Harvard University Press Blog

Cavell at the Movies

“Every teacher knows the excitement, and chaos, in learning about a subject by undertaking to teach it.” So writes Stanley Cavell of his decision in 1963 to teach a seminar on film. The idea struck him as pedagogically promising, in that all present would have memories of their experiences with movies, and no established body of criticism yet existed to distract them from the nature of those experiences. As Cavell recounts in The World Viewed, though, the seminar was a failure. “Or rather,” he writes, “what was learned was important enough, but it came from our failures.”

Each week I assigned one or two students the responsibility of opening the discussion by reading a two- or three-page description—nothing but description—of the film we all had seen. It turned out that the descriptions were never quite accurate, not always because some gross turn in the plot was out of order or an event had been forgotten, but often because more was described than had been shown. (For example, “The car followed her to the hotel.” But in viewing the film, we had not known until later that the structure was a hotel.) After that, I noticed that almost every summary statement of a movie, whether in newspaper “criticism” or in brochures for a projected series, contains one or more descriptive inaccuracies. Is that because summaries don't really matter? Or because it is unclear what one wants from them? Only about operas, certainly not about novels or stories or poems or plays, would we accept so casual and sometimes hilariously remote an account as we will about movies.

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Another failure in the seminar’s work was no less pervasive, and far more disheartening. The willingness to forgo theory and criticism was too proud a vow, particularly in view of our continuing inability to discover categories we had confidence in or to make comparisons (e.g., with the novel, plays, and painting) that really carried the weight we wished upon them. A frequent reaction to these dead ends was to start getting technical; words flowed about everything from low-angle shots to filters to timings and numbers of set-ups to deep focus and fast cutting, etc., etc. But all this in turn lost its sense. On the one hand, the amount and kind of technical information that could be regarded as relevant is more than any of us knew; on the other hand, the only technical matters we found ourselves invoking, so far as they were relevant to the experience of particular films, which was our only business, are in front of your eyes. You can see when a shot begins and ends and whether it’s long, middle, or close; you know whether the camera is moving back or forth or sideways, whether a figure brings himself into the field of the camera or the camera turns to get him; you may not know how Hitchcock gets the stairwell to distort that particular way in Vertigo, but you can see that he got it. Then what is the reality behind the idea that there is always a technical something you don't know that would provide the key to the experience?

The questions raised by the “failure” of the seminar stuck with Cavell over the next several years, and he describes their lingering effect as the genesis of The World Viewed, which was first published in 1971. The significance of that book, and of Cavell’s work on film more generally, is noted in two recent appreciations from the folks at n+1. In a piece earlier this month, Charles Peterson deems Cavell “one of the greatest American philosophers of the past half-century” but one who’d have become “little more than a curious footnote in American intellectual history” had he not turned to “the more practical concern of how to ‘reconstruct the everyday.’ ”

The History and Philosophy of Representational Art in Islam

There exists a widespread belief that Islam can countenance no representational religious art, that any depiction of religious figures will trip the wire of Newsweek’s “Muslim Rage.” Such a belief is so firmly held in the west that it easily underwrote the government-propagated claim that the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was a spontaneous reaction to the “Innocence of Muslims” film, rather than the premeditated assault it now appears to have been.

In fact, as those willing to grant the possibility of dissonance within a centuries-old religion understand, it is not actually the case that Islam so thoroughly outlaws representational art. What we’ve lacked, writes Jamal J. Elias, is a thorough understanding of the historical and philosophical origins of the contentious role of iconography in Islam. In the following excerpt from his forthcoming study, Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam, Elias explains his approach to filling this gap in our understanding.

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It is often claimed that Muslims do not have icons, idols, or pictures of God or religious heroes; indeed, in modern times, there undoubtedly appears to be a widespread Islamic cultural opposition to depicting human religious figures as well as God in visual form. One need only recall the publicity surrounding the making and release of The Message in 1976—a film about the birth of Islam in which none of the primary characters appears on screen out of concern for Muslim sensibilities. Similarly, one might look to the intermittent controversies over the American comedy cartoon South Park’s allusions to depicting Muhammad beginning in 2005 and culminating in threats against the makers of the series in 2010, causing them to self-censor airings of the relevant episodes. And although the Taliban do not represent a widespread Muslim ideal, their destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001 was religiously motivated to some degree, and religiously justified to every extent. More recently, the (at times violent) indignation following the publication of caricatures of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper in 2005, and the reaction to instances, threats, and rumors of the desecration of the Qur’an in the United States or in U.S. detention centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Cuba, underscore the obvious fact that Muslims hold complex attitudes toward religious images and objects, and that these attitudes do not reflect worldviews that are either naively unaware of or religiously oblivious to the power of images.

In fact, Muslim attitudes toward religious images and objects display apparent contradictions that not only are shared with Islam’s sister religions of Christianity and Judaism, but also are apparent in the history of image-rich religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. On the one hand, Muslims display a widespread (though not comprehensive) taboo on religious depictions, and a narrower—but still prevalent—distrust of treating material objects as supernatural or divine. On the other, they embrace a religious culture that is rich in images, reacts to the images of others in complex ways, and is spatially focused around an object—the Ka‘ba building in Mecca—and its associated primary ritual of pilgrimage, which incorporates somatic engagement with material objects such as stones and pillars.

The "Cabul Prisoners" and the Buddhas of Bamiyan

Llewelyn Morgan’s The Buddhas of Bamiyan is the most recent installment in the Wonders of the World series edited by Mary Beard. The book mines the history and meaning of these colossal figures, which stood for 1,400 years before their destruction by the Taliban in 2001. In the post below, Morgan tells of a visit to the grave of a woman whose life story he came to know during his work on the book.

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On a grey and drizzly English day earlier this summer I found myself in a cemetery in Somerset, feeling more emotional than I should have in front of the grave of a stranger. I hadn’t had much to go on: it was somewhere in the village of North Cheriton, and it had a cross. But I had scraped the mud away from the short inscription and there she was:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF JULIA FLORENTIA MULOCK

WIDOW OF COL MULOCK CB BORN IN AFGHANISTAN

JUNE 24 1842 DIED AT NORTH CHERITON APRIL 23 1910

Julia Mulock, née Sturt, had become a minor obsession of mine as I wrote The Buddhas of Bamiyan. Aside from her remarkable early life, Julia came to encapsulate for me Britain’s long and spasmodically intense relationship with Afghanistan, a relationship as easily forgotten as this memorial in an English country graveyard.

Chapel and Graveyard at North Cheriton

Julia Florentia Sturt had been born in captivity in Kabul. Her mother was Alexandrina Sturt, a prisoner of the Afghans; her father, Lieut. John Sturt, was already dead. He had been an officer of Engineers in the British force occupying Kabul during the First Afghan War, a misguided attempted to establish a buffer zone between British India and the Russian Empire encroaching from the north. A series of tactical errors resulted in a chaotic British retreat in midwinter, under ferocious attack from all sides, through the mountain passes between Kabul and Jalalabad, one of the most notorious disasters in British imperial history. A measure of the horror of this massacre is that Sturt was said to have been “the only man of the whole force who received Christian burial.” Very few indeed survived it, but Sturt’s pregnant widow Alexandrina, her mother Lady Sale, and a number of other soldiers and dependents were taken into custody by Akbar Khan, leader of the Afghan resistance, and spent nine months as effective hostages while the First Afghan War lurched towards its messy conclusion.

In those nine months the “Cabul Prisoners” became celebrities, their predicament the object of rapt interest by the British press and public in a way that has been compared to the US hostage crisis in Tehran in 1979-81. The most celebrated of them all was Julia’s grandmother and namesake, Florentia, Lady Sale, a tough, no-nonsense army wife (her husband, Sir Robert Sale, was all this time besieged by Akbar Khan in Jalalabad) whose journals of her experiences later became a publishing sensation. On July 24 1842 (note that Julia’s grave inscription gets the date wrong), Lady Sale dryly recorded the arrival of her granddaughter: “At 2 P.M. Mrs. Sturt presented me with a grand-daughter;—another female captive.”

In the latter stages of their captivity, as a British “Army of Retribution” closed in on Kabul, the prisoners were moved up from Kabul to Bamiyan, high in the Hindu Kush. Conditions were grim, and they faced the awful prospect of being marched north, beyond the mountains, and sold into slavery. But they also had the opportunity to visit what a series of European visitors to Afghanistan over the previous decades had made a famous monument, the cliff face peppered with caves and containing the giant Buddha statues. Lady Sale’s journal was illustrated with “some very pretty and correct sketches” by another captive, Lieut. Vincent Eyre, including three images of the Buddha cliffs.

That old lady in North Cheriton wouldn’t have remembered anything about Bamiyan, or the emotional scene when a force led by Lady Sale’s husband rescued them in September 1842. But she probably did retain some memories of the amazing reception when her family visited Britain in 1844. When they first landed at Lyme Regis (from a ship which the press were delighted to discover was called the True Briton), Lady Sale, her husband, daughter and granddaughter Julia were mobbed by well-wishers: “as soon as their presence became known,” according to The Times, “the nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood, and the inhabitants of Lyme, vied with each other in offering their congratulations, while the church bells poured forth their merriest strains of harmony…” There were similar scenes in Londonderry, Liverpool, Southampton, and London. Lady Sale was the heroine of the hour. At Astley’s Amphitheatre a circus performance culminated in “Lady Sale” fighting a double sword combat “with six Afghans, whom she put to flight.” This lionizing of Lady Sale isn’t so hard to analyze, a substitute victory that softened the dismay Britain had felt at the humiliating retreat from Kabul.

We catch a (slightly jaundiced) glimpse of the family group on their return journey to India at the end of 1844, in letters of Sir Henry Hardinge, the Governor General of India: Sir Robert Sale, “one of our military heroes seen to most advantage with a sabre in his hand,” the “very coarse” Lady Sale “coming out with a direct plain oath,” “Mrs [Alexandrina] Sturt pretty but unfeeling, the little daughter born in captivity.” Alexandrina Sturt could be forgiven for being emotionally withdrawn, we might think. As for Julia, incredibly, captivity in Afghanistan wasn’t the greatest trauma that she suffered early in life. On the eve of her fifteenth birthday, her mother Alexandrina was killed alongside her new husband, Major James Garner Holmes, beheaded by rebellious troops during the “Indian Mutiny.”

At 17 Julia married a military man 25 years her senior (they consistently falsify their ages in the census, not making Julia any easier to trace). Julia’s later years were no bed of roses, following her husband on his postings around the Empire. She lost two sons who followed the family tradition into the army. But it was to all appearances a happy marriage. Certainly Julia’s final years at The Old Rectory in leafy North Cheriton (a comfortable house up the hill from the graveyard where she now lies) were as far removed as it is possible to imagine from the place and circumstances of her birth.

Athletic Beauty, Divinely-Infused

In celebration of the Olympic games, we offer the following excerpt from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In Praise of Athletic Beauty, a thoroughly charming meditation on our love affair with athletes and their pursuit of excellence.

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If you take a car from Athens to the Isthmus of Corinth, and then drive across the winding mountain roads of the Peloponnese Peninsula to the distant village of Olympia, some thirty miles inland from the Ionian Sea, you will soon begin to feel what a commitment it was to walk or travel on horseback to the ancient Olympic games. Yet hundreds of athletes and tens of thousands of spectators, protected by an Olympics truce, made the journey every four years, over the span of a millennium or more—from 776 BC to 394 AD (the conventionally accepted dates of the ancient Olympic games). As you try to imagine this bodily effort, for which there is simply no equivalent in the modern world, you may begin to wonder what the specific attraction of those five days spent at Zeus’ most famous sanctuary could have been.

One answer, a modern answer but valid nevertheless, comes when you arrive at this shady green valley, where the Kladeos and Alpheios rivers join under lush foliage, a place so different from the arid stony landscape through which you have traveled, with growing impatience, during several hours. For ancient guests who had walked for days and even weeks, this contrast upon arrival must have triggered intense feelings of sensual pleasure and relief. Unlike modern tourists, who have the luxury of returning to their air-conditioned hotel rooms for the night, the crowds in ancient Olympia (all men, except for the priestess of Demeter and her maidens) endured narrow quarters, a shortage of water, and blistering heat. And yet their lives held nothing more glorious or more desirable than being precisely there, in that place, to watch athletes compete.

Olympia was just one of the traditional places, along with Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea, where free men from the various Greek states and colonies came together for panhellenic games, but it was the oldest and most charismatic site. So outstanding was Olympia’s fame that the four-year rhythm of its games became the most widely accepted measure for marking time in ancient Greece. Each Olympiad (four-year period) was named for the winner in the first athletic event of the five-day competition. Unlike the spectators (and also the artists, musicians, and orators who came to showcase their talents on the margins of sporting events), athletes spent at least a month before the games at Elis, thirty-five miles from Olympia, where they trained to reach the peak of physical conditioning.

