Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe: Finding Heaven

ISBN-13: 9780521517959 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 334 str.

Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier

Opis

In this book, Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier offers the first systematic study of Pythagoras and his influence on mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, religion, medicine, music, the occult, and social life as well as on architecture and art in the late medieval and early modern eras. Following the threads of admiration for this ancient Greek sage from the fourteenth century to Kepler and Galileo in the seventeenth, this book demonstrates that Pythagoras s influence in intellectual circles Christian, Jewish, and Arab was more widespread than has previously been acknowledged. Joost-Gaugier shows that during this period Pythagoras was respected by many intellectuals in different areas of Europe. She also shows how this admiration was reflected in ideas that were applied to the visual arts by a number of well known architects and artists who sought, through the use of a visual language inspired by the memory of Pythagoras, to obtain perfect harmony in their creations. Among these were Alberti, Bramante, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Thus did, she suggests, some of the greatest art works in the Western world owe their modernity to an inspirational force that, paradoxically, had been conceived in the distant past."

Recenzje

'… wide-ranging, well-written study …' Renaissance Quarterly

Spis treści

Part I. Pythagoras, Man for the Renaissance: 1. Prologue: the diffusion of knowledge about Pythagoras in the Renaissance; 2. The emergence of 'Saint' Pythagoras in the early Renaissance; 3. The apotheosis of Pythagoras in the sixteenth century; Part II. The Many Faces of Renaissance Pythagoreanism: 4. The Pythagorean tradition in the early fifteenth century; 5. The strengthening and deepening of Pythgoreanism in the later fifteenth century; 6. The maturation and vicissitudes of Pythagoreanism in the sixteenth century; Part III. Pythagoreanism in Architecture and Art: 7. Renaissance images of Pythagoras; 8. The search for harmony in architecture and art of the fifteenth century; 9. Finding harmony: form and meaning in architecture and art of the sixteenth century; 10. Conclusions: the prince of Italian philosophy and the birth of harmony as an aesthetic notion.