From Publishers Weekly
Our closest celestial neighbor, the moon has haunted and intrigued humanity from prehistory to the present. It has inspired the work of poets, artists, philosophers, theologians and scientists. Montgomery's prodigiously detailed, scholarly work joins these various disciplines, displaying vast depth of knowledge in areas divergent from geology, the field in which he is trained. From the pre-Socratic philosophers through the rise and fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Montgomery stitches a story of religious allegory, scientific inquiry and artistic insight. The moon, he writes, is "the most dominant but changeable element of the night sky." Among the masters on whom Montgomery draws are Galileo and Copernicus, Leonardo and Van Eyck. Their wide-ranging exertions are depicted and studied in their.interrelated historical context. We learn, for instance, of Plutarch's anthropomorphic imagery in his On the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon; that in early Christian art the sun and moon were associated with the crucified Christ; that, in a shift away from allegorical images of the moon, Jan Van Eyck was the first artist, long before Leonardo, to give a naturalistic image of the lunar surface. Beneath the easy-reading style lies a work of substance that is a narrow but penetrating contribution to cultural history. 14 photos, 12 line drawings. Astronomy Book Club selection. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Card catalog description
"From early perceptions of the Moon as an abode of divine forces, humanity has in turn accepted the mathematized Moon of the Greeks, the naturalistic lunar portrait of Jan van Eyck, and the telescopic view of Galileo. Scott Montgomery has produced a richly detailed analysis of how the Moon has been visualized in Western culture through the ages, revealing the faces it has presented to philosophers, writers, artists, and scientists for nearly three millennia. To do this, he has drawn on a wide array of sources that illustrate mankind's changing concept of the nature and significance of heavenly bodies from classical antiquity to the dawn of modern science."--BOOK JACKET.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From early perceptions of the Moon as an abode of divine forces, humanity has in turn accepted the mathematized Moon of the Greeks, the naturalistic lunar portrait of Jan van Eyck, and the telescopic view of Galileo. Scott Montgomery has produced a richly detailed analysis of how the Moon has been visualized in Western culture through the ages, revealing the faces it has presented to philosophers, writers, artists, and scientists for nearly three millennia. To do this, he has drawn on a wide array of sources that illustrate mankind's changing concept of the nature and significance of heavenly bodies from classical antiquity to the dawn of modern science.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly