Abstract
The conjunction of the rise of the printed book as a prime means of transmitting information and the Renaissance reformulation of the means of visual representation was clearly an integral part of what we call the scientific revolution. On one level, it seems perfectly obvious that to be able to represent (say) a plant in a convincingly naturalistic manner in a printed botanical treatise would serve to provide straightforward instruction and to transmit checkable information to students of the natural world. Indeed, the polemic in favour of illustration by Leonhart Fuchs, introducing his great book on botanical science in 1542, provides early support for this view. He confronts those who ‘will cite the most insipid authority of Galen that no one who wants to describe plants should try to make pictures of them’.2
The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced or combined... The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage’. (Einstein)1
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Notes
Einstein’s letter to Jacques Hadamard, quoted by J. Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton, 1954) pp. 142–3.
L. Fuchs, De historia stirpium (Paris, 1542) pp. x–xi.
Leonardo da Vinci, Windsor 19071r; K. Keele and C. Pedretti, Leonardo da Vinci. Corpus of Anatomical Studies in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, 3 vols. (London and New York, 1979) no. 162r.
J. Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, ed. W. von Dyck, M. Caspar et al, 20 vols. 1938–88, vol. 13, p. 85; trans. E Rosen, ‘Kepler and the Lutheran attitude towards Copernicanism in the context of the struggle beweeen science and religion’, Kepler. Four Hundred Years, ed. A. Beer and P. Beer, Vistas in Astronomy, XVIII (Oxford and New York, 1975) p. 325.
A. Crombie, ‘Science and the arts in the Renaissance: the search for truth and certainty, old and new’, in J.W. Shirley and D. Hoeniger (eds), Science and the Arts in the Renaissance (Cranbury, New Jersey, 1985) pp. 15–6. Compare J. Ackerman, ‘The involvement of artists in Renaissance science’, Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, pp. 94–129 and ‘Early Renaissance ‘naturalism’ and scientific illustration’, in A. Ellenius (ed.), Natural Sciences and the Arts (Uppsala, 1985) pp. 1–17; and R. Root-Bernstein, ‘Visual thinking: The art of imagining reality’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 75 (1985) 50–67.
E. Panofsky, Die Perspektive als ‘symbolishe Form’, Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, 1924–5 (Berlin, 1927); Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. C. Wood (New York, 1991).
For reworkings of the Panofskian standpoint, see especially S.Y. Edgerton Jnr., ‘The Renaissance artist as quantifier’, in M. Hagen (ed.), The Perception of Pictures (New York, 1980) I, pp. 179–212; ‘The Renaissance development of scientific illustration’, Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, pp. 168–97; and The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry. Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca and London, 1991).
S.Y. Edgerton Jnr., ‘Galileo, Florentine ‘disegno’, and the strange spottednesse of the moon’, Art Journal 44 (1985) 225–48;
M. Kemp, The Science of Art. Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat, revised ed. (London and New Haven, 1992) pp. 94–6.
For recent contributions that make some inroads into these matters, see particularly R. Westman, ‘Nature, art and psyche: Jung, Pauli, and the Kepler-Fludd polemic’, in B. Vickers (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984) pp. 177–229; M. Mahoney, ‘Diagrams and dynamics: Mathematical perspectives on Edgerton’s thesis’, Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, pp. 198–220;
W. Ashworth Jnr., ‘Light of reason, light of nature: Catholic and Protestant metaphors of scientific knowledge’, Science in Context 3 (1989) 89–107;
E. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, Connecticut, 1983),
E. Tufte, Envisioning Information (Cheshire, Connecticut, 1990);
M. Lynch and S. Woolgar (eds), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge, Mass., 1990);
M. Winkler and A. Van Helden, ‘Representing the heavens: Galileo and visual astronomy’, Isis 83 (1992) 195–217.
An illustrated panorama is provided by B.J. Ford, Images of Science (London, 1992).
For Osiander’s foreword, see De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Nuremberg, 1543) preface, iv–vi; and the manuscript version (Cracow, Jagiellonian University, Library, MS BJ 10,000), trans. and commentary by E. Rosen in Nicholas Copernicus. Complete Works, 3 vols. (London, Warsaw and Cracow, 1972) II, p. xvi. Compare De revolutionibus, II, intro., p. 27; trans. Rosen p. 51.
See O. Gingerich, ‘From Copernicus to Kepler: Heliocentrism as model and as reality’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117 (1973) 513–22.
K. Roberts and J. Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body: European Traditions of Anatomical Illustration (Oxford, 1992).
Andreas Vesalius, Tabulae sex (Venice, 1436), letter of dedication to Narcissus Parthenopeus; quoted J. Saunders and C. O’Malley, The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (New York, 1950) p. 233.
