E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series 2024
Galileo's Laughter: Knowledge and Play in the Renaissance
Organised by the Warburg Institute and sponsored by Princeton University Press, this series features prominent humanities scholars who address pressing concerns in art, literature, and ideas, across historical periods.
Galileo's Laughter: Knowledge and Play in the Renaissance by Professor Paula Findlen (Stanford University)
10, 11 & 12 September 2024
In February 1937, Johan Huizinga presented a lecture based on Homo ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938) at the Warburg Institute, with a young Viennese art historian, Ernst Gombrich, in the audience. Gombrich was already thinking about visual play with Fritz Saxl as well as Ernst Kris who discussed caricature in this Warburg lecture series of 1937. Laughter, jokes, play, and paradox are fundamental to understanding Renaissance culture. They also shaped the knowledge that this society produced and permeated its understanding of nature and humanity in profound ways.
These lectures offer three different perspectives on the Renaissance tradition of playing seriously. The first lecture explores why so many elements of Renaissance nature were considered supremely playful. The second lecture considers the paradoxical and enduring popularity of a strange academic joke as a means of understanding what it means to be human. The final lecture reflects on why Galileo self-conscious cultivated a reputation as the laughing philosopher of his age, a Democritus at the end of the Renaissance.
