The Moon and the Western Imagination

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.)