da Vinci and the Renaissance 2019 (Italy) Dashboard
Description
Led by Prof. Dino Franco Felluga ([email protected]), da Vinci and the Renaissance is a fully cross-disciplinary study-abroad program that explores the transition from the medieval period to the Renaissance across multiple subjects (art, architecture, engineering, science), thus laying out how much of what we take for granted today about technology or about the human subject were implemented in this rich period, especially in Italy. The focus for the course will be that most famous “Renaissance man,” Leonardo da Vinci. The course’s interdisciplinary approach asks students to think about the constructed nature of the things we take for granted as “natural” (e.g., time, space, human subjectivity, meaning, sight, knowledge, and law), thus opening our eyes to the significance of cultural differences.
We finish in the last days of the course by flash-forwarding to our present century so we can consider not only how Renaissance thinking made possible a number of present-day developments (robotics and computing, for example), but also the myriad ways that we are now seeing a cultural, ontological, and epistemological shift that is as far-reaching as the one between the medieval period and the Renaissance. The Peggy Guggenheim Museum and the Venice Biennale will provide us with our artistic examples of so-called “postmodernism.”
Galleries, Timelines, and Maps
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Individual Entries
The Villa where Galileo designed his version of the first pendulum clock, but it was never completed.
This pendulum clock served as the first time standard in the United States, from 1904 to 1929. It achieved accuracies of 10 milliseconds per day, and were guaranteed to be at least within 30 milliseconds. By including a low thermal expansion pendulum, a low pressure tank, and a gravity remontoire, the error on the pendulum swing was reduced.
Dating from c. 1600, this is one of the few remaining clocks in the world that still feature ts original Verge and Foliet escapements. It has been moved and restored, and is now on exhibit in the Science Museum, London.
Said to be the oldest working clock in the world, it orginally used the Verge and Foliet escapements, which were later replaced a verge and pendulum, and when the clock was restored in 1956, a new Verge and Foliet was installed.