in the period. While this type of figure is widely recognised as having significantly influenced late Renaissance art and science, the range of their activities and a lack of surviving evidence has hampered efforts to properly explain their contribution. My book seeks to overcome these obstacles by providing a detailed account of Oddi and his circle based on an extensive (and largely unstudied) set of archival documents. Oddi's papers (including notebooks, financial accounts, treatises, drawings, and more than 1000 letters) comprise a remarkably rich source for the study of science, art, commerce, and society in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Scrutiny of these documents reveals Oddi's involved relationships with leading intellectual, artistic, political, and religious figures, such as Galileo Galilei, Jan I Brueghel, Federico Barocci, Francesco Maria II della Rovere, and Federico Borromeo. A close study of Oddi's papers and printed works offers valuable new insights into mathematical and artistic education, the production and purpose of printed books, the trade in mathematical instruments, the content and context of Flemish cabinet paintings, the collecting and uses of drawings, the complexities of military architecture, and the ways in which friendship and regional identity influenced trade and intellectual life. One of the book's key objectives is to examine the ways in which mathematics and material culture affected late Renaissance scientific culture. A near-exact contemporary of Galileo, Oddi's life and works shed new light on the practice of science in a formative age, especially the growing application of mathematics to the investigation of nature and the substantial cross-pollination between the visual arts and the sciences at the turn of the century. However, although Oddi's career bears striking similarities to that of his better known peer, much of Oddi's interest and historical value lies in the fact that, unlike Galileo, he was not spectacularly innovative and did not become a 'hero of modern science'. As such, he is arguably a better representative of the majority of everyday scientific practitioners active in the period, particularly those whose energetic dissemination of mathematical knowledge established the foundations of the Scientific Revolution by instituting a 'shared knowledge' of mathematics. Through a comparison between Oddi, Galileo, and their peers the book seeks to establish what was general and what was particular about mathematically based science in the late Renaissance, distinguishing between common attitudes on the one hand, and local or personal approaches and practices on the other. 'Mathematics and Material Culture in Late Renaissance Italy' will demonstrate that scientific change in the period was multivalent and contested, embedded not only in the mind but also in materials, governed by friendship as much principle, and determined by place as much as purpose.