The Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome

by Ingrid D. Rowland

The Ecstatic Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome surveys the scientific, religious, and political culture of seventeenth-century Rome through the works of Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), a German Jesuit at the Roman College. Published in conjunction with an exhibition held in the Department of Special Collections at the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library, this illustrated catalog includes an essay by Ingrid D. Rowland and descriptions of over 100 works. The introduction by F. Sherwood Rowland, 1995 Nobel laureate in Chemistry, offers an appreciation of Kircher and observations on the idea of scientific progress.



"In an age of polymaths, Kircher was perhaps the most polymathic of them all."-Anthony Grafton, Princeton University (Q in NYT 5/25/02)


"[Kircher] made vomiting machines and eavesdropping statues. He transcribed bird song and wrote a book about musicology (still used today). He taught Nicholas Poussin perspective and made a chamber of mirrors to drive cats crazy. He invented the first slide projector and had himself lowered into the mouth of Mount Vesuvius just as it was supposed to erupt. He proved the impossibility of the Tower of Babel. . . .With his labyrinthine mind, he was Jorge Luis Borges before Borges."-Sarah Boxer, New York Times

Genres: History Of Science, History

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Ingrid Drake Rowland is a professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Based in Rome, Rowland writes about Italian art, architecture, history and many other topics for The New York Review of Books. She is the author of the books Giordano Bruno: Philospher/Heretic (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008); The Place of the Antique in Early Modern Europe; The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth Century Rome; The Roman Garden of Agostino Chigi Horst Gerson Memorial Lecture, Groningen: University of Groningen, 2005; The Scarith of Scornello: a Tale of Renaissance Forgery (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Her essays in The New York Review of Books were collected in From Heaven to Arcadia: The Sacred and the Profane in the Renaissance (New York Review Books, 2005).