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Mary Quinlan-McGrath, Inuences: Art, Optics, and
Astrology in the Italian Renaissance. Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. xi+284. ISBN
978-0-226-92284-3. \$35.00 (hardback).

Steven Vanden Broecke

The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 47 / Issue 02 / June 2014, pp 374 - 375
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087414000247, Published online: 01 May 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0007087414000247

How to cite this article:
Steven Vanden Broecke (2014). The British Journal for the History of Science, 47, pp 374-375
doi:10.1017/S0007087414000247

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of those of you student readers who have such a wonderful Marauder’s Map (another Harry
Potter reference) to help you navigate your way through those early days of graduate school.

NEERAJA SANKARAN
Yonsei University, Seoul

MARY QUINLAN-MCGRATH, Influences: Art, Optics, and Astrology in the Italian Renaissance.
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. xi+284. ISBN 978-0-226-
92284-3. $35.00 (hardback).
doi:10.1017/S0007087414000247

Beginning with Fritz Saxl’s 1934 study of the horoscope ceiling which Baldassare Peruzzi
painted for Agostino Chigi in the Villa Farnesina (1511), art historians have been fascinated by the
monumental astrological vaults of Renaissance architecture. These lavish productions are often
interpreted as rhetorical tools for naturalizing the legitimacy of the ruler among the ruled by
associating the former’s position with astrological fate. According to Mary Quinlan-McGrath, this
was not at all how the patrons of such vaults interpreted their significance and use. Instead,
she claims, these vaults were built as instruments for purifying and protecting the bodies, spirits,
and minds of these patrons and their kin.

There is very little evidence for actors’ understandings of these starry vaults. One precious
exception, which is central to Quinlan-McGrath’s argument, occurs in Chapter III.19 of Marsilio
Ficino’s influential De vita, where Ficino concludes an extensive discussion of astrological images
with the advice for a man to construct, ‘in the very depth of his house . . . a chamber, vaulted and
marked with these figures and colors, and he should spend most of his waking hours there and
also sleep’ (p. 161). The distinguishing feat of Quinlan-McGrath’s book is to carefully explore
how such advice could have made perfect sense for the elites of Renaissance Italy, embedded as
it was in widely shared intellectual presuppositions reaching back as far as Plato’s Timaeus.

The planning and ambit of this exploration, carried out in eight chapters, are simply
breathtaking. In terms of planning, the author privileges a select number of presuppositions
(‘gazing’ as the default relation between patrons and their vaults; vision as a (meta)physical
mediator between things, rather than as a transmission of visual content; the self and architectural
art as equally embedded in a divinely given, astrologically shaped nature and fate; artificial figures
as privileged sites for capturing such celestial powers), and carefully shows how each of these
was connected with another. This yields an elegant, Russian doll-like structure ‘from the larger
concepts to the more particular’ (p. x).

In terms of ambit, it is clear that the author has waded through an enormous literature
on premodern metaphysics, epistemology, astrology, mathematics, natural philosophy, psych-
ology and art history, in supplying the reader with ‘the tools’ by which to ‘judge the case’
(p. 198). No less impressive is her judicious selection of what to include in the main body of
the text (two hundred pages), and what to relegate to the particularly insightful endnotes
(fifty pages).

So how is the case to be judged after reading this book? At the very least, Quinlan-McGrath’s
thesis is far less anachronistic than anything else which is on offer concerning this topic. This is not
to say, of course, that her precise interpretation of the Renaissance equivalent of the oxygen tent is
definitive. Consider her interpretation of Book III of Ficino’s De vita. As early as Chapter III.8,
Ficino introduces doubt and uncertainty about amulets as suitable recipients of portable celestial
power; his subsequent discussion of figurae never really abandons these suspicions. Ficino, who
articulates this in terms of ‘medicine’ versus ‘magic’, does grant the possibility of demonic agency
in the effectiveness of figurae, and repeatedly takes the position that the heat released when
inscribing a figure, not the inscription as such, is the source of its effectiveness. This makes the
distance between him and a theologian like Aquinas less large than Quinlan-McGrath tends

374 Book reviews



to suggest. Likewise, it remains unclear whether Ficino’s talk of harmonies obtaining between
images speaks the language of ‘sympathy’ or ‘copy’, of ressemblance or ‘representation’. Further
research may also highlight Ficino’s tendency to advance a strong distinction between the sub-
and superlunary realms, as well as his apparent investment in an anagogy of the spirit towards
the celestial and supra-celestial realm, rather than in sublunary empowerment per se. Finally, it
remains to be seen what we should make of Ficino’s frequent adoption of metaphors
of preparation and accommodation in describing the relation between spirits and ‘celestial gifts’.
Is the Ficinian self really an embodied being which also has spirits, or rather a ‘spirit in the material
world’?

The simple fact remains, however, that Quinlan-McGrath’s fresh look at these astrological
canopies opens up entire new vistas of Renaissance intellectual life. This alone makes it required
reading for anyone interested in Renaissance visual culture, architecture, and history of natural
philosophy. But it can also serve as a model of scholarship. Over the past few decades, it has
become far less uncommon for art historians to sink their teeth into premodern intellectual history
and history of science. Influences crowns them all in tenaciousness and thoughtfulness.

STEVEN VANDEN BROECKE
Ghent University

GIDEON MANNING (ed.), Matter and Form in Early Modern Science and Philosophy. Leiden and
Boston, MA: Brill, 2012. Pp. x+248. ISBN 978-90-04-21870-3. E105.00 (hardback).
doi:10.1017/S0007087414000259

Historians of both science and philosophy have often discussed the relation between matter
and form in the early modern period. The intricacies of this issue are caused by the various
meanings associated with each of these terms, and the emphasis placed by different historical
actors on either of the two. Despite becoming a classic theme in the literature, the problems of how
matter and form relate to each other and how their meanings change in the early modern period
still requires careful analysis. This is why the present volume makes a valuable contribution to
an ongoing debate.

In his foreword to the volume, Mordechai Feingold acknowledges that Matter and Form
in Early Modern Science and Philosophy puts together nine papers that were presented at a
conference at the California Institute of Technology in 2010. Gideon Manning opens the volume
with a study of the term ‘hylomorphism’. After tracing its origins to the final decades of the
nineteenth century, Manning turns to three historical cases: Aristotle himself, Scipion Dupleix
(a late Scholastic) and Jacques Rohault (a Cartesian). The main aim of this chapter is to argue
against the view that a commonly shared doctrine of hylomorphism endured in the early modern
period. Thus his chapter makes a nice introduction to the volume, as the other contributions
document a rich variety of early modern views about matter and form. In the second chapter,
Michael Edwards explores a body of scholastic texts on the scientia de anima and compares them
with the ‘science of human nature’ (p. 52) that one can find in their contemporary Protestant
authors. He argues convincingly that anatomy and its newly associated imagery played an
important role in reshaping the terms of the debate, revealing among other things ‘semi-permeable’
disciplinary boundaries that raised the problem of authority (p. 44). Hiro Hirai is the author of the
third chapter, in which he provides a careful analysis of Daniel Sennert’s theory of seeds. Based on
his prior work on the concept of ‘seed’ in the Renaissance and the early modern period, Hirai gives
a convincing account, concluding that in Sennert’s view the seeds are similar to substantial forms.
The next chapter is again focused on Sennert, but this time it deals to a larger extent with his
chymical views. William Newman compares Sennert with Etienne-François Geoffroy, who almost
a century later advanced his famous theory of affinities. Newman gives textual support for the
claim that a pre-theory of affinities can already be found in Sennert, reacting in this way to some

Book reviews 375