SAN MARINO, CA.-The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens presents The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture, on view through November 27, 2005. The second half of a major exhibition curated by Mordechai Feingold of Caltech, “The Newtonian Moment” explores the diffusion of Sir Isaac Newton’s scientific ideas and their influence on all aspects of modern culture, from religion and history to art and literature. “ Newton was first and foremost an emblem of a new era,” says Feingold. “Whether other philosophers admired and imitated him, or disagreed with and attacked him, they recognized that he had provided a new point of departure for the three major domains of human inquiry: man, nature, and God.” His ideas remain fundamental to our understanding of the world today.

For 150 years after his death in 1727, admiration of Newton bordered on idolization; he was immortalized in verse, carved in stone. With time, Newton thus metamorphosed into science personified. It was for precisely this reason that he was vilified by 19 th -century Romantics such as Shelley and Blake, who sought to remove poetry and art from under the umbrella of science, substituting mysteries and emotions for laws and reason.

The exhibition will feature over a hundred books, prints, and reproductions drawn primarily from the Huntington ’s collections that illustrate Newton ’s influence in many areas of thought. Selections include Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels (1726); Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad: An heroic poem (1728); Elémens de la philosophie de Neuton by Voltaire (1737); Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (1810); and William Blake’s engraving “Ancient of Days” (1794). The companion publication, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture by Mordechai Feingold (Oxford University Press, 2004; $22.50), is available in the Huntington ’s Bookstore & More.