Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend

$45.00 at The Getty Museum.

Elizabeth King and W. David Todd, with photographs by Rosamond Purcell An abundantly illustrated narrative that draws from the history of art, science, technology, artificial intelligence, psychology, religion, and conservation in telling the extraordinary story of a Renaissance robot that prays. This volume tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the…