Painting vs. Sculpture in the Cigoli Letter

Document Type

Book Section

Publication Date

8-29-2021

Publication Title

Science, Method, and Argument in Galileo

Publisher

Springer, Cham

Publisher Location

Cham, Switzerland

Volume

40

First page number:

187

Last page number:

224

Abstract

This essay is partly a case study of the role of logic in historiography. It is also partly a test case for the thesis of a Galilean correspondence between aesthetic attitude and scientific thought, advanced by Erwin Panofsky, Alexandre Koyré, and John Heilbron. Intrinsically, it is a discussion of the authenticity of the letter to Cigoli dated June 26, 1612, widely attributed to Galileo, containing argumentation about the relative aesthetic merits of painting and sculpture. I undertake a systematic analysis of the letter’s method of argument, comparing and contrasting it with Galileo’s. I argue that the letter does have some Galilean characteristics: critical reasoning; ad hominem argumentation, in the seventeenth-century sense; and appeal to experimentation. However, the letter falls short of the typical Galilean open-mindedness, fair-mindedness, and clarity; crucially, it uses several illative terms which Galileo never uses, and does not use the one he uses most often. The latter features outweigh the former. Moreover, I discuss some aspects of the letter’s substantive content, primarily a theory of vision that disregards the dynamics of perspective and the faculty of binocularity, which Galileo understood and exploited very well.

Controlled Subject

Galilei, Galileo, 1564-1642; Reasoning

Disciplines

History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology | History of Philosophy

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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