Color,cosmos,oculus: Vision,color,and the eye in Jacopo Zabarella and Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente.
详细信息
文摘
The seventeenth century saw radical changes to theories of vision,light,color,matter,and knowledge about animal bodies. Understanding vision in the sixteenth century is essential to grasp these changes,but here many lacunae exist. Histories of vision have focused on mathematical optics and neglected color in natural philosophy and medicine. Historians of medicine have not sufficiently analyzed works on vision and color by physicians. Finally,historians of philosophy have produced few analyses of color theory from antiquity until 1600. My dissertation analyzes two highly important works on vision that have yet to be examined in detail by modern scholars: the natural philosopher Jacopo Zabarellas De visu,first published in his natural philosophy textbook De rebus naturalibus in 1590,and the physician and anatomist Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendentes De visione,first published in 1600. Both taught at the University of Padua,at the time Europes most prestigious medical school,and their stature and influence was considerable. Chapter 1 provides the history of one widely held theory of what color is and how it arises,which I dub the condensation theory of the origin of color. This theory arises from the Aristotelian commentary tradition with significant influences from astronomy,optics,and anatomy. This theory of color was closely intertwined with an Aristotelian cosmology,and is found in fully developed form in AverroA"s. Chapter 2 analyzes book 1 of Zabarellas De visu,where we find the most rigorous and complete explication of this theory in its history. Chapter 3 is an analysis of Fabriciuss De visione,which combines anatomy,natural philosophy,and mathematical optics. Chapter 4 examines the shared,novel theory of vision held by Zabarella and Fabricius,and argues that they interacted across disciplinary lines in forming it. Chapter 5 demonstrates Zabarellas and Fabriciuss influence on highly important figures for seventeenth-century optics and visual theory,such as Johannes Kepler,FranA§；ois AguilA³；n,and Christoph Scheiner； it argues for a revision to current narratives about the reception of the retinal theory of vision； and it addresses some major misconceptions about transformations to theories of vision and sensation in the seventeenth century.