Noam Andrews | Independent Scholar (original) (raw)
Papers by Noam Andrews
Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide. (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies), 2023
In the space between Leonardo’s Vitruvian man and his grotesques, the opposing and equally ideali... more In the space between Leonardo’s Vitruvian man and his grotesques, the opposing and equally idealized poles of human perfection and deformity, the Renaissance gave rise to a spectrum of mediations on the nature of the human face, and the extent to which its appearance communicated emotion, signified intelligence, or indicated moral worth. Perhaps no text denotes the tactical continuum as much as Albrecht Dürer’s late treatise on applied geometry, Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion (1528), in its own way a dispassionate progenitor of a long lineage of quantifying the human through the graphic dissection of the human visage. Dürer’s use of geometry to precisely map a transformational relationship between body types illustrates a unique moment in the history of the exact sciences that would only become increasingly central to the construction of racial identity. Thus “Racial Profiling” aims to trace a prehistory of the modern discourses on phrenology, physiognomy, and other fascistoid constructions of race and ethnicity, and the critical impact these systematic approaches had on what would ultimately devolve into new visual typologies of racial definition.
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Press release for The Polyhedrists: Art and Geometry in the Long Sixteenth Century (MIT Press, 2022)
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Creating Place in Early Modern European Architecture. Amsterdam University Press., 2022
The article unfolds an account of several overlapping fields of inquiry contributing to the early... more The article unfolds an account of several overlapping fields of inquiry contributing to the early modern experience of the cosmos. Traversing scale, scope, and media, from the first recorded meteorite fall to scholastic debates over the materiality of heaven and the practice of architecture as cosmic analogue, I argue in favour of bringing together a broad range of interdisciplinary source material in order to explore the spatiality of the cosmos and how it was encountered and reproduced as a place or cosmic space or non-place on earth. The accompanying examples gesture towards an open-ended model defined not solely by the built environment as much as by the ephemeral and rhetorical structures framing the cosmos for human consumption.
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Journal for the History of Astronomy, 2021
The article explores Johannes Kepler's abortive attempts to produce an opulent, decorative art ob... more The article explores Johannes Kepler's abortive attempts to produce an opulent, decorative art object to accompany the publication of his first treatise, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). It was Kepler's hope that this Credentzbecher, so-called because it was designed to resemble a large, ceremonial chalice, would valorize the significance of what he believed to be an epoch-defining discovery concerning the proportional nature of the planetary intervals and serve as a personal introduction to his local sovereign, Duke Friedrich I of Württemberg (1557-1608). The correspondences of Kepler and his circle, some of which have been reproduced and translated here for the first time, reveal in excruciating detail the struggles to negotiate the demands, and exacting standards, of the Stuttgart court and Kepler's difficulty working with the local goldsmiths employed by the court to enact his vision. Though met with skepticism and destined for failure, the model, its design, and the misunderstandings its failure revealed, poignantly display the sometimes-insurmountable gap between artisanal knowledge and scientific ambition.
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Re-Inventing Ovid's Metamorphoses : Pictorial and Literary Transformations in Various Media, 1400-1800, 2021
When Wenzel Jamnitzer (1508-1585), famed goldsmith to three Holy Roman Emperors, and his son Abra... more When Wenzel Jamnitzer (1508-1585), famed goldsmith to three Holy Roman Emperors, and his son Abraham (1555-1600), spliced the “silver bust of a young woman with a large growth of coral,” as it was tersely described in the 1586/87 Schatzkammerinventar of the Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden, they distorted centuries of visual and literary tradition surrounding the iconic myth of Daphne and Apollo. The laurel tree, ever associated by Apollo with Daphne and subsequently adopted as a sacred emblem of victory and honor, vanished, replaced by a phenotypically unstable, hybrid substance—part animal, part stone, and part plant, possessed of apotropaic properties and associated since the Middle Ages with the Holy Blood. The article proposes to investigate the ontological implications of the coral Daphne—both for querying the liberal approach to Ovid taken by Renaissance decorative artists, who had to answer to conflicting, and sometimes incommensurate, aesthetic and technical priorities, and as a paradigmatic example of the reconfiguration and scrambling wrought by the reciprocal interplay of text and matter.
