The Elemental Body
Natural Philosophy and Medicine in Louis Finson’s Four Elements
Hardback (Forthcoming)
(February 2027)
ISBN: 9782503627007
Price: $94.00
In 1611, the Bruges born master Louis (or Lodewijk) Finson painted in Naples an atypical allegory of the traditional four elements. In it, Fire, Air, Water, and Earth are represented as four nude bodies: two female and two male, or, equally accurate, two young and two elderly figures entangled in a circular fight. Through multiple incursions into the ancient and early modern iconographic tradition, natural philosophy, medicine, and poetry, Lorenzo Pericolo illuminates the complex meaning of the painting, relating it ultimately to the revolutionary vision of the cosmos developed by the southern Italian philosopher Bernardino Telesio. Finson’s Four Elements no doubt represents one of the most fascinating testimonies of an age of transition at the dawn of the scientific revolution. It is also an “epistemic painting”: an original form of prescientific illustration that Pericolo links to other works by Lavinia Fontana (Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez) and Jusepe de Ribera (Portrait of Maddalena Ventura with her Husband and Child).
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