San Antonio College Library

In The Viewer as Poet, Norman Land provides the first comprehensive survey of ekphrasis in literature and art criticism from antiquity through the Renaissance. Land demonstrates more fully than anyone has so far, that Renaissance art criticism assimilated the poetic tradition of ekphrasis while maintaining its function of analyzing works of art. Broadly speaking, the book shows that purely literary descriptions of art in poetry and prose contain a...

From the publisher. Peterson makes an extraordinary claim in this fascinating book focused around the life and thought of Galileo: it was the mathematics of Renaissance arts, not Renaissance sciences, that became modern science. Galileo's Muse argues that painters, poets, musicians, and architects brought about a scientific revolution that eluded the philosopher-scientists of the day, steeped as they were in a medieval cosmos and its underlying philosophy....

When the eighteen-year-old Henry, Prince of Wales, died in November 1612, the hopes of a new generation had been dashed. For the Prince, eldest son of James I, and the brother of the future Charles I, epitomized the yearning of those who wished England to lead Protestant Europe in a great crusade against the might of Catholic Spain. He simultaneously embodied the aspirations of a new era in the arts, creating a court which would have rivalled those...