Among the displays of telescopes and microscopes, clocks, globes and glass polyhedra, astrolabs and contraptions designed to test or display scientific principles, and many other curious objects to be found at the Galileo Museum in Florence, these are uniquely gruesome (unless you find the sculpted lifesize and very naturalistic body fragment of a pregnant woman dissected also gruesome, but you are thankfully aware that it is a sculpture). These are fingers cut off of Galileo's hands encased in glass reliquaries, like many remains of saints to be found in medieval cathedrals. But here no one is sobbing in front of them, pleading with the spirit of Galileo to assist them or leaving post-it notes to the saint as I have seen in places of pilgrimage. Maybe I should have tried that: "Grant me some genius, O saint Galileo." The dried flesh has pulled back and revealed bones. I was a bit daunted and put off looking closely until after I had gone through most of the museum twice and come back to this room. I think I would rather see the work of his fingers, notes and sketches that would record the movement of his pen and thoughts. These are just bones.
I have finally gotten around to reading David Freedberg's
The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his friends, and the beginnings of modern natural history. It is a thorough history and analysis of the work of the principle members of the Academy of the Lynx, the troubles they had with their detractors, and the scientific arguments and problems of the time, mostly the place of images in the attempt to order knowledge. The relationship of the emblem of the Barbarini bees and the scientific investigation of bees under the microscope is fascinating. Distinctions between art, politics, fables and other narratives, and scientific inquiry dissolve. The total natural and cultural worlds are treated as continuous, apparently the ambition of more than one of the group. They, the Linceans, had the same problem as many of us--very little of their work was finished, partly because of the scale of their ambitions and partly because of the unsolved problems of method. Most died relatively young (relative to expectations today). Where I found a new idea to contemplate was in the relation of naturalistic illustration, geometric diagrams, and words. The first two, being non-verbal like drawings I would have said to be more similar and words the odd man out. But Freedberg's thought is that diagrams are more like words. Both abstract nature and therefore allow for categorization. Taxonomy is made difficult if not impossible by naturalistic images; even when you dissect and reach down inside things they continue to show more and more of the unique and odd features of a thing and not what makes them the same. What the work of the Linceans revealed is that the world of nature is not a set of clearly distinguished species that each member of which can be set in a box and, as Aristotle claimed, be altogether the same within the group and that which is outside altogether other. Instead, the world of nature is a continuum with fuzzy edges between things. Even animal, vegetable, and mineral are liable to be mixed or ambiguous. So categories and order come not from reality but from human reason alone, therefore only abstracted languages are suitable to clarify the order. Naturalistic illustrations reveal the blurs between things. The question of whether fossils are, in the case of petrified wood for example, vegetable or mineral can't be answered with a picture.
This put me in mind of the question of color. When we identify colors using basic color terms, as Berlin and Kaye showed in their surveys of people around the world, we are liable to put color chips on the fringes of a color group in one category one day and another on another day. In other words, a reddish-orangey color will be put in the red box sometimes and other times in the yellow. Individuals actually varied more from day to day within a language group population than between different cultures. This suggests that categorizing color is a subjective thing. But, contrary to expectations, people everywhere select what we call the 'pure' color as the center of the color group. In other words primary red is always red and this even holds in places where there is no basic color term for a color (red's a bad choice though, there's only one language known to lack a name for it). In the end it appears there is something about the categorization of colors that is subjective, something inter-subjective (cultural), and something beyond that transcends culture, language, and individual choice. In other words, there is something about the categorization of colors that is 'natural' and not reliant on reason or learning alone. Might this also not be true of species, even though, further complicating the matter, they also change over time? Are illustrations indispensable to this understanding?
