题 目：Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend /奇迹与机械：一台十六世纪机器人与其传奇

作 者：Elizabeth King

出 版：Getty Publications，2023

装 帧：精装，256页

尺 寸：20.3*25.4 cm

这是一本图文并茂的叙事作品，融合了艺术、科学、技术、人工智能、心理学、宗教和保护等领域的历史，讲述了一个文艺复兴时期祈祷机器人的非凡故事。

本书讲述了一件独特而罕见的艺术与科学交汇之物的故事：一件有450年历史的自动机械装置，被称为“修士”。这件藏于史密森尼学会美国国家历史博物馆的、能够行走和做手势的修士形象，是自驱动机器人现存最早的祖先之一。根据与西班牙国王费利佩二世宫廷相关的传说，这个修士代表了迭戈·德·阿尔卡拉的肖像，他是一位谦卑的方济会修士，据说其神圣的遗体在1562年西班牙王储病危时奇迹般地治愈了他。

为了追踪修士及其传说的起源，作者们走访了美国和欧洲的档案馆、图书馆和博物馆，探究了一个机械装置执行看似精神行为的悖论。他们发现了同时期的七件类似的自动机械装置，并认为这些装置构成了行走“原动者”的典范类别，它们在视觉和功能真实性上的结合是前所未有的。虽然关于自动机械装置的大部分文献都集中在启蒙时代，但这个引人入胜的叙事回溯到了文艺复兴晚期，当时钟表机械还是全新的事物，预示着未来人工生命的演变。

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 Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to legend connected to the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562.

In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come.