Italy is brimming with art treasures, but now and again new troves emerge from obscurity. In The Eye of the Lynx (University of Chicago Press, $50), art historian David Freedberg brings together a wealth of mostly unknown natural-history drawings produced by the world's first modern scientific academy, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Academy of the Lynxes), which was founded 400 years ago. Revolutionary at the time, the drawings were aided by the use of a new instrument — the microscope — which was created by turning around Galileo's new telescope. Pictured here is a selection of Vincenzo Leonardi's carefully observed details of the anatomy of the common porcupine, drawn in the early seventeenth century.