Visualization of the philosophical and conceptual foundations of modern natural sciences in renaissance painting

Abstract

The “philosophical horizon” of modern European science was not formed exclusively by the efforts of the scientific community. The ground for the scientific revolution of the modern era was also prepared by the art of Alberti, Leonardo and other masters of the Renaissance. The Renaissance art theory and practice testify to the visual elaboration of the philosophical and conceptual guidelines which were later to become the basis of modern European science. This also includes such principles as geometrization of nature and science, overcoming of the Aristotelian and scholastic gap between physics and mathematics, between the natural and the artificial, between the superlunar and sublunar worlds. Renaissance artists fitted the celestial and the terrestrial into geometric shapes such as pyramids, triangles, etc. The theory and practice of Renaissance painting recognized geometry as a universal law valid both for the superlunar and sublunar worlds. The mathematical principles of nature were developed by Renaissance masters in the form of the theory of perspective and the theory of proportions. It should be noted that the Renaissance mathematical perspective did not derive from comprehending phenomena, but was brought into the real world as a compositional basis. This implies that Renaissance artists started from the a priori assumption of the mathematical order of nature and then tried to confirm this thesis at the visual level through representation of the corporeal world using the mathematical law of perspective and the theory of proportions. Renaissance artists realized that things made with men’s hands and those created by God are to the same extent subject to the same natural laws. The drawings of Leonardo can be interpreted as the visualization of engineering thinking which extends not only to mechanisms but also to natural objects and the human body structure. Leonardo’s anatomical studies can be regarded as engineering drawings which visually demonstrate the structure of the represented object. In this regard, the drawings of Leonardo foreshadowed the formulation of the mechanistic principle which turned to be one of the most important ones in modern European science, and which asserted the absence of a fundamental difference between the natural and the mechanical. The example of Renaissance painting demonstrates that fundamental philosophical conceptions as well as ideological shifts, transition to new fundamental ideas concerning space, time and the place of man in the universe, are simultaneously expressed in more than one way. In particular, they can be represented in visual images, in a sign-and-symbol form, in scientific conceptions, in philosophy, literature and art of a certain period. There are constant exchanges between different cultural practices as, for example, between philosophy, science and art: Communication, exchange of information, translation from a sign and symbol language into a figurative one and vice versa, visualization of non-image information.