The five days of the Olympic festival were organized as a complex sequence of athletic events and religious rituals (though we miss the specific appeal of Olympia if we insist too much on the distinction between the two). The first day was dedicated to heralds, musicians, and athletic competitions for adolescents. The second day featured horse races, chariot races (including chariots drawn by mules), and, in the U-shaped 200-yard-long stadion, the core event—the pentathlon, consisting of a foot race, long jump, discus, javelin, and wrestling. All stadion races that were not part of the pentathlon took place on the third day. The fourth day was devoted to wrestling, boxing, and the pankration (a very aggressive, almost sadistic type of wrestling or kick boxing), mostly taking place at the palestra, a rectangular court surrounded by arcades. Back at the stadion finally, spectators could enjoy the hoplite run, a middle distance race for men in full armor.

Athletes in the panhellenic games performed naked, and since nakedness only became a condition several centuries after this athletic tradition began, we know that performing naked was a cultural rule, not a symptom of an archaic state of society. Before competitions, athletes would spread oil all over their skin, and some historians have explained this practice as a competitive strategy, especially for the wrestling contest, or as a performance enhancement. I am not convinced that strategic advantage was the most important reason, however. The oil made the naked bodies of athletes glisten with reflected sunlight, and this very palpable aura set them apart from ordinary men.

Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012

Many of us at HUP were saddened this week by the death of author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. Among those most moved were editor Lindsay Waters and designer Jill Breitbarth, who remain grateful to Sendak for allowing our use of an illustration from his accompaniment to Joel Agee’s translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea on the cover of our 2004 book A New History of German Literature. Below, Waters and Breitbarth recall how we came to use Sendak’s work.

Lindsay Waters:

For me German culture came alive in the drawings and artwork of artists who fled to America before and after World War II, from the artists who made Little Golden Books, Stefan and George Salter, and the book designers and illustrators inspired by them. It was a style, a tone of dark forests where children get lost within seconds of losing sight of their parents, all of a sudden menaced by scary creatures. Maurice Sendak captured and developed this style to and beyond the point of vertigo. He went to the heart of what was scary in German culture, just as he’d journeyed to the heart of American darkness with Herman Melville.

Our New History of German Literature begins with a spell, an account of the very first document consisting of what is recognizably German language, something written on the back of a Latin manuscript which is held in the monastery at Fulda. The German literary tradition is enchanted. Who better to convey that complex history than Maurice Sendak, whose work helped so many to feel that chilling fright for the first time? So we approached him for permission to use one of the illustrations from his edition of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. It was like a dream come true when he decided eventually that our book was a project he was willing to be a part of. The person who’d made German language culture come alive for me was going to help bring our epic, thousand-page account of that culture to the world.

 

Jill Breitbarth:

Lindsay was eager to use one of Sendak’s illustrations from Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist for the jacket of A New History of German Literature, and I was thrilled to make a go of it. Getting permission to use the piece involved lots of phone calls between our camp and Sendak’s assistants. At one point, when a little tweaking was necessary, Sendak wished to speak directly with me. I was nervous thinking I would be talking with Sendak. I was such a fan.

We covered the design issues quickly and went right into politics. Sendak bemoaned the recent re-election of George Bush, that the war in Iraq had ever started, and that so many people close to him were dying. His passions were real and he had no qualms about sharing them with a person he’d never met. Sendak was respectful, and I felt I was talking with an honest man, sensitive to history and emotions.

Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam

The British Museum’s major new exhibition, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, is being hailed as a milestone in the “public recognition and acceptance of Islam at the heart of British life.” As British Museum Director Neil MacGregor notes, the exhibition will “enable a global audience to deepen their understanding of the significance and history of the Hajj. In particular, it will allow non-Muslims to explore the one aspect of Islamic practice and faith which they are not able to witness, but which plays such a major part in forming a worldwide Islamic consciousness.”

As part of our ongoing relationship with the British Museum, we’ve just published the North American edition of the beautiful book designed to accompany the exhibition. Ventia Porter, the book’s editor and a Curator in the Museum’s Department of the Middle East, explains in her preface that the book is meant more as a companion to the exhibition than as a conventional catalogue:

Our intention has been to gather the history, the voices of pilgrims and the material culture associated with the Hajj together in one place. We felt this was greatly needed because the story of Hajj crosses so many very different disciplines, from religion, history and archaeology to anthropology, travel and art history, each of which often forms the subject of self-contained publications. We therefore brought together a group of distinguished scholars who themselves take us on a journey and help us delve deeper into the subject. Karen Armstrong invites us to look at Hajj within a broader context of pilgrimage; M.A.S. Abdel Haleem explains the rituals of Hajj and their meaning and also gives us an insight into the experience of a Hajj in rural Egypt. Hugh Kennedy explores the history of the Hajj in early Islam and then focuses on two key travellers. Nasir-i Khusraw and Ibn Jubayr, whose fascinating accounts provide such insight not only into the practicalities of the journey but the deeper meaning of why they undertook it. When you compare the writings of these early pilgrims with those of today it is clear that, although the method of travel and Mecca itself may have changed over time, the act of pilgrimage—that need to touch the holy place, the reactions to seeing the Ka‘ba at Mecca for the first time—have not changed at all. Robert Irwin picks up the history in the thirteenth century and, in a veritable tour d’horizon, he introduces us to more travellers and tells the story of Hajj during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, though into colonial times and up to the twentieth century. It then falls to Ziauddin Sardar to bring us up to the present day: he looks at how the enormous growth in numbers has changed Hajj in the modern era and demonstrates how it is organized today.

Running in parallel with the history of Hajj is the story of the material culture that surrounds it, whether paintings evoking the journey; archaeological finds from the Hajj routes; manuscripts, historic photographs and tiles illustrating the holy sanctuaries at Mecca and Medina; certificates and pilgrim guides commemorating the direction of Mecca. In addition, there are the objects taken by pilgrims on Hajj or brought back as souvenirs, and the beautiful textiles made annually especially for the Ka‘ba. The works of photography, painting and sculpture by contemporary artists add a further dimension to the art of Hajj. All of these complement and personalize the history, allowing us to glimpse the experience through individuals, deepen our understanding and see how art has been used in the service of Islam. These objects, many of which are included in the exhibition, are illustrated throughout the book; some are highlighted in themed spreads on subjects such as “sacred geography,” the tiles of Mecca and Medina, the Futuh al-Haramayn manuscripts and the sacred textiles. There is also a focus on particular Hajj routes, with detailed maps: across Africa, from Syria and Cairo, and that remarkable endeavor, the Hijaz Railway.

You can get a sense of both the power and the beauty of the material included in the exhibition and book from this short video produced by the British Museum:

 

Tower of Lincoln Books

Next week, when the first visitors enter Ford’s Theatre’s new Center for Education and Leadership, they’ll be greeted by a stunning 34-foot tower comprised of thousands of copies of the over 15,000 published books on Lincoln. Take a look: 

 

That’s a lot of Lincoln books, and we’ve surely played a role in the proliferation. And we’re not stopping, either, at least not now, in the midst of the Civil War Sesquicentennial. We even have a new one this month from Harold Holzer, who has authored, co-authored, or edited over 30 books on Lincoln. A winner of the National Humanities Medal in 2008, Holzer is known as one of the country’s leading authorities on the political culture of the Civil War era. And, as it happens, he’ll be at the Center for Education and Leadership for its grand opening on President’s Day, February 20th, joining Michael Beschloss and Chris Matthews in a discussion of presidential leadership.

In the new book, Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory, Holzer takes a fresh look at the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s most important—but, Holzer argues, most misunderstood and under-appreciated—piece of writing. He examines the Proclamation in three distinctive ways: as a brilliantly timed news event (using original sources to explain how it was variously withheld, leaked, published, promoted, and ultimately elevated into iconic status in the years before the historical neglect began); as a piece of literature (asking what modern Americans are to make of its leaden prose and suggesting that Lincoln’s subsequent orations on freedom represented the “poetry” to accompany and embellish its legalistic tone); and in terms of the popular art works it inspired, both for reputation-celebrating purposes after Lincoln’s assassination and martyrdom, and for commercial profit. The book, drawn from Holzer’s Nathan I. Huggins Lectures, is designed to shed new light on the increasingly contentious debate about the meaning of what Lincoln himself believed to be his greatest act and his most significant contribution to history—examining it in words and pictures, then and now.

Emancipating Lincoln can be thought of as presenting the life of the document, its original status as a collectible, as an inspiration for soaring oratory, and as a stimulus for reverential portraiture. Holzer draws heavily from previously neglected original sources, the existence of which may seem hard to believe, given all those Lincoln books in that tower. Even in their shadow, though, Holzer has written the first book to interpret the meaning of Lincoln’s most famous executive order as it was greeted by the news media, collectors, organizers of charity fairs, artists, sculptors and print publishers.

