by Joseph W. Dauben, CUNY Graduate Centerand Lehman College
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Description
Prof. Joseph W. Dauben discusses the life of Galileo, the origin of perspective drawing and the interaction of art and science in the Renaissance. His presentation includes dozens of examples from Renaissance painting, sculpture and architectural drawing including the works of Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Leonardo DaVinci.
Brunelleschi's famous discovery of linear perspective using mirrors and the Baptistry of the Cathedral in Florence is illustrated with overlays showing the horizon line and the vanishing points.
Computer graphics are used to recreate the inclined plane and Tower of Pisa experiments of Galileo. Dauben explains how these experiments allowed Galileo to formulate his revolutionary mathematical theory of the behavior of falling bodies.
Dauben concludes by discussing the influence of Galileo's scientific work on the artists of his time.
Reviews
The Satellite Scholar, January, 1994
"The underlying reality of the world we perceive with our bodily senses, is a set of mathematical proportions." This fact was one of the key discoveries of the Italian Renaissance. And how it came about is cogently explained by the historian, Joseph Dauben, in this superb film.
Focusing on the life of Galileo, Dauben explains how early Renaissance painters had already begun to experiment with visual perspective: rendering three-dimensional realities more accurately on the canvas surface, and how this technique spread to sculpture and architectural drawing. Finally, Galileo and his experiments with falling bodies and projectile motion attempted to explain motion in the universal language of mathematics.
Using many additional examples from DaVinci, Michelangelo, and Brunelleschi, plus computer graphics, the film demonstrates how art and science grew from and fed one another, in the amazing explosion of human awareness we call the Renaissance.
Dauben's presentation is first-rate and likely to hold the interest of a broad range of viewers.
Mathematics Teacher, September 1992
Documentation was not supplied with this videotape, but I assume that the target audience is a college history class in a science, mathematics, art, or interdisciplinary area.
This videotape presents a history of the development of perspective drawing and its effect on the life andwork of Galileo, as well as the art of the Renaissance. Excellent highlights include graphics that illustrate Galileo's inclined-plane experiments on gravity and Brunelleschi's work on perspec- tive drawing.
The vocabulary is sophisticated, and the sentence structure seems more appropriate for a text- book than for a videotape. The content is valuable, but the ideas and connections some too quickly to allow students to comprehend them, especially if any of the ideas are new to students. Viewing this tape would make a good closure activity if students had previously studied the content.
Robert P. Stutts, Columbia College, Columbia, SC 29203