The seminar aims to explore the thorny but fascinating issue of how to conceive and treat the vast plethora of scientific illustrations, figures, and diagrams that occur in medieval texts, both from an ecdotic and from a conceptual point of view. Images of various kinds frequently appear in medieval manuscripts, where they perform different functions and play multiple roles. Glossing the text, helping its study, facilitating its memorisation, showing visually the flow and the development of demonstrations and arguments: these are just some of the multifaceted, and properly scientific, needs that illustrations can fulfil. This great importance notwithstanding, a proper theory of a philology of illustrations still awaits to be written. In broad preparation to such an ambitious goal, and building on recent reassessments of the issue in scholarship, this paper will systematically present the set of scientific figures and diagrams that accompany the text of al-Ġazālī‘s (d. 1111) Intentions of the Philosophers [Maqāṣid al-falāsifa], an encompassing Arabic summa of philosophy which covers the three main branches of medieval knowledge, i.e. logic, metaphysics, and physics. All three sections of this compact encyclopaedia of Aristotelian-Avicennan thought present some figures, often relating to the geometrical notions time by time evoked by the author in his compelling presentation of philosophical doctrines, but also extending well beyond the scope of geometry. These figures have, moreover, both a retrospective and a prospective history: they were in some cases already present in the Persian source of al-Ġazālī‘s text — Avicenna's Book of Science for ʿAlāʾ-ad-Dawlā [Dānešnāme-ye ʿAlāʾī] —, and they were then transmitted also to the Latin version of the Arabic work, the so-called Summa theoricae philosophiae, which enjoyed a wide fortune in the Latin Middle Ages. This unique textual situation will allow us to assess in vivo various accidents of transmission, elaboration, loss, and salvage of illustrations, in a fruitful and constant exchange between the images and the text that introduces, describes, and sometimes contradicts them.The seminar aims to explore the thorny but fascinating issue of how to conceive and treat the vast plethora of scientific illustrations, figures, and diagrams that occur in medieval texts, both from an ecdotic and from a conceptual point of view. Images of various kinds frequently appear in medieval manuscripts, where they perform different functions and play multiple roles. Glossing the text, helping its study, facilitating its memorisation, showing visually the flow and the development of demonstrations and arguments: these are just some of the multifaceted, and properly scientific, needs that illustrations can fulfil. This great importance notwithstanding, a proper theory of a philology of illustrations still awaits to be written. In broad preparation to such an ambitious goal, and building on recent reassessments of the issue in scholarship, this paper will systematically present the set of scientific figures and diagrams that accompany the text of al-Ġazālī‘s (d. 1111) Intentions of the Philosophers [Maqāṣid al-falāsifa], an encompassing Arabic summa of philosophy which covers the three main branches of medieval knowledge, i.e. logic, metaphysics, and physics. All three sections of this compact encyclopaedia of Aristotelian-Avicennan thought present some figures, often relating to the geometrical notions time by time evoked by the author in his compelling presentation of philosophical doctrines, but also extending well beyond the scope of geometry. These figures have, moreover, both a retrospective and a prospective history: they were in some cases already present in the Persian source of al-Ġazālī‘s text — Avicenna's Book of Science for ʿAlāʾ-ad-Dawlā [Dānešnāme-ye ʿAlāʾī] —, and they were then transmitted also to the Latin version of the Arabic work, the so-called Summa theoricae philosophiae, which enjoyed a wide fortune in the Latin Middle Ages. This unique textual situation will allow us to assess in vivo various accidents of transmission, elaboration, loss, and salvage of illustrations, in a fruitful and constant exchange between the images and the text that introduces, describes, and sometimes contradicts them.
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