Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster by Gerard Passannante

Author:Gerard Passannante
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Europe, Renaissance, Literary Criticism, European, General, Philosophy, History & Surveys
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-03-13T00:48:32.500000+00:00

Going Deep

In 1667 Henry Howard presented to the Royal Society a library of books and “neere 100 mss.,” including the “Codex Arundel” of Leonardo da Vinci now held at the British Library.5 Making his way through the pages of the manuscript, a member of the fledgling Society could have stumbled upon any number of Leonardo’s catastrophic images, including the description of Etna and Stromboli “when their sulphurous flames, having been forcibly confined, rend, and burst open the mountain,” and the figure of the cavern that inspired Leonardo’s “fear and desire.” This latter passage would have been of special interest to John Evelyn, who had convinced Howard to make a gift of the codex.6 As he reports in a diary entry dated February 7, 1645, Evelyn had himself climbed to the top of Vesuvius to peer “into that most frightfull and terrible vorago, a stupendous pit of neere three miles in circuit.”7 Not two years after Leonardo arrived at the Royal Society, Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus made its debut in English. Kircher’s lavishly illustrated book touched on many things—from fossils (which he believed to be lusus naturae, or “jokes of nature,” rather than the remains of organic bodies) to the flow of subterranean rivers to the network of fires that continually burned like a furnace underground (fig. 3).8

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.