UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · HISTORY
Judith Veronica Field
Also known as: J. V. Field, Judith V. Field
Judith Veronica Field is a British historian of science with interests in mathematics and the impact of science in art. --Wikipedia
There can be few more arid, or more acrimonious, themes for a paper than one that conjoins science and the Renaissance.
— from Renaissance and revolution
Most acclaimed
Piero della Francesca
More than any other Italian fifteenth-century painter, Piero della Francesca was responsible for the development of Renaissance painting in Florence, and its crucial dissemination throughout Italy. His work represents a synthesis of Italian painting, with its focus on perspective and space - and Netherlandish painting, which stressed light and natural phenomena, and he was one of the first to develop architectural and spacial perspective. This beautifully illustrated book offers a full-scale chronological and critical account of Piero's paintings. From his formative years in Florence, when he worked with Domenico Veneziano in the church of Sant'Egidio, to his seminal mid-career work in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo, and his later work in Rome, Perugia, and Urbino, these pages capture Piero's extraordinary palette and the remarkably expressive faces of his subjects.
Renaissance and revolution
Renaissance and Revolution is a collection of fifteen essays on some of the problems presently seen to be associated with the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The topics treated include the dissemination of Greek science, medical empiricism, natural history, the relations of scholars and craftsmen from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the so-called 'mechanical philosophy' in France and England, the work of Isaac Newton, and the difficulties encountered by Newtonianism in Italy in the early eighteenth century. Figures discussed include Leonardo Fioravanti, Jan Swammerdam, Piero della Francesca, Johannes Hevelius, Jonas Moore, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Christiaan Huygens, Francesco Algarotti and Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli. There is an introduction by the editors and an afterword by A. Rupert Hall. The authorship is international, including scholars with established reputations as historians of science.
The invention of infinity
From Giotto to Michelangelo and beyond, the period from about 1300 to 1650 saw an extraordinary flowering in the visual arts in Western Europe. The works produced were sometimes of astonishing quality and their history has been well documented and much discussed. The scientific endeavour of the time has received considerably less attention. The history of science is a newer discipline than history of art, and no topic is newer than the history of mathematics in the period that saw the beginning of the Renaissance in the arts. This book tells us about the everyday worlds of art and mathematics in a time when artists were merely 'craftsmen' and their practical mathematics was separate from the mathematics of scholars. The story brings together the histories of art and mathematics and shows how the craftsmen's discoveries changed learned mathematics, taking it beyond the admired achievements of the Ancient Greeks. Infinity at last acquired a precise mathematical meaning. The journey takes us through consideration of some of the world's most renowned paintings, and lively accounts of the mathematical techniques and discoveries of the time. We are in a world where art and the sciences have not yet pulled apart from one another, and it becomes clear that the mathematical nature of what we now call Science may well owe something to the tradition of what is now called Art.