>This last point is only half-way to the truth. The truth is that there is
>way too much really great stuff, far more than any given collection of
>humans can sort out and become acquainted with. There was a time when, on
>the whole, all educated persons shared the same texts; now there are simply
>too many immortal masterpieces, and take any two readers (take those who
>read the most), and they won't share all the same authors. Probably this
>flood of work, beginning in the early 17th-c, contributed to the appearance
>of "taste" (or "gusto") in discussions of art.
I've wanted to get this book for a long time. Maybe I'll buy it for myself for xmas. Interesting stuff on Kircher here too: http://www.mjt.org/exhibits/Knots.html
http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/spring_2007/features/know-it-all.html
[...]
Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, is the title of a 2004 book edited by Stanford’s Paula Findlen.
But how much did he know? Unquestionably, Kircher was a brilliant polymath. Though he was, in fact, a man of the Baroque era, we might nowadays think of him as a Renaissance man, and in Kircher’s case the term would be almost literally apt, inasmuch as his lifetime followed almost immediately upon the age of the Renaissance. Just how much he knew, however, is a matter in dispute. As noted earlier, it would turn out that his interpretations of hieroglyphics were just wrong, and even some of his contemporaries followed his intellectual feats with less than complete conviction. “I wish I could hold back the force of my laughter when I think about the Kircherian squaring of the circle,” wrote one French observer in the 1640s about Kircher’s mathematical claims. Yet, even if Kircher manifestly did not “know everything,” there is also no doubt that in the 17th century it was possible for an intellectually ambitious scholar, such as Kircher, to achieve a more approximate pretension to universal knowledge than would be plausible in any of the centuries since.
To trace that gap between the sciences and humanities that has developed over the past three centuries, rendering the comprehensively erudite person extinct, we have to step back 150 years or so from Kircher’s time, to that of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), the most supremely multitalented man of the Italian Renaissance, who was not only the artist of the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, but also an anatomist, a military engineer, and the designer of aerodynamic flying machines. Michelangelo (1475–1564) was scarcely less varied in his Renaissance genius, adding architecture and poetry to painting and sculpture. In both cases, art of the human form was inseparable from the science of human anatomy, and therefore art and science, to some practical extent, were strongly linked.
[...]