This is the second of the author's two volumes on the critical fortune of Pythagoras and the ideas attributed to him from antiquity to the early seventeenth century. Volume one, Measuring Heaven: Pythagoras and His Influence on Thought and Art in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, which appeared in 2006,1 covered the period beginning with Pythagoras's lifetime, in the sixth century BC, and ending in the fourteenth century. The volume reviewed here centers on fifteenth- and earlier sixteenth-century Italy and includes some material from northern Europe and up to the seventeenth century. This chronological and geographical emphasis is not surprising, since the project began with the author's investigation of the iconography of Raphael's School of Athens, (Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention,2 where Pythagoras is prominently represented. While some of this Pythagorean material has been available in classic studies like S. K. Heninger's Touches...
University of California Press