If you’re not in DC to see Holzer (and the tower) at Monday’s panel, be sure to follow his posts at Disunion, the Civil War blog from the New York Times.

Editing The Image of the Black in Western Art

This month marks the publication of the second and third parts of Volume III of The Image of the Black in Western Art. As the fifth and sixth of an eventual ten books, these new releases put us past the halfway point in our work to complete this fascinating series, and so offer a nice occasion to reflect on the challenges that it presents. To that end, we invited HUP Production Editor Adriana Kirilova, one of the many people who have been dedicated to this project over the decades since its conception, to tell us a bit about her experience working on the books. Her piece is below.

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When two years ago my manager told me that I would be the production editor for The Image of the Black in Western Art series, I was thrilled to be a part of this monumental project. I remember thinking I wouldn’t have very much to do. The first four books were scheduled to come out in the fall of 2010, and three of them had been previously published as part of the first incarnation of the series. There was little new text to edit, and a media research company in London had been contracted to deliver the images. We just had to flow it all into the new design and redo the index. Easy as pie.

How naïve I was!

When Dominique de Menil first conceived of the Image of the Black project in the 1960s, she had assumed it wouldn’t take very long to complete it. She had not anticipated the astonishing wealth of material or the complexity of the iconography of blacks in Western art. Fifty years later, we found ourselves in a similar situation. Everyone at the Du Bois Institute and HUP was excited to renew the efforts to complete this monumental undertaking, but few of us were fully aware of its intricacies.

First and foremost, we had to contend with the passage of time. The very title of the series reflects how much has changed since the conception of this project. The Image of the Black in Western Art: the meaning of nearly all of those words has grown more complicated in the years that have passed. And, as we started to work, it became clear how much else had changed. There were references in the text to East Germany and West Germany, St. Petersburg was still Leningrad, Sri Lanka was still Ceylon.

Ensuring that the text accurately and consistently reflects today’s geopolitical map has been only one of the challenges, and not the biggest one by far. The real Herculean task has been locating all the art. Since the publication of the first edition, museums have disbanded, galleries have changed their names, manuscripts have moved from one library to another. Vases have disappeared. Inscriptions on tombstones have faded. Broken statuettes have been restored. Research from the past thirty years has shed new light on the dates and titles of artworks. Paintings that were previously accepted as the work of X are now believed to be by Y.

Producing these books sequentially would have been demanding. No book that includes 200 illustrations could ever be easy. Producing them in batches, as efficiencies in publishing demand, has come dangerously close to insanity. There are so many details to keep track of, and nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems. Even the most inconsequential decision becomes paramount when multiplied by ten books. Changes in one book usually necessitate changes in another. Many of our conversations about IBWA (our shorthand for the series) include the phrase “Wait, which volume are we talking about?” The six books that make up volumes I through III have more than 1,500 images total. To date, I have received about 4,700 emails about IBWA and I’ve sent about 3,800.

It’s hard to explain what it is that I do for this series. I’ve done some copyediting, a little proofreading, a lot of fact-checking. I also nag, beg, and bully everyone else on the team when the deadlines loom large in front of us. It’s a miracle my colleagues still talk to me.

A Third Galileo

Works on Galileo have essentially shown us two views of his life and work—Galileo the astronomer and martyr of science, and Galileo the precursor of Newton. Mark Peterson’s new book, Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts, gives us a third view. Peterson’s is a Galileo with a more expansive understanding of mathematics than the other two familiar Galileos, one who is capable of a synthesis of the artistic and the mathematical in his own person, a Galileo interested in and indebted to Hellenistic culture.

Peterson, a Professor of Physics and Mathematics, explains the book’s origins:

The beginnings of this project were some observations about mathematics and the arts in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. I was especially intrigued by some mathematical ideas that I had noticed in Dante, unexpected mathematical sophistication centuries before Galileo. I also became fascinated with Galileo, and I began to wonder where he had come from. This question seemed to organize my thoughts. What was Galileo’s intellectual inheritance, and how did it form him? Galileo’s education was in the humanities and the arts, so the question is a sprawling one. And even that is not enough, because Galileo’s ultimate enthusiasm was for mathematics, and that is another broad intellectual stream. Where all these streams mixed, that is where Galileo came from, or so I imagined. To understand it, I had to follow the streams back to their sources.

The book summarizes the classical legacy in mathematics and the sciences, and contains chapters on the Renaissance arts of poetry, painting, music, and architecture. We learn, for instance, that Galileo’s favorite poem was Orlando Furioso, Ludovico Ariosto’s epic of love, chivalry, and madness. The thread connecting the book’s sections, writes Peterson, is mathematics: “Implicitly I ask, what did mathematics mean for the arts? And what did the arts mean for mathematics?”

The sections come together with Peterson’s reconsideration of Galileo himself, in light of all this background material on the various artistic traditions of which he was a product. What we have in Galileo’s Muse, then, is the surprising and extraordinary claim that it was the mathematics of Renaissance arts, not Renaissance sciences, that became modern science. And, what’s more, Peterson presents a dramatic and convincing claim that the Oratione de Mathematicae Laudibus, a 1627 book attributed to Galileo’s young protégé Niccolo Aggiunti was actually written by Galileo himself, and should be read as confirmation of this “third” Galileo.

Mark Peterson spoke with us about Galileo’s Muse for an episode of the Harvard Press Podcast. You can listen here.

A New Perspective on Florence and Baghdad

We’ve just released Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, a new book from the German art historian Hans Belting. The book’s title stresses conjunction, but it also clearly highlights things we’re perhaps more accustomed to seeing considered in opposition. Art and science; the Renaissance and the Middle Ages; Christianity and Islam. Much of the implied contrast is conveyed by Jill Breitbarth’s jacket design for the book. The geometrically ornate arabesque, reproduced from the tile decoration of an Egyptian mosque, set against the lush realism of the 16th century oil painting beneath it.

The juxtaposition of the images obviously highlights the flatness of the tiling against the painting’s use of perspective. In traditional Arab art the viewer isn’t meant to look through the surface – the surface is the art. In the painting underneath, though, our eyes are clearly directed past the surface, into the distance, the background. Belting shows that the relationship between these two styles and also between the cultures that they represent is far more complex than opposition. Florence and Baghdad, then, is about perspective, and about the gaze, but not just in the artistic or theoretical senses of the words. What Belting gives us is also a study of these two cultures gazing at one another.

Belting reveals the sensational fact that the “invention” of perspective in the West is actually due to a discovery that had already been made in the Arabic World centuries before the Renaissance. The Arab mathematician Alhazen developed an optical theory—in the middle of a culture largely devoid of images—which later formed the basis for Western perspective painting. Belting explains why Islamic art wasn’t influenced by the discovery, due to its religious, cultural and scientific contexts. He also explains why the effects on European art didn’t appear until later:

The rationalism dominant in the era when Arab science reached its peak could not bear fruit in the West until the modern period, since it was based on scientific experiments liberated from every kind of theological baggage. During the epoch that we in the West call the Middle Ages, the subjects of mathematics and astronomy were popular in the Arab world, which had not yet come under the kind of dogmatic constraints so prevalent later.

As Belting puts it elsewhere: “The Arab theory of optics was known at European universities by the thirteenth century, but it did not become a theory of pictures until the fifteenth century. The grounds for its transformation were not scientific but cultural.”

There’s much to digest here. Work like Alhazen’s came from a period when Arab societies were open to scientific inquiry that was remarkably free of theology in a way that Christian science and society were not. At the time of Alhazen’s development of the theory of perspective, there was simply too much “theological baggage” for the concept to yet begin to influence Western art. What should also be clear from Belting’s study is the inaccuracy of the notion of Arab writers as just preservers of Greek knowledge during the “Dark Ages.” They were actually making serious advancements.

So, while virtually rewriting this chapter of art history, Belting also offers a discerning comparison between Arabic and Western culture, opening our eyes to the images that have surrounded us since the beginning of the Modem Age and essentially pioneering a new area of cultural studies: the comparison of the visual perceptions of Western and Islamic culture. Or, more generally, the cultural comparison of the gaze. The differences between the pictures developed in these two cultures, between Renaissance art and Arabic science, reflect their different practices with regard to visuality. The differences involve, as Belting notes, “not just art but also a mind-set and relationship to the world.”

Belting’s study of those differences is an important new work of scholarship that’s also an intellectual and historical adventure. And, if we can add modestly, the book is a simply stunning object, heavily illustrated, full color throughout, and sure to give us a new perspective on art and the world.