Alexander Marr’s new book on Mutio Oddi, Between Raphael and Galileo: Mutio Oddi and the Mathematical Culture of Late Renaissance Italy has been published by the University of Chicago Press. The first full account of Oddi’s like and work, it includes a chapter on the Linder Gallery Interior as well as extensive discussion of Oddi’s activities in mathematics, the visual …
New publication on gallery interiors
Just published, a special issue of Intellectual History Review, edited by Alexander Marr, on the topic of seventeenth-century gallery interiors: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g919679010
Obelisks
A quick note on obelisks, as I see the one in the background of the painting is described as an ‘unlikely architectural feature’. I don’t think this is quite right. Obelisks were, in fact, rather common in northern architecture of the period, featuring regularly in formal gardens. For example, Robert Dudley’s garden at Kenilworth(visited by Elizabeth I in 1575) was …
An alternative candidate for Disegno?
It is by no means clear whether the figure of Disegno in the Linder gallery is intended to be generic or a specific portrait. Michael John has suggested Kepler as a possible candidate – which is certainly plausible, although I have yet to be convinced of the similarity between known portraits of Kepler and the features of the Linder gallery figure, …
Muzio Oddi and the Linder Gallery
The sole surviving piece of textual evidence that sheds light on the Linder gallery interior is a letter, sent on 28 March 1629, from the architect-engineer Giovanni Battista Caravaggio to his former tutor in mathematics, Mutio Oddi of Urbino. In the letter, Caravaggio (then in Milan) mentions a visit to their friend Pieter Linder, a German merchant who had also …