Spot the Gull

Peter Campbell

• The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History by David Freedberg
  Chicago, 513 pp, £35.00, December 2002, ISBN 0 226 26147 6

David Freedberg’s new book is illustrated with wonderful, detailed drawings and engravings of plants, fungi, fossils, birds, insects and animals – nearly all made in the 17th century. Freedberg is an art historian; the starting point of his book is a dream he had sometime before 1986 in which Anthony Blunt appeared holding a drawing of an orange. The dream led him to the drawings that Cassiano dal Pozzo commissioned from Vincenzo Leonardi, which were the basis of the engravings by Cornelis Bloemart that illustrate Hesperides, a monograph on citrus fruit by the Jesuit priest Giovanni Battista Ferrari, published in 1646. (Freedberg’s book demands that one remember many names.) The drawings, kept in a cupboard in Windsor Castle, were among ‘hundreds of the finest natural historical drawings’ he had ever seen.