Keele and Pedretti, Corpus, no. 198r. More generally for artists and anatomy in the Renaissance, see B. Schultz, Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy, in Studies in Fine Arts: Art Theory, No. 12, ed. D. Cuspit (Ann Arbor, 1985); and
M. Cornell, Artists and the Study of Anatomy in Sixteenth-Century Italy (PhD. Thesis, Warburg Institute, University of London, 1992).
L. Fries, Spiegel der Artzny (Strasbourg, 1518).
See R. Koch, Hans Baidung Grien: Eve, the Serpent and Death (Ottawa, 1974);
L.H. Boudreau, Hans Baidung Grien and Albrecht Dürer. A Problem in Northern Mannerism (Ph.D. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1978);
L.H. Boudreau, Hans Baidung Grien: Prints and Drawings (exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1981).
Roberts and Tomlinson, The Fabric, plate 9, for the illustration from L. Fries, Spiegel der Artzny (Strasbourg, 1519);
H. von Gersdorf, Feldtbuch der Wundartzney (Strasbourg, 1517) p. 262.
M. Hundt, Antropologium (Leipzig, 1501), illustrated by Roberts and Tomlinson, The Fabric, plate 7.
Windsor 12636; Pedretti and Keele, Corpus, no. 111r.
Pietro d’Abano, Conciliator (Venice, 1496), CXCIX, in which Pietro argues that the depiction of the diagonal muscles is incorrect—an argument Leonardo appears not to have grasped.
Berengario da Carpi, Commentaria super anatomia Mundini (Bologna, 1521); and Isagogae breves... (Bologna, 1522); trans. L. Lind, A Short Introduction to Anatomy (Isagogae breves) (Chicago, 1939) p. 160.
See R. French, ‘Berengario da Carpi and the use of commentary in anatomical teaching’, in A. Wear, R. French and I. Lonie (eds), The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985) pp. 42–74;
M. Kemp, ‘‘The mark of truth’: Looking and learning in some anatomical illustrations from the Renaissance and eighteenth century’, in W. Bynum and R. Porter (eds), Medicine and the Five Senses (London, 1993) pp. 85–121.
C. Estienne (Carolus Stephanus), De dissectione partium corporis humani (Paris, 1545); French trans. as La Dissection des parties du corps humain (Paris, 1546).
For the artistic sources, see C.F. Kellett, ‘Perino del Vaga et les illustrations pour l’Anatomie d’Estienne’, Aesculapius 37 (1964) 74–9;
M. Kornell, ‘Rosso Fiorentino and the anatomical text’, Burlington Magazine 81 (1989) 842–7.
Tabulae sex, letter of dedication, trans. Saunders and O’Malley, The Illustrations, p. 234.
See also J. Dryander, Anatomia (Marburg, 1537).
A. Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel, 1543) VII, xix, p. 661.
M. Kemp, A Drawing for the Fabrica; and some thoughts upon the Vesalian muscle-men’ Medical History 14 (1970) 277–88; and ‘The mark of truth’.
Tabulae sex, letter of dedication; trans. Saunders and O’Malley, The Illustrations, p. 234.
Appendix Vergiliana, Elegiae in Maecenatem, I, 38: ‘vivitur ingenio, cetera mortis erunt’ (reference kindly provided by Professor H. Hine).
E.g., Fabrica, I, xx, p. 93, and III, i, p. 358.
Saunders and O’Malley, The Illustrations, pp. 230–1.
Fabrica, VII, xiv, p. 643.
For a discussion of such linear conventions, see Kemp, ‘The mark of truth’, pp. 100–1.
B. Eustachio, Tabulae anatomicae (Rome, 1722); see Roberts and Tomlinson, The Fabric, pp. 188–93.
P. Apianus, Cosmographicus liber (Landshut, 1524).
De revolutionibus, preface, iii; trans. Rosen, vol. II, p. 4. For Copernicus generally, see Copernicus Yesterday and Today, ed. A. Beer and K.A. Strand, in Vistas in Astronomy. XVII (Oxford and New York, 1975); and J-P. Verdet, ‘L’Astronomia dalle origini a Copernico’, in W. Shea (ed.), Storia delle scienze. Le scienze fisiche e astronomiche (Milan, 1991) pp. 38–109.
For an instructive interpretation of Copernicus in the tradition of Renaissance rhetoric, see R. Westman, ‘Proof, poetics, and patronage’, in D. Lindberg and R. Westman (eds), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1990) pp. 167–207.
See also P.L. Rose, ‘Universal harmony in Regiomontanus and Copernicus’ Avant, avec, après Copernic: la representation de l’univers et ses conséquences épistémologiques (Paris, 1975) pp. 153–8.
