The Art of Science

Abstract

In a heady essay written over thirty years ago, Giorgio de Santillana argued that some of the key ideas of the Scientific Renaissance were to be traced to developments in the arts.' In particular, the idea of space was transformed from the Aristotelian conception a 'tidy arrangement of a simple multiplicity of things, not unlike, let us say, the shipping department of Sears Roebuck' into 'a matrix for infinite potential complexities and states and tensions'. The main innovators of this transformation were not scientists but artists, especially Alberti, Brunelleschi and Leonardo, who created on their canvases and in their architecture and treatises a new conception of space. When I first encountered de Santillana's paper in the late 1960s I found it both fascinating and suggestive. Its attraction arose principally from its iconoclastic message, for de Santillana explained one of the key conceptual innovations in the rise of modern science in terms that challenged the assumptions of my teachers in the history of science. They had argued that the new ideas about space and motion had arisen from an intellectual and, to a much lesser extent, empirical critique of the preceding, largely Aristotelian, notions. Discussion of this transformation was confined to the great tradition of philosopher-scientists beginning with Aristotle, continuing with medieval authors, such as Oresme and Jordanus, and ending with Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and, of course, Newton. De Santillana offered a very different account of the new ideas of space and a different cast of actors. Most importantly, he claimed that the new science was not the progeny of earlier science but the outgrowth of developments in the practical arts. In his account the history of art and the history of science were intrinsically linked: in the late 1960s this was an heretical claim to most historians of science (and probably many historians of art). Although sympathetic to this heresy I found myself intoxicated but also somewhat inhibited by de Santillana's impressionistic style. However exciting his paper, his thesis seemed in danger of crumbling if it were reworked into a conventional historical discourse. In the book under review, Martin Kemp reexamines the art-science relationship with much care and circumspection. His style is lucid and he emerges as an honest broker who judiciously weighs the historical evidence. He has an impressive command of the literature of both art and optical science across much of Europe and over a span of four centuries. In contrast to de Santillana's uninterrupted thirty pages of text, Kemp's thesis is amply illustrated with several hundred plates, including many of his own line drawings showing artists' deployment of visual angles, vanishing points, etc. The reader is led gently through the history of art and the details of optical science to appreciate their interrelationship. Albeit less impressionistic and insightful, Kemp's analysis is of broader scope and greater clarity than de Santillana's. Kemp identifies optics as a topic of common concern to both art and science. (In a sequel he proposes to pursue the role of anatomy and natural history in the history of art.) Of the many interweaving strands within this extensive topic he concentrates primarily on the way artists have deployed scientific ideas and instruments these connections constitute 'the science of art' of his title while he also encompasses a number of related themes. The science of art, claims Kemp, has not been adequately appreciated by art historians and to begin to rectify the situation he strives to demonstrate that 'there were special kinds of affinity between the central intellectual and observational concerns in the visual arts and the sciences' in European history between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century (p. 1). In the first of the book's three sections Kemp examines the theory and practice of perspective from Brunelleschi to Turner. The second section, which is less focused and less easy to characterise, contains discussion of perspective machines and other technical aids as well as theories of perception. The final section is concerned with the theory and depiction of colour. In the first section one of Kemp's main themes is the relationship between theoria and praxis. Renaissance artists confronting the problem of portraying spatial arrangement, responded by developing linear perspective. The initial emphasis was on praxis. Following the first crude attempts by Giotto, Lorenzetti and others, Brunelleschi got it right. Then, in the mid-1430s, Alberti the theorist codified the system. The basic rules of linear perspective were now accessible to any artist. Theoria could influence praxis. The relation between the theory and practice of