Earthly Science in the Renaissance.

Talk by Andrew Spira

The Renaissance was not only a time of epoch-making change in the arts.  There were also profound changes to what we now think of as aspects of science – thought the word ‘science’ did not exist at the time.  This lecture looks as the extraordinary progress made in the study of plants, animals, minerals and anatomy from the 14^th to the 17^th centuries, placing these developments in their cultural context and relating them to the arts.  Leonardo da Vinci was famously interested in all of these subjects but he was the tip of an iceberg.