Imaging life : image acquisition and analysis in biology and medicine /
"The earliest biological images appear in caves. These images are prehistoric, but, in truth, they are the first historical records of the natural world. Art and science have a common twenty-thousand-year-old ancestor, the desire to represent the natural world in images. The drawings are often...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Hoboken, New Jersey :
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,
[2023]
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "The earliest biological images appear in caves. These images are prehistoric, but, in truth, they are the first historical records of the natural world. Art and science have a common twenty-thousand-year-old ancestor, the desire to represent the natural world in images. The drawings are often amazingly accurate. The images of horses, Figure 1.1A, appear markedly similar to lineages that have escaped extensive alteration through husbandry, Figure 1.1B. In modern art, when representing the power and essence of the horse, similar images appear, as in the Blue Horse by Franz Marc, Figure 1.1C. The cave horse images are multiples, offset and overlapping, Figure 1.1A, not unlike the multiplicity of horse images in the forerunners (so-to-speak) of the earliest movies, Figure 1.2. The spatial linkage of multiple horse heads may represent, not a herd of horses, but a single horse in time. An image series of the turning head of a walking horse could come alive in a cave lit by a flickering candle. "When the hunter was brought here into the secret dark and the light was suddenly flashed on the pictures, he saw the bison as he would have to face him, he saw the running deer, he saw the turning boar." - J. Bronowski (1973) Another common cave image is the handprint, a silhouette of the hand that is a direct cast on the wall of the cave by paint or soot, Figure 1.3. Hand print silhouettes found in many Neolithic caves are the ancestor of photography, an image cast by light rather than by paint. They can act as signatures of the authors, telling us who made these images 20,000 years later. The sexual dimorphism in the length of the index finger between men and women reveals that about half of the painters of cave images were women"-- |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xiv, 525 pages) : illustrations (chiefly color) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781119081579 1119081572 9781119081593 1119081599 9781394171538 1394171536 |