SO GOOD. SO BIG. SO EXPENSIVE. SO LATE RETURNING IT TO THE LIBRARY. ( )

From the Introduction, page 10:
"Is 'Cosmigraphics' an art or a science book? Yes, and yes. As with science, the role of art was far from its contemporary meaning for most of the history sampled here. Until the seventeenth century or later, the arts and sciences were essentially fused. The great Renaissance painters advanced the science of optics, and were prized for their ability to convey realistic depictions of nature. Many were as much scientists and engineers as they were artists, even if their art is what we most celebrate now. The natural philosophers of the Enlightenment also developed their mimetic abilities, the better to depict natural phenomena. ...
"Before the Renaissance and as late as Romanticism, artists were essentially considered craftspeople, artisans involved in a relatively low-ranking guild devoted to embellishing church architecture, manuscripts, and civic buildings. Their names weren’t necessarily important, even if the greatest rose to prominence. …
“Just as scientific endeavor wasn’t autonomous from theology and was viewed as a way to comprehend God’s design, so art operated in service as a form of illustration….
“The visual legacy encompassed by ‘Cosmigraphics’ documents the stages of our evolving understanding as a species — a gradually dawning, forever incomplete situational awareness about the cosmos and our position within it, rising across millennia. If there’s one over-arching subject, it’s the enigma of our emergence as conscious beings within an unspeakably vast and cryptic universe, one that doesn’t necessarily guard its secrets willfully — actually it strews them promiscuously around in the form of hints, indications, clues, and manifestations — but doesn’t exactly hand out codebooks either.”

https://maryoverton.wikispaces.com/How+Comets+Broke+the+Celestial+Spheres