Art and Science in Calvino’s Palomar: Techniques of Observation and Their History

This article proposes a new reading of Italo Calvino’s Palomar, focusing on its combined interest in the histories of art and science. By examining the text alongside Calvino’s readings and writings from the same period (1975–1983), it demonstrates that Calvino was concerned throughout to explore parallels in the artistic and scientific histories of (objective) observation and of the techniques and instruments that serve to faithfully represent and communicate the results of such observations. Calvino’s privileged interlocutors are Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo but they also include a wide range of historians of art and science, zoologists, painters and botanists. The objects of this quest are mostly to be found in nature: animals, plants, stars and the sea. What emerges is a Calvino who writes a much more concrete, stratified history of science and art than is usually recognized.