For the translations from the Greek, see Complete Works, III, p. 31. For further discussion of Copernicus’s humanism, see K. Hutchison, ‘Copernicus, Apollo and Herakles’, in S. Gaukroger (ed.), The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition (Dordrecht, 1991) pp. 1–23; and ‘Harmony and authority: The political symbolism of Copernicus’s personal seal’, in R.G. Mazzolini (ed.), Non-Verbal Communication in Science prior to 1900 (Florence, 1993). For the standard likeness of Copernicus, see Vistas in Astronomy, XVII, figs.5–7. The evidence regarding the possible self-portrait(s) is assessed by Westman, ‘Proof, poetics, and patronage’, pp. 184–6.
De revolutionibus, preface iiiv, and I, x, p. 10; trans. Rosen, pp. 4 and 22.
G.J. Rheticus, Narrado prima (Danzig, 1540, and Basel, 1541); quoting Galen, De usu partium, X, 14; trans. E. Rosen, Three Copernican Treatises (New York, 1971) p. 137.
L.B. Alberti, De re aedifactoria (Florence, 1486; also Paris ed. of 1512 and Strasbourg, 1541); trans. J. Rykwert, N. Leach and R. Tavernor, On the Art of Building in Ten Books (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1988), especially the prologue and the introductions to books I and VI.
De revolutionibus, preface, iiiv; trans. Rosen, p. 4. Compare De revolutionibus, p. 9r; trans Rosen, p. 22, where it is asserted that nature ‘avoids producing anything superfluous or useless’.
De revolutionibus, I, 10, pp. 9v–10r; trans. Rosen, p. 22. See H.R Nebelsick, Circles of God. Theology and Science from the Greeks to Copernicus (Edinburgh, 1985) pp. 200–73; G. Hatfield, ‘Metaphysics and the new science’, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, pp. 93–166; and, in a post-moderm vein,
F. Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler (New York, 1990). For a more circumscribed interpretation of this passage, see S. Drake, ‘Copernicanism in Bruno, Kepler and Galileo’, Vistas in Astronomy, XVII, pp. 177–90, esp. p. 184.
For a detailed assessment of Copernicus’s astronomy, see N. Swerdlow and O. Neugebauer, Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s ‘De Revolutionibus’, 2 vols. (New York, 1984).
De revolutionibus, I, 8, p. 6r; trans. Rosen, p. 16; Virgil, Aeneid, III, 72.
Leonardo da Vinci, MS A 36r and MS K3120v, in M. Kemp (ed.), Leonardo on Painting, trans. M. Kemp and M. Walker (London and New Haven, 1989) p. 55.
J. Kepler, Epitome astronomiae Copernicae (Linz, 1618); in Gesammelte Werke, ed. W. von Dyck, M. Caspar et al, 20 vols. 1938–88, VII, p. 277.
J. Kepler, Somnium, published posthumously by L. Kepler (Frankfurt, 1634); trans. E. Rosen, Kepler’s Somnium (Madison and London, 1962). In his Astrononomia nova (Heidelberg, 1609), Kepler envisages an observer on Mars; Gesammelte Werke, III, p. 22.
De revolutionibus, III, 3, fol.66v, p. 124. The MS illustration is on fol.74. See O. Neugebauer, ‘On the planetary theory of Copernicus’, in A. Beer (ed.), Vistas in Astronomy (Oxford and New York, 1968) p. 96.
De revolutionibus, III, 3, p. 66r (trans. Rosen, p. 124).
De revolutionibus, III, 3, p. 66r, (trans. Rosen, p. 123).
R. Westman, ‚Three responses to the Copernican theory: Johannes Praetorius, Tycho Brahe and Michael Maestlin’, in R. Westman (ed.), The Copernican Achievement (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1975) pp. 318–9, for annotations by Kepler and the Scottish philosopher, Duncan Lidell.
The annotated Copernicus in St. Andrews was, as an insciption indicates, the property of the ‘German Nation’ in the University of Padua in 1626.
Illustrated by O. Gingerich in Vistas in Astronomy, XVII, fig. 70.
For reviews of such instruments, see E. Zimmer, Deutsche und Niederländische astronomische Instrumente des 11.–18. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1967);
A. Turner, Early Scientific Instruments (London, 1987);
J. Bennett, The Divided Circle: A History of Instruments for Astronomy, Navigation and Surveying (Oxford, 1987);
G. Turner (ed.), Storia delle scienze. Gli strumenti (Turin, 1991).
Illustrated and discussed by F. Maddison in Ca 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (exhibition catalogue, National Gallery, Washington, 1991) nos. 120–2. For a suggestive discussion of the nature and use of such instruments,
see J.V Field, ‘What is scientific about a scientific instrument?’, Nuncius, III.2, 1988, pp. 3–26.
For the courtly context, see T. DaCosta Kaufmann, ‘The Kunstkammer, politics and science’, in The Master of Nature. Aspects of Art, Science and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1993) esp. pp. 188–93.
See also M. Kemp, ‚‘Intellectual ornaments’: Style, function and society in some instruments of art’, in J. Pittock and A. Wear (eds), Interpretation and Cultural History (London, 1991) pp. 135–52.
P. Apianus, Instrumentum primi mobilis (Numberg 1534); and Astronomicum caesareum (Ingolstadt, 1540);
see O. Gingerich, Apianus’s Astronomicum caesareum and its Leipzig facsmile’, Journal for the History of Astronomy 2 (1971) 168–77.
T. Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae mechanica (Wandesburg, 1598); see Tycho Brahe’s Description of his Instruments and Scientific Work as Given in Astronomiae instauratae mechanica, Wandesbeck 1598, Nuremberg 1602, trans. H. Raeder, E. Strömgren and B. Strömgren (Copenhagen, 1946). The illustrations of instruments are also found in Brahe’s Progymnasmata, ed. J. Kepler (Prague, 1602).
For Tycho’s career and achievements, see V. Thoren, The Lord of Uraniborg. A Biography of Tycho Brahe (Cambridge, 1990).
T. Brahe, De nova et nullius aevi memoria prius visa stella (Copenhagen, 1573); trans. His Astronomical Conjecture of the New and Much Admired Star which Appeared in the Year 1572 (London, 1623).
Mechanica, p. 61.
Mechanica, pp. 44–5. The poem is in Opera omnia, VI, p. 266ff.
Mechanica, p. 30.
Mechanica, p. 13.
Mechanica, p. 57.
Mechanica, p. 27.
See Thoren, Lord of Uraniborg, pp. 106–13 for the architecture, though somewhat overestimating the classicism and Palladianism of the enterprise.
Mechanica, p. 131.
J. Kepler, Tabulae rudolphinae (Ulm, 1627).
The sketch in the Archiv der Kepler-Kommission, Munich, is illustrated in Gesammelte Werke, X, p. 279, and Kepler: Four Hundred Years, ed. A. Beer and P. Beer, Vistas in Astronomy, XVIII (Oxford and New York, 1975) fig.3.8. For Kepler’s stereometry, see his Nova stereometria doliorum vinariorum, 1615. For Kepler generally, see M. Caspar, Kepler (London and New York, 1959);
J.V Field, Kepler’s Geometrical Cosmology (Chicago, 1988); Kepler: Four Hundred Years; and W. Shea, ‘La rivoluzione scientifica’, Le scienze fisiche e astronomiche, pp. 168–233.
J. Kepler, Mysterium cosmographicum (Tubingen, 1596); Gesammelte Werke, I, pp. 3–80. Kepler’s treatise is also unusual in that he represents the actual paths of the planets in addition to their orbs.
Field, p. 47. See also pp. 45–51 for an outline of the way Kepler reached his formulation.
For apsects of the ‘aesthetics’ of the Platonic solids in perspectival depiction, see M. Kemp, ‘Geometrical bodies as exemplary forms in Renaissance space’, in I. Lavin (ed.), World Art. Themes of Unity in Diversity, 3 vols. (University Park, Pennsylvania; and London, 1989) I, pp. 237–42.
Gesammelte Werke, XIII, pp. 50–3. See F. Prager, ‘Kepler als Erfinder’, in F. Krafft et al. (eds), Internationales Kepler-Symposium Weil der Stadt 1971 (Hildesheim, 1973) pp. 385–405.
Gesammelte Werke, XIII, p. 218ff.
Gesammelte Werke, XIII, p. 151.
Letter to Hewart von Hohenburg, 10 February 1605; Gesammelte Werke, XV, p. 146.
Marsilio Ficino, De sole, 1493, cap.XIII, p. 255.
S. Münster, Organum uranicum (Basel, 1536) title page.
Sidereus nuncius (Venice, 1610); trans. and intro. A. Van Helden, Sidereus nuncius or the Sidereal Messenger (Chicago and London, 1989).
Winkler and Van Helden, ‘Representing the heavens’.
A recension of this paper, here printed in its original form, has been published as follows: Temples of the body and temples of the cosmos: Vision and visualization in the Vesalian and Copernican revolutions’, in B.S. Baigrie (ed.), Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science (Toronto, 1996).
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Kemp, M. (2000). Vision and Visualisation in the Illustration of Anatomy and Astronomy from Leonardo to Galileo. In: Freeland, G., Corones, A. (eds) 1543 and All That. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9478-3_2
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