Myth and the New Science: Vico, Tiepolo, and the Language of the Optimates
The ideas of the Neapolitan philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico attracted little attention during his lifetime, except in Venice, where his works found an enthusiastic audience. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's early ceiling fresco in the Palazzo Sandi (1725–26) offers a unique example of how contemporary Venetian intellectuals read Vico's work. It appears that Tiepolo's patrons based the iconography of their salone on Vico's Universal Law (1720–22) and first New Science (1725) to illustrate the main tenets of the myth of Venice, a political fiction that legitimized the class structure of the republic and the absolute legislative and judicial authority of its aristocracy.
The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts
This unique work of reference offers a topically classified chronology of more than 20,000 artworks from c.1300 to the present day that take as their theme the subject of Greek and Roman mythology. Alphabetically arranged by subject and covering all the mythical events and beings of antiquity, entries list in chronological order how they have been represented in painting, sculpture, music, dance, opera, and literature over the last six centuries. There is also a wealth of information about the pertinent myth, the names of works and their creators, and the present location of works of fine art. Fully cross-referenced, and complete with bibliographies and an extensive artist index, this will be an invaluable tool for the study of the history of the arts in the Western world.
CATARACT: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE.
The earliest extant description of a surgical operation for the cure of cataract is that of Celsus, toho practiced medicine in Rome at the beginning of the Christian era. In his text De Meclicina he described in detail his method of couching, by which he inserted a bronze needle into the eye at the equator on the lateral side of ihe globe and depressed the cataract downward into the lower part of the vitreous where the surgeon hoped it would remain out of the way of vision. The same method had been employed by the Greeks and Hindus for at least several hundred years earlier and ivas to continue as the only operation available until the middle of the eighteenth century when Daviel of Paris described extraction of the lens through the cornea. The early couchers worked on the premise that the crystallin humor we know as the lens was the receptor for vision, and that in certain conditions of disease a suffusion flowed doivn in front of the crystallin humor where it solidified and formed a dense curtain. The purpose of couching was to press the hardened corrupt humor out of the way of the lens. That cataract was opaque material within the lens itself was not recognized until after the middle of ihe seventeenth century. Until then ihe surgeons were not even aware that it was the lens they were dislocating.