The Art and Science of Renaissance Natural History: Thomas of Cantimpré, Pier Candido Decembrio, Conrad Gessner, and Teodoro Ghisi in Vatican Library MS Urb. lat. 276

Abstract

"The Art and Science of Renaissance Natural History: Thomas of Cantimpré, Pier Candido Decembrio, Conrad Gessner, and Teodoro Ghisi in Vatican Library MS Urb. lat. 276." Art is essential to the accurate description of organisms in natural history. The empiricism inherent in natural history is analogous to that in Renaissance humanism's approach to the text, particularly through its critical philological method. Vatican MS Urb. lat. 276 (1460) embodies a humanistic approach to the world, in that its author, Pier Candido Decembrio, while basing himself on Thomas of Cantimpré, rewrites the text, occasionally inserting critical comments of his own about phenomena he has witnessed. Decembrio's text can be better understood in the context of the natural history tradition from antiquity to the Renaissance. Teodoro Ghisi illustrates the manuscript 130 years later, basing himself on the latest and most accurate natural history information available, Conrad Gessner's Historia animalium. The tempera illustrations of the manuscript are closely related to sixteenth-century artistic trends, and particularly to the graphic arts tradition. The process of their addition to the manuscript can be termed "critical illustration," being a selective intellectual endeavor, either through choice of available previous depictions of an animal or through the highly accurate direct observation, analysis, and interpretive rendering of a specimen found in nature. Developments in the tradition of scholarship can thus be seen as analogous to developments in art, and both as related to the development of science in the Renaissance, well before the "scientific revolution."