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Making Marvels: Art, Technology, and Entertainment at the Courts of Europe, 2019
The article addresses the courtly creation of lathe-turned ivory, which was often made to adorn t... more The article addresses the courtly creation of lathe-turned ivory, which was often made to adorn the top of miniature decorative art pieces. Housed in highly specialized workshops, ivory turning became associated with two primary goals: the demonstration of applied geometrical principles to sovereigns for whom turning was widely considered to be a uniquely suitable pastime, and the transformation of ivory by master artisans into intricate symbols of sovereigns’ dominance over matter and the technological capacities of their courts.
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Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 2019
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Journal for the History of Astronomy , 2017
The article addresses the genesis and visualization of the capstone image to Kepler's polyhedral ... more The article addresses the genesis and visualization of the capstone image to Kepler's polyhedral hypothesis of the planetary intervals from his first major work, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). The contention is that the famous Tabula III was directed less by Kepler than it was an initiative spearheaded by Georg Gruppenbach, the printer of Mysterium, and Kepler's mentor Michael Mäistlin, who sought to produce a marketable broadsheet that would appeal to the contemporary German fashion for illustrations of polyhedral geometry. More generally, the article seeks to redefine the key role played by the printing workshop and the decorative arts in the theory's inception and ultimate graphic manifestation.
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Word & Image, 2016
The article discusses the handwritten revisions and drawn additions by Albrecht Dürer in his own... more The article discusses the handwritten revisions and drawn additions by Albrecht Dürer in his own copy of the treatise on geometry, Underweysung der Messung (1525). Situating Dürer’s interest in mathematics within the scholarly milieu of Renaissance Nuremberg, the article addresses the shifts in style and content that Dürer proscribes and offers new perspectives on the artist’s relation to his own late work. The article concludes by displaying several drawings bound into the edition by Dürer that illustrate variations on perspectival apparatuses. These lesser known drawings illuminate the evolution of Dürer’s conceptualization of the dynamics between artist and subject, as well as the tools used to facilitate this interaction.
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RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2015
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Log, 2015
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Drawings that Count, AA Publications, 2013, 46-67.
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Log, Issue 19, 2010, 37-151.
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Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide. (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies), 2023
In the space between Leonardo’s Vitruvian man and his grotesques, the opposing and equally ideali... more In the space between Leonardo’s Vitruvian man and his grotesques, the opposing and equally idealized poles of human perfection and deformity, the Renaissance gave rise to a spectrum of mediations on the nature of the human face, and the extent to which its appearance communicated emotion, signified intelligence, or indicated moral worth. Perhaps no text denotes the tactical continuum as much as Albrecht Dürer’s late treatise on applied geometry, Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion (1528), in its own way a dispassionate progenitor of a long lineage of quantifying the human through the graphic dissection of the human visage. Dürer’s use of geometry to precisely map a transformational relationship between body types illustrates a unique moment in the history of the exact sciences that would only become increasingly central to the construction of racial identity. Thus “Racial Profiling” aims to trace a prehistory of the modern discourses on phrenology, physiognomy, and other fascistoid constructions of race and ethnicity, and the critical impact these systematic approaches had on what would ultimately devolve into new visual typologies of racial definition.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Press release for The Polyhedrists: Art and Geometry in the Long Sixteenth Century (MIT Press, 2022)
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Creating Place in Early Modern European Architecture. Amsterdam University Press., 2022
The article unfolds an account of several overlapping fields of inquiry contributing to the early... more The article unfolds an account of several overlapping fields of inquiry contributing to the early modern experience of the cosmos. Traversing scale, scope, and media, from the first recorded meteorite fall to scholastic debates over the materiality of heaven and the practice of architecture as cosmic analogue, I argue in favour of bringing together a broad range of interdisciplinary source material in order to explore the spatiality of the cosmos and how it was encountered and reproduced as a place or cosmic space or non-place on earth. The accompanying examples gesture towards an open-ended model defined not solely by the built environment as much as by the ephemeral and rhetorical structures framing the cosmos for human consumption.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal for the History of Astronomy, 2021
