blog post 3

Blog Post 3 – Galileo Museum & Project 3

Origins of Art & Science

Johee Kwak

Lia Halloran

January 23 2016

The Galileo Galilei Museum ignited my interests about navigation, astronomy, physics, and medicine. It was a perfect place for us curious students to get a close up of Galileo’s inventions. The museum included Terrestrial and celestial globes, barometers, compasses, telescopes, thermometers, astrolabes, armillary sphere, and the original instruments designed and built by Galileo himself. This is the only place in the world where the gadgets made by Galileo are stored. Moreover, complete scientific collections from the Houses of Medici and Lorraine are also displayed.

Walking through the museum, I was exposed to several halls, which underscored the studies of medicine, astronomy, navigation, war, experiments, physics, biology, mechanics, optics, pneumatics, electricity, electromagnetism, atmosphere, and chemistry.

The first floor was devoted to the Medici collections, which dates back from the 15^th century through the 18^th century. The permanent exhibitions include all of Galileo’s artifacts including his two telescopes, thermometer, and his extraordinary collections of the celestial and terrestrial globe.  The second floor of the museum housed instruments and experimental collections including the progress of electricity, electromagnetism, and chemistry. There were also wax models in glass cases, which reminded me of La Specola, that were from Santa Maria Nuova Hospital. The Grand Duke’s chemistry cabinet was also displayed alongside with spectacular machines that were used to portray the fundamental laws of physics.

Room after room, I was able to grasp the challenges and questions that were posed in the past which was not an easy task – how to measure time by day and by night, the problem of longitude for navigation purposes, the birth of science of warfare correlated to the expansion of firearms that transformed the battlefield in geometric studies—it goes on forever!

In particular, the telescopes, astrolabes, and the representations of the earth and the stars were the most fascinating aspects of the museum.  For the final project, Tessa and I teamed up to make a close up observation of the planet Venus, which was first observed and found by Galileo. Without his knowledge of science and the invention of his telescope, he would not have been able to observe the phases of Venus, let alone confirm Copernicus’ theory that the universe had a heliocentric model. We were inspired by the anamorphic art collection from the museum but decided to add our own twist to it by not directly creating anamorphic art, but employing a similar concept by making two completely separate drawings that mimic each other visually. Our project was divided into two different pieces. The first piece focused on the observations and limitations Galileo had on the study of Venus. The telescope helped him greatly in understanding the planet in relation to the Sun and the solar system, but this also came with constraints in that there were limits as to how close he can get to Venus. Therefore, the first part of the piece includes Galileo’s findings of Venus, including the phases of Venus and the exterior detail of the planet itself. The second piece was a close up observation that we can make of Venus today. Back then, Galileo’s understanding of the plane was limited to telescopes, but today there are countless of space missions that have been conducted to better understand it. In doing so, we were able to pull up a close-up detail of Venus’ surface as well as its core and crust, using an app via NASA. With that, we attempted to create an abstract collage using the different parts and levels of Venus. This enabled us to get a magnified detail on the texture of Venus including the mountain like structures that exist on the planet, something Galileo could not have concluded in his studies. We also incorporated Botticelli’s depiction of Venus from “The Birth of Venus” as well as Tiziano’s  painting of Venus, both of which we saw at the Uffizi. By incorporating the mythical aspects of Venus onto the contemporary landscape, we aimed to create a sense of life to a planet that is deemed to be inhabitable.