Building up the Basics: An Introduction to ArtScience Collaboration

Abstract

In a time of rediscovery of art and cultures of antiquity, artists started out to employ scientific principles and philosophy in order to experiment with daily processes of perception. Artists do not see their roles anymore in the depiction of religious motives, but want to contribute to the exploration of nature or even outplay it with their work. Based in this new self-understanding of art and a process of societal change, a curious scene can be observed: in 1412, the well-known Florentine craftsman Filippo Brunelleschi stands in front of the Florentine Dome looking at the Baptistery through a strange wooden construction, inviting passersby to look through and to see a perspectively correct representation of the Baptistery. In this way, Brunelleschi demonstrates his newly developed method of central perspective to his fellow citizens. He developed this method from his architectural and sketching point of view by investigating geometry and ways of seeing with the goal to create the illusion of depth in paintings. This is the environment where crossing borders between disciplines to create advancement in different fields is rediscovered—and the fruitful environment where the often-cited genius of Leonardo da Vinci is born and where he goes through an apprenticeship as painter, in a world where artists start to cross borders and do not want to be part of this reductionist guild of artisans of highly professions. Openness and observation of the world are important for these artists to create their progressive artworks, which drives them to employ methods from natural sciences like mathematics and investigations into the body as basic fundament of their artistic production. This led not only to artistic development but also to scientific investigations, or to visionary ideas about flying machines, as those demonstrated by Leonardo da Vinci.