The Eye of the Lynx: Art, Science and Nature in the Age of Galileo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002; paperback 2003; Italian translation (Bologna: Bononia University Press), 2007.

This profusely illustrated and engagingly written book reveals a crucial moment in the development of natural history. In the seventeenth century, the Academy of Linceans took as its task nothing less than the pictorial documentation of all of nature. Thousands of such drawings are found across Europe—drawings of fossils, the species of the New World, or the heavenly bodies studied by the group's most famous member, Galileo Galilei.