Christopher Tyler discusses three books published by Diatrope Press

Complete Illustrated Edition of the Life of Leonardo da Vinci, from Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari.. Edited with complete illustrations and annotations by Christopher W. Tyler. Color illustrations throughout. This is the only edition of Vasari’s Life of da Vinci that illustrates every single painting and sculpture mentioned by Vasari. Translated by Gaston du C. De Vere (The Medici Society/Macmillan: London, 1912-1915).

Portraits of his Daughters by Thomas Gainsborough commemorates two delightful sisters painted by their father, the famous 18th century English painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). The daughters are buried together at St Mary’s Church, Hanwell. In 1809, the rector of the Church, George Henry Glass, built the Hanwell cottage where a fountain inscribed in memory of two sisters makes an interesting link with the Gainsborough daughters. Illustrations on every page.

Parallel Alices: Alice through the Looking Glass of Eleanor of Aquitaine. New insights into historical roots of Alice in Wonderland. Examines the historical lines of the Alice books by Lewis Carroll through the historical sources at the time of Eleanor of Aquitaine. 170p. 6×9″ inches. Includes timelines, glossary, bibliography.

Lecture: Was Leonardo da Vinci’s World Map the First to Name America?

Was Leonardo da Vinci’s World Map the First to Name America?

by: Christopher W. Tyler, Ph.D., D.Sc.  –  Saturday Sept 28 @ 3:00 PM

Christopher Tyler’s scientific interests are in visual perception and visual neuroscience. With regards to Leonardo da Vinci, Tyler’s interests extend from his youthful activities as an extempore singer and artist’s model in Florence to his architectural and anamorphic influences in the Court of Renaissance France.

image+%281%29.jpgIn addition to his better known artistic, scientific and engineering talents, Leonardo da Vinci has an extensive reputation as a cartographer, drawing maps for a wide range of hydro-engineering projects for the rulers of Florence, Milan, Arezzo and the Vatican, amongst others. However, he is not generally acknowledged as authoring a world map (or mappamundi) spanning the globe, which was the domain of a few specialized cartographers of the era. Nevertheless, there is a world map among his papers in the Royal Library, Windsor, which has the correct overall configuration of the continents, including an ocean at the north pole and a continent at the south pole. Moreover, it has a unique cartographic projection onto eight spherical-geometry triangles that provide close to isometric projection throughout the globe.

This quincentennial anniversary year of his death in 1519 is an appropriate moment for a reappraisal of this contribution to global cartography. Although the authenticity of this world map has been questioned, there is an obscure page of his notebooks in the Codex Atlanticus containing a sketch of this precise form of global projection, tying him securely to its genesis. Moreover, the same notebook page contains sketches of eight other global projections known at that time (early C16th), from the Roman Ptolemaic conic section projection to Rosselli’s (1508) oval planispheric projection. This paper reassesses the dating of Da Vinci’s unique mappamundi to suggest that it predates that of Waldseemüller (1507), and may thus have been the first map in history to name both America and Florida.

Now Available: Eye centring in selfies posted on Instagram

Abstract
Earlier work by one of us examined a historical corpus of portraits and found that artists often paint the subject such that one eye is centred horizontally. If due to psychological mechanisms constraining artistic composition, this eye-centring bias should be detectable also in portraits by non-professionals. However, this finding has been questioned both on theoretical and empirical grounds. Here we tested eye-centring in a larger (N ~ = 4000) and more representative set of selfies spontaneously posted on Instagram from six world cities. In contrast with previous selfie results, the distribution of the most-centred eye position peaked almost exactly at the horizontal centre of the image and was statistically different from predictions based on realistic Monte-Carlo predictions. In addition, we observed a small but statistically reliable pseudoneglect effect as well as a preference for centring the left-eye. An eye-centring tendency appears to exist in self-portraits by non-artists.

Authors: Nicola BrunoID1*, Marco Bertamini2*, Christopher W. Tyler
PLoS ONE14(7): e0218663.
PDF

1 DiMeC, Università di Parma, Parma, Italy,

2 Department of Psychological Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom,

3 Division of Optometry and Vision Sciences, School of Health Sciences, City University of London, London, United Kingdom

* M.Bertamini@liverpool.ac.uk (MB); nicola.bruno@unipr.it (NB)

(Also see MedicalResearch.com interview here and articles)

Now Online: List of 100+ Animal Names Used as Verbs

Animal Verbs ImageA compendium of 100+ animal names (i.e., nouns) that are also used as verbs in the English language is posted here. The list includes verbal usages that relate directly and indirectly to the noun’s meaning, analogies and unrelated verbal definitions. There are many different animal classes and every animal in the world belongs to one of them.

This list is divided into the five most well known classes of vertebrates (animals with backbones) that are mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians. and is subdivided into common categories of vertebrate animals, together with a category of invertebrates.

Continue reading “Now Online: List of 100+ Animal Names Used as Verbs”

Screening of the optical movie ‘Tim’s Vermeer’

Screening of the optical movie Tim’s Vermeer followed by presentations and panel discussion by Tim Jenison, Philip Steadman, Christopher Tyler and Sir Colin Blakemore. European Conference on Visual Perception, Liverpool, August 22-28th.
http://www.ecvp.org/2015/everyman.html

Continue reading “Screening of the optical movie ‘Tim’s Vermeer’”