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

Tells the story of the author's discovery of hundreds of vividly coloured, masterfully precise drawings of all sorts of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds. Freedberg traced them all back to a little-known scientific organization from C17 Italy called the Academy of Linceans (or Lynxes). Founded by Prince Federico Cesi in 1603, the Linceans took as their task nothing less than the documentation and classification of all of nature in pictorial form. In this first book-length study of the Linceans to appear in English, Freedberg focuses on their revolutionary use of microscopic observation and other new techniques.