Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe: Finding Heaven

In this book, Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier offers the first systematic study of Pythagoras and his influence on mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, religion, medicine, music, the occult, and social life--as well as on architecture and art--in the late medieval and early modern eras. Following the threads of admiration for this ancient Greek sage from the fourteenth century to Kepler and Galileo in the seventeenth, this book demonstrates that Pythagoras's influence in intellectual circles--Christian, Jewish, and Arab--was more widespread than has previously been acknowledged. Joost-Gaugier shows that during this period Pythagoras was respected by many intellectuals in different areas of Europe. She also shows how this admiration was reflected in ideas that were applied to the visual arts by a number of well known architects and artists who sought, through the use of a visual language inspired by the memory of Pythagoras, to obtain perfect harmony in their creations. Among these were Alberti, Bramante, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Thus did, she suggests, some of the greatest art works in the Western world owe their modernity to an inspirational force that, paradoxically, had been conceived in the distant past.

Author: Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 10/12/2009
Pages: 319
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.90lbs
Size: 10.00h x 7.00w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780521517959

About the Author
Joost-Gaugier, Christiane L.: - Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier is an internationally known and distinguished scholar. A three-times graduate of Harvard, she has published extensively in research journals, conference proceedings, and international catalogues on subjects ranging from classical literature to medieval architecture to Renaissance art and intellectual history. A recipient of grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities among others, she is the author of Jacopo Bellini: Selected Drawings, Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention, and Measuring Heaven: Pythagoras and His Influence on Thought and Art in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.