Can we believe what we see? How are we to represent the unseen world? Can anything be recorded with true objectivity? These are a few of the questions Martin Kemp asks in Seen/ Unseen, a formidable and wide-ranging disquisition on the overlapping imagery of art and science. Kemp is one of the world’s leading authorities on Leonardo da Vinci, and it is hardly surprising that that Renaissance polymath, with his unfathomable scientific curiosity, is the touchstone of this enterprise. Nor that - in the spirit of Leonardo - Kemp should see more continuities than discontinuities down the centuries in the way we visualise the world, and picture its underlying coherence.
This book is not for the faint-hearted; one wouldn’t imagine that a professor of the history of art at Oxford would venture so fearlessly into the more abstruse realms of higher mathematics and particle physics in pursuit of his inquiry. But what is so stimulating about his text is its refusal to be pigeonholed as “history of art” or “history of science”, as Kemp moves deftly between the two. Central to his argument is the existence of certain shared and recurrent themes, or “structural intuitions”, that reflect the inherent patterns discernible in nature.
Seen/Unseen: Art, Science, and Intuition From Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope by Martin Kemp Oxford University Press ₤25, 368 pages
No comments:
Post a Comment