Art Histories
2014/ 2015

Ittai Weinryb

Art and Experience in the Time of the Astrolabe

Astrolabe, Muhammad b. AbiBakr, 618 A.H (1221/2 A.D.), Isfahan Iran/Persia (inv. number:48213), Oxford Museum of the History of Science)
Astrolabe, Muhammad b. AbiBakr, 618 A.H (1221/2 A.D.), Isfahan Iran/Persia (inv. number:48213), Oxford Museum of the History of Science).

Ittai Weinryb is Assistant Professor at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. He received his PhD (2010) and MA from the Johns Hopkins University and his BA from Tel Aviv University. His area of research and teaching include Art and Material Culture of Western Europe and the Medieval Mediterranean in the nexus of Image and Object Theory, Anthropology, Magic and Religion as well as Medieval Folklore. He has recently completed a book entitled: Bronzescapes: Material and Magic in the Making of the Middle Ages. The book deals with the rise and development of monumental bronzes in Medieval Europe. Weinryb is currently also involved in developing a large-scale exhibition dealing with votive offerings (ex votos). He has published in journals such as Word and Image and Gesta and was recently an Andrew Mellon fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Art and Experience in the Age of the Astrolabe

Ittai Weinryb’s project as Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices fellow focuses on the reception and distribution of mathematical knowledge presented through the technology of the astrolabe in the Mediterranean environ in the Middle Ages. The astrolabe, a sophisticated inclinometer used by scholars, navigators and astrologers, was a fundamental scientific tool for the amassment of numerical and visual knowledge. Weinryb’s project carefully examines the place of the astrolabe’s technology and its relation to the production of data such as distance, proportion, length and depth as well as to its influence on the production of astrological knowledge. The project further shows that inter-regional interactions in the science of astrology in the Middle Ages were positioned in parallel movement to discourse in image and object production at that period. Thus, the reception of the technology of the astrolabe and the discourse regarding the actual fabrication of the inclinometer, this project shows, served as a protagonists in the discourse regarding the nature of object and image around the Mediterranean environ and beyond.