Fossili e artefatti da Leonardo a Leibniz

Domenico Laurenza

2024-01-01

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Abstract

The book illustrates a little-known aspect of the interaction between art and science in the early modern period: the study of fossils by three artists (Leonardo, the French ceramist Bernard Palissy, and the Sicilian painter Agostino Scilla) and the subsequent use, by the scientist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, of models of artistic origin to study the same phenomenon. Initially attracted by the widespread theory that interpreted fossils not as animal remains, but as stones in which nature, like an artist, imitated animal and plant forms, Leonardo, Palissy and Scilla used empirical-artistic models and knowledge to deny the nature-artist theory and demonstrate the organic origin of fossils. This volume, the first comprehensive analysis of the work of these authors, brings to light the more general evolution of the art-science relationship between the 16th and late 17th centuries and highlights the contribution made by art to one of the key ideas of modernity: the temporality of nature.