The article explores Johannes Kepler's abortive attempts to produce an opulent, decorative art ob... more The article explores Johannes Kepler's abortive attempts to produce an opulent, decorative art object to accompany the publication of his first treatise, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). It was Kepler's hope that this Credentzbecher, so-called because it was designed to resemble a large, ceremonial chalice, would valorize the significance of what he believed to be an epoch-defining discovery concerning the proportional nature of the planetary intervals and serve as a personal introduction to his local sovereign, Duke Friedrich I of Württemberg (1557-1608). The correspondences of Kepler and his circle, some of which have been reproduced and translated here for the first time, reveal in excruciating detail the struggles to negotiate the demands, and exacting standards, of the Stuttgart court and Kepler's difficulty working with the local goldsmiths employed by the court to enact his vision. Though met with skepticism and destined for failure, the model, its design, and the misunderstandings its failure revealed, poignantly display the sometimes-insurmountable gap between artisanal knowledge and scientific ambition.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Re-Inventing Ovid's Metamorphoses : Pictorial and Literary Transformations in Various Media, 1400-1800, 2021
When Wenzel Jamnitzer (1508-1585), famed goldsmith to three Holy Roman Emperors, and his son Abra... more When Wenzel Jamnitzer (1508-1585), famed goldsmith to three Holy Roman Emperors, and his son Abraham (1555-1600), spliced the “silver bust of a young woman with a large growth of coral,” as it was tersely described in the 1586/87 Schatzkammerinventar of the Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden, they distorted centuries of visual and literary tradition surrounding the iconic myth of Daphne and Apollo. The laurel tree, ever associated by Apollo with Daphne and subsequently adopted as a sacred emblem of victory and honor, vanished, replaced by a phenotypically unstable, hybrid substance—part animal, part stone, and part plant, possessed of apotropaic properties and associated since the Middle Ages with the Holy Blood. The article proposes to investigate the ontological implications of the coral Daphne—both for querying the liberal approach to Ovid taken by Renaissance decorative artists, who had to answer to conflicting, and sometimes incommensurate, aesthetic and technical priorities, and as a paradigmatic example of the reconfiguration and scrambling wrought by the reciprocal interplay of text and matter.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Making Marvels: Art, Technology, and Entertainment at the Courts of Europe, 2019
The article addresses the courtly creation of lathe-turned ivory, which was often made to adorn t... more The article addresses the courtly creation of lathe-turned ivory, which was often made to adorn the top of miniature decorative art pieces. Housed in highly specialized workshops, ivory turning became associated with two primary goals: the demonstration of applied geometrical principles to sovereigns for whom turning was widely considered to be a uniquely suitable pastime, and the transformation of ivory by master artisans into intricate symbols of sovereigns’ dominance over matter and the technological capacities of their courts.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal for the History of Astronomy , 2017
The article addresses the genesis and visualization of the capstone image to Kepler's polyhedral ... more The article addresses the genesis and visualization of the capstone image to Kepler's polyhedral hypothesis of the planetary intervals from his first major work, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). The contention is that the famous Tabula III was directed less by Kepler than it was an initiative spearheaded by Georg Gruppenbach, the printer of Mysterium, and Kepler's mentor Michael Mäistlin, who sought to produce a marketable broadsheet that would appeal to the contemporary German fashion for illustrations of polyhedral geometry. More generally, the article seeks to redefine the key role played by the printing workshop and the decorative arts in the theory's inception and ultimate graphic manifestation.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Word & Image, 2016
The article discusses the handwritten revisions and drawn additions by Albrecht Dürer in his own... more The article discusses the handwritten revisions and drawn additions by Albrecht Dürer in his own copy of the treatise on geometry, Underweysung der Messung (1525). Situating Dürer’s interest in mathematics within the scholarly milieu of Renaissance Nuremberg, the article addresses the shifts in style and content that Dürer proscribes and offers new perspectives on the artist’s relation to his own late work. The article concludes by displaying several drawings bound into the edition by Dürer that illustrate variations on perspectival apparatuses. These lesser known drawings illuminate the evolution of Dürer’s conceptualization of the dynamics between artist and subject, as well as the tools used to facilitate this interaction.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2015
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Log, 2015
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Drawings that Count, AA Publications, 2013, 46-67.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Log, Issue 19, 2010, 37-151.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact