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Mathematics in the Visual Arts
Series Editor
Marie-Christine Maurel
Mathematics in the
Visual Arts
Edited by
Ruth Scheps
Marie-Christine Maurel
First published 2020 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Ruth SCHEPS and Marie-Christine MAUREL
Chapter 1. Infinity of God and Space of Men in Painting,

Conditions of Possibility for the Scientific Revolution . . . . . . . . . 1
Giuseppe LONGO and Sara LONGO
1.1. A brief introduction to infinity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2. Infinity in painting and the invention of mathematical space. . . . . . . 2
1.3. Geometrical optics and the subject in projective space . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.4. The limit of time, calculus and algebra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.5. Rational spaces: from trade to physics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.6. Setting a priori conditions of representation and knowledge . . . . . . . 20
1.7. Spaces of possibilities for the evolution of life? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.8. Conclusion and opening: heterogeneous spaces
of biological evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Chapter 2. Geometry and the Life of Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Ruth SCHEPS
2.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.2. Taking form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.2.1. Early geometries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.2.2. Geometrizing complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.2.3. Morphogeneses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.3. Art and geometry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.3.1. Geometric art before its time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
vi Mathematics in the Visual Arts
2.3.2. From geometric abstraction to digital art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

2.3.3. Three legatees of geometric art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.4. Beyond geometry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.4.1. Quantic and cosmic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.4.2. Outline and content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.4.3. From form to the sublime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Chapter 3. Among the Trees: Iterating Geneses of Forms,

in Art and Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Giuseppe LONGO and Sara LONGO
Chapter 4. The Passion of Flight: From Leonardo da Vinci

to Jean Letourneur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Bruno CHANETZ
4.1. Introduction: from legend to reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
4.2. Leonardo da Vinci and the basis of the theory of flight . . . . . . . . . . 64
4.2.1. Chief engineer to Francis I of France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
4.2.2. The flying propeller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
4.2.3. Flapping-wing flight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
4.2.4. Why can’t man fly like a bird? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
4.2.5. The basis of Leonardo da Vinci’s theory of flight . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4.3. Pioneers of the air and the first fluid movement visualizations . . . . . 70
4.3.1. Clément Ader (1841–1925), a distant successor
of Leonardo da Vinci, invents the aeroplane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
4.3.2. The oil king presides over the surge in flight. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
4.3.3. From Magnus to Lanchester: the difficult gestation
of the theory of flight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
4.3.4. Gustave Eiffel highlights the suction component of lift force . . . . 72
4.3.5. Étienne-Jules Marey takes the first images of fluid movement . . . 72
4.4. From Henri Werlé to Jean Letourneur, the sculptor
of fluid movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
4.4.1. Henri Werlé or “the Master” of ONERA’s water tunnel . . . . . . . 75
4.4.2. Jean Letourneur, interpreter of snapshots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
4.4.3. As the 21st Century dawns, Jean Letourneur gathers momentum . . 79
4.5. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
4.6. Appendix: additions to the chapter entitled “Why Can’t Man Fly?”,
which refers to the article by Marielle Vergès and Kamil Fadel
(see footnote 15) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Contents vii
Chapter 5. Sculptor of Fluid Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

Jean LETOURNEUR
5.1. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Chapter 6. Internal Geometry of “Salvator Mundi”

(The “Cook Version”, Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci) . . . . . . . . . 103
Jean-Pierre CRETTEZ
6.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
6.2. Distinctive features of the works of Leonardo da Vinci . . . . . . . . . . 104
6.3. Presentation of the Salvator Mundi, Cook version . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
6.4. Investigating the compositional mesh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
6.5. Compositional format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
6.6. Elements of the internal geometry of the Salvator Mundi,
Cook version . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
6.7. A detailed look at the ellipses of the head of the Salvator Mundi . . . . 114
6.8. Visual consonance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
6.9. Properties of the type 1 ellipse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
6.10. Other applications of the type 1 ellipse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
6.11. The decoration of two intersecting bands of the stole . . . . . . . . . . 118
6.12. The internal geometry of the Salvator Mundi (Ganay version) . . . . . 123
6.13. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
6.14. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
Chapter 7. Internal Geometry of a Night Scene by Georges

de La Tour: “The Apparition of the Angel to St. Joseph” . . . . . . . 127
Jean-Pierre CRETTEZ
7.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
7.2. Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
7.3. Distinctive features of the work of Georges de La Tour . . . . . . . . . 129
7.4. Internal geometry of The Appearance of the Angel to St. Joseph . . . . 130
7.5. The search for the compositional mesh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
7.6. Compositional format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
7.6.1. Position of the two protagonists’ heads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
7.7. The compositional architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
7.8. The ellipse of light. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
7.9. Curved or elliptical forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
7.10. Internal geometry of the two protagonists’ heads . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
viii Mathematics in the Visual Arts
7.11. Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

7.12. Compositional construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
7.13. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
7.14. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
Chapter 8. Emergilience, an Art Research Project . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Sophie LAVAUD
8.1. Background of the project Emergilience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
8.1.1. Preamble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
8.1.2. The artistic challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
8.1.3. A little bit of art history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
8.2. Description of the Emergilience project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
8.2.1. A continually developing research in progress. . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
8.2.2. What has already been achieved? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
8.2.3. Future developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
8.3. Let us finish with a conclusion that looks to the future . . . . . . . . . . 171
8.4. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
List of Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Introduction
The presence of mathematics in the arts has been plain since at least
Pythagoras’ time. This applies as much to music (rhythm, scales and chords)
as to all the visual arts, which are addressed in this book. The visual arts are
also related – more and more closely – to other sciences (material, life and
cultural). However, in order to get to the very roots of the connections
between art and science, we felt it appropriate to choose “the queen of
sciences”.
Within the mathematical sciences themselves, geometry, born from the

vision of space (geometry: “measuring the Earth”), is, in this respect, the
first. In the words of Max Bill: “The primary element of any plastic work is
geometry, in terms of relationships between positions in the plane or the
space”1. Confronted with the forms they saw in nature, the early geometrists
tried to understand them by drawing them in an idealized way, that is, by
modeling them. In the artists’ hands, these basic forms became the means of
expression with universal scope.
Before characterizing this unquestionable presence of mathematics in the

works of art in more detail, we should first note that mathematics, by its very
nature, has a tendency towards plastic representations: mathematical objects,
created for the purpose of translating scientific abstractions into visual terms.
Introduction written by Ruth SCHEPS and Marie-Christine MAUREL.

1 Bill, M. (1949). The mathematical way of thinking in the visual art of our time. Werk, 3.
x Mathematics in the Visual Arts
Visual artists of modernity have often taken their inspiration from

mathematical models, as if to delegate to them the task of speaking the
unspeakable of art. Think of M.C. Escher, who exploited the riches of tiles
from the hyperbolic plane, or Salvador Dali, who represented the crucified
Jesus on a hypercube2, or the constructivist sculptors Henry Moore, Naum
Gabo and Barbara Hepworth.
A certain parallelism between mathematical and artistic approaches has

often been argued – and equally often rebutted. Let us therefore say at the
outset what, in our view, should be excluded, and that is the quest for beauty
for its own sake. If mathematics happens to be “beautiful”, this is actually a
consequence of its elegance, in other words, its simplicity. As for art, it
renounced beauty as a determining criterion long ago.
What seems of greater interest in this respect is the search for truth. This
is, without question, the ambition of mathematics, which is wholly intellectual in
nature and based on axioms that are posited as true or on accepted assumptions.
This ambition is more intuitive in art: in a picture, truth is not expressed
in a “thinking way”; it can be simultaneously striking and inaccessible.
The best established point of convergence between the artistic and

mathematical approaches (as with other sciences) is that they turn the subject,
whatever it may be, into a heuristic form; that is, they make it thought-
provoking. Moving away from a materialistic concept of painting, can
mathematics help us to discover the “spiritual software” of a work of art?
Let us turn to the contemporary aspects of the “marriage” between

mathematics and the visual arts.
Since the emergence of non-Euclidean geometries and new branches of

physics (quantum and relativistic) that point to the importance of chance, or
even uncertainty, in the material world, we have seen a gradual erasure of
the boundaries between the logical understanding of phenomena and the
intuitive approach. Max Bill’s Mathematical Art represents a culmination of
this convergence.
In the wake of conceptual art, digital art has driven the dematerialization
of artwork still further. Now that a painting is nothing but a signal, devoid of
2 Dali, S., Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), oil on canvas, 194.3 x 123.8 cm, 1954. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Introduction xi
any meaning of its own, the work’s significance has shifted upstream, in
other words, to its production processes, the algorithms or the thought
processes that generated it.
But there is more: having gradually freed itself from the material (in
favor of light, or other forms of energy or information and communication),
the work of art tends nowadays to emancipate itself from its creator, with
their assent, and win its autonomy. Randomness thus plays a role, not only in
the decision-making processes of the artist, but within the work itself. Art
appears to have accepted its own artificialization. It remains to be seen
whether this will lead to its disappearance as a human construct, or to its
reconfiguration as total artificial art.
Taking note of the fact that geometry, in all its forms, is the mathematical
discipline that has contributed most to the visual arts, this book sets out to
show the fruitfulness of their relationships throughout all eras.
Giuseppe Longo and Sara Longo, in their article “Infinity of God and
Space of Men in Painting”, evoke the contribution of the geometric
perspective to Renaissance painting. From the mid-14th Century, armed with
this new tool, artist-theologians were able to organize the space of men and
symbolize their finitude, in the face of God’s infinite act.
Another contribution of geometry to painting is highlighted by Jean-

Pierre Crettez in his two articles on “internal geometry” – a concept created
by the author to show how classical painters such as Leonardo da Vinci and
Georges de La Tour used geometry (invisible but revealed through its
structural mesh) to ensure the coherence and harmony of their pictorial
space.
Since the early 20th Century, geometry has had a plurality of forms: non-
Euclidean geometry, catastrophe theory, algorithmic geometry, fractal
theory, etc. In her article “Geometry and the Life of Forms”, Ruth Scheps
explains how these various geometric currents have inspired geometric
abstract artists – from suprematism to digital art, via optical art, kinetic art,
conceptual art and minimalism.
A special case of artistic inspiration, derived from geometric and natural

forms, is provided by Giuseppe Longo and Sara Longo in their article
“Among the Trees: Iterating Geneses of Forms, in Art and Nature”, which
xii Mathematics in the Visual Arts
presents the fractal geometric structure as a source of inspiration for the

“Komorebi” project (an untranslatable Japanese word that refers to the effect
of sunlight through the foliage).
At the interface of art and science, or belonging to both, scientific

drawings and photography have also given rise to artistic works, as illustrated
by the article by Bruno Chanetz, “The Passion of Flight: from Leonardo da
Vinci to Jean Letourneur”, and by Jean Letourneur himself, “Sculptor of
Fluid Movement”, whose drawings and sculptures draw their inspiration
from visualizations created by an engineer at ONERA.
Finally, the most contemporary tools for experimental visual art are, no
doubt, provided by advances in computer modeling and simulation. Sophie
Lavaud, in her article “Emergilience, an Art Research Project”, explains her
project: exploring the conditions necessary for the emergence, through
self-organization, of “infinite dynamic picture-systems” composed of
collective and global shapes and phenomena.
1
Infinity of God and Space of Men in

Painting, Conditions of Possibility
for the Scientific Revolution1
1.1. A brief introduction to infinity
There is no space in Greek geometry. By drawing lines, using a ruler and

a compass as we would say today, measurements are made and figures are
constructed, with no mathematical “infinite container” – a plane or a space –
“behind” them. Symmetries – rotations and translations – provide proof in
the finite. And potential infinity (apeiron, without limit, without bounds) is
constructed by using extensions and iterations: a segment can be extended
with no finite limit in a straight line (the second axiom), eis apeiron. If we
take a set of prime numbers, we can construct a new prime which is greater
than each of the elements in that set (Euclid’s theorem on the infinitude of
primes). An extension and an endless iteration of the finite, from the act of
drawing a line to the construction of integers. Time is infinite in this sense,
never present in its entirety in our minds. Infinity is not beyond that in which
there is nothing, Aristotle tells us in his Physics, that in the beyond there is
always something. It is a becoming, a potentiality.
Chapter written by Giuseppe LONGO and Sara LONGO.

1 This chapter is a significantly expanded and revised version of an article published in ISTE
OpenScience, ISTE Ltd, London, 2019, and, in a very early form, in French in Le formalisme
en action : aspects mathématiques et philosophiques, J. Benoist and T. Paul (eds), Hermann,
Paris, 2013.
Mathematics in the Visual Arts,

First Edition. Edited by Ruth Scheps and Marie-Christine Maurel.
© ISTE Ltd 2020. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
2 Mathematics in the Visual Arts
Paolo Zellini2 explains that the Aristotelian distinction between this

mathematical infinity, which must be constructed step by step, potential, and
the infinity which is “already” there, in actuality, and is all-encompassing,
was to resurface in medieval metaphysical debate. God is an all-enveloping,
all-inclusive infinity, beyond which nothing is a given. However, this
concept of actual infinity is not an easy matter. For Aristotelians, it was
embodied in negation, as in Aristotle, and God cannot have a negative
attribute. However, St. Thomas convinced people by excluding the existence
of this kind of infinity in actuality, except as an attribute of God and God
alone. And this concept of actual infinity was to grow in strength and acquire
a positive identity in people’s minds. This reached the point where, in 1277,
the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Templier, decreed that actual infinity was a
positive attribute of God and His Creation. God, when He so wishes,
introduces actual infinity into the world; for example, by bestowing Full and
Infinite Grace upon a finite being, a woman, Mary – and for those who
disagreed, burning at stake awaited. There is no doubt that this
uncompromising “axiomatic posture” helped stabilize the concept of actual
infinity.
Zellini quite rightly stressed the significance of this debate for the birth of
a cosmology of infinity, that was to find fulfillment, first mystical and then
scientific, in the infinite Universe and “gli infiniti mondi” of Nicolas of Cusa
(1401–1464) and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600).
1.2. Infinity in painting and the invention of mathematical space
The concept of actual infinity was clarified in a metaphysical debate,

circumscribing infinity as a single “entity” and forcing the mind to envisage
it in its totality. How would the “entity” pass into mathematics, where it will
be turned into a specific object of discourse, and indeed an element of proof?
The transition came about through the invention of perspective

(prospettiva) in Italian Renaissance painting3.
2 Zellini, P. (2005). A Brief History of Infinity. Penguin, New York (in Italian: Adelphi,
Roma, 1980).
3 At the time there was intense debate in Italy over what name should be given to this new
technique: perspettiva, “seeing through”, which was to pass into other languages, or, more
accurately, the choice of a viewpoint, a prospettiva, as we will see.
Infinity of God and Space of Men in Painting 3
The problem of depicting the scenes where narrative figures were to be

placed became a central issue for painters from the late 13th Century
onwards. Giottesque “boxes” (dolls’ houses with one wall missing, exposed
to the viewer) are scenes whose purpose is to contain the historia and to
render its theological teachings intelligible. In a contiguous arrangement, the
spatial scenes (boxes, landscape, hills) punctuate the narrative – we will
come back to this later.
Figure 1.1. Giotto di Bondone, Life of St. Francis,

fresco, around 1290. Assisi, Basilica of St. Francis
The geometrical perspective which Filippo Brunelleschi experimented

with in 1417, and which was defined in 1435 by Leon Battista Alberti, is a
revolution: not only does it construct a single compositional space
(and thus, with a few rare exceptions, a unified narrative) but, above all, it is
the result of a construction where man is the source of every measurement
(see Alberti, De Pictura, I, 19) and where actual infinity, the point of
convergence of the orthogonal lines at the bottom of the painting, is
contained, enclosed within the representational framework. Since the second
half of the last century, in response to Erwin Panofsky’s inaugural article
(Perspective as Symbolic Form, 1925), art historians including Pierre
Francastel, Hubert Damisch and Louis Marin from the École des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, have highlighted the importance of
this pictorial revolution.
According to Erwin Panofsky’s foundational essay, published in

Germany in 1927 but translated into English in 1991, the representation of a
space by the geometry of orthogonal lines has led to the development of “the
concept of an infinity, an infinity not only prefigured in God, but indeed
actually embodied in empirical reality”4. Erwin Panofsky noted that
Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Annunciation (below), painted a century before
Alberti formulated his theory, is the first geometrical construction where the
receding lines converge not towards a single point but towards a single
vertical axis (in the picture plane, the column separating Gabriel from Mary).
Daniel Arasse went further, extending this insight to the quite remarkable
upsurge in complex geometric constructions, in scenes of the Annunciation
to Mary.
His argument is very relevant to our discussion topic: the special affinity
that existed in the 15th Century between Annunciation and perspective is
due to the fact that in Christian history, the moment at which the infinite
enters into the finite is the moment when the son of God miraculously
appears in human flesh, through the meeting of God and the Madonna, full
of Grace. Daniel Arasse discusses this idea by highlighting what he calls a
“theological-pictorial” problem, which toys with the effects and the
effectiveness of images: with a back and forth between depth and surface,
the paradoxes internal to the spatial structures of certain Annunciations
demonstrate the impossibility of depicting God within the space of human
geometry. This research in painting could be closely linked to a conception
of the divine that is not excluded, as Panofsky said, but present in the
picture.
To support his argument, Arasse makes particular reference to a sermon

delivered by St. Bernardine of Siena in 1427: the Annunciation is the
moment when “immensity comes into measure […], the unfigurable into
figure, the uncircumscribable into place, the invisible into vision […],
length into brevity, width into narrowness, height into lowness”5 … all these
conceptual paradoxes have given rise to spatial paradoxes from painters.
Daniel Arasse also highlights how the most ingenious perspectivists enjoy
toying with the rules of geometric perspective in order to show the paradox
of the infinite entering into the finite.
4 Panofsky, E. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Zone Books, New York, p. 65.

5 St. Bernardine of Siena (1745). De triplici Christi nativitate. In Opera Omnia, Venice, IV,
p. 3, cited in San Bernardino de Siena, Pagine Scelte, Milan, 1950, p. 54.
Figure 1.2. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Annunciation, tempera

on wood, Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, 1344
In this Annunciation, there is a column, often a symbol of Christ, very

substantial at floor level and becoming fainter towards the top where it
overlays and obscures the receding axis, which we could say, at infinity, is
an explicit reference to God. Here, in 1344, we have an extraordinary
innovation: a rigorously drawn projective space. And then, through the effect
of the geometry of the floor that goes from (wo)man to God, a new scene
unfolds: God has His place here, hidden, far away at infinity, but present in
the story that is being told. The Madonna, too, has a new human depth: her
solid, three-dimensional body ushers in the expression of an emerging
humanism. Perspective introduces God as the actual limit, at infinity, thus
as the limit of a space that everything encompasses, including human spaces
that replenish themselves. The very first pictures painted in prospettiva
were annunciations, unique scenes where infinite meets finite6. Then, with
6 Longo, S. (2013). “L’Annonciation en Italie. Enjeux méthodologiques et historiographiques,

autour du colloque florentin de 1986”, “‘La perspective de l’Annonciation’, présentation d’une
étude de Daniel Arasse” and “L’intervalle sacré”. In Studiolo, revue de l’Académie de France
à Rome, X, pp. 24–32 and pp. 75–93.
Piero della Francesca, this metaphysical dissertation in paint went on to also

become a technique, without necessarily losing its religious essence. Piero’s
book De Prospectiva Pingendi (1475) is actually a treatise on “practical”
projective geometry, and was the most significant mathematical text of his
time, as Vasari wrote.
Hence, prospettiva allows the painter to arrange the space of men and
objects and to choose a viewpoint. The choice of where to place a vanishing
point determines the spectator’s viewpoint; it proposes/imposes a line of
sight – for instance, viewing, humbly from below, Antonello da Messina’s
Saint Sebastian the Martyr (1476).
Figure 1.3. Antonello da Messina, St. Sebastian, tempera on wood

transposed onto canvas, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie, 1476
And now this metaphysical and religious cosmology became a geometry

of space: God, the stars and men found a new place in it, arranged in a
unifying and changeable viewpoint. We have come a long way from the
absolutes outside of space and the world of Byzantine mosaics, if we think
back to Ravenna. This (re)arrangement of space, this new skill of choosing a
viewpoint, this technology that soon spread across Europe, helped
Copernicus (1473–1543) to “see” the solar system from “the Sun’s
viewpoint”, the new prospettiva of modern science7.
In fact, the Renaissance invention of perspective involved the

simultaneous invention of an explicit spatial structure, a viewpoint, and even
a “Copernican revolution” of this new and relativizing point, which we will
come back to in the sciences. It was the consequence of a diametrical
change: the viewer is no longer obliged to move in accordance with a system
of contiguously arranged scenes, he is the fixed point from which a
continuous narrative starts out. This change is very significant, because it
puts man in a different position in the space of action, or even in the
Universe: Aristotelian physical space is the sum total of different scenes, it
has no overall structure and gives form to a pictorial space, conceived as the
sum of the scenes of the historia. The ultimate expression of this idea was
the spatial boxes of Giotto, as we have mentioned, and his fellow artists of
the Trecento: “little houses”, or rooms, are inhabited by protagonists in
various different, and often independent, narratives. The monofocal
construction, theorized by Alberti in 1435, 90 years after Lorenzetti’s early
experiments, radically changed this method. Turning pictorial space into one
unified body, albeit articulated into scenes (its limbs), gave this space the
specific feature of being constructed from a single mathematical point,
proposed by the painter, which also identifies the eye of the motionless
viewer, in relation to whom everything is arranged.
The idea of a chosen, unique, immobile viewpoint was a theoretical leap,

an epistemological mutation8. Painting thinks of the picture’s hitherto closed
space, as being open to the narrative “almost to infinity”9. As we have been
7 This refers to a comment made in van Frassen, B.C. (1970). An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Space and Time. Random House, New York.
8 Michael Baxandall made a very subtle connection between Alberti’s conception of painting
and the oratorical art of rhetoric. See Baxandall, M. (1971). Giotto and the orators, 1340-
1450. Clarendon Press.
9 Alberti, L.B. On Painting, I, 19.
taught by Hubert Damisch and Daniel Arasse, among others, paintings think.
Linear perspective, which is Alberti’s costruzione leggittima, is a
geometrical abstraction that unifies the scenes of the narrative and, as such,
constitutes a theoretical break with earlier techniques. And so, we have
mathematical space.
1.3. Geometrical optics and the subject in projective space
Painters and scientists of the 15th Century seem to have been familiar
with geometrical optics, invented by Euclid and developed by the major
Arabic-language schools of algebra and geometry. Some authors compare
the references Alberti makes to the “old school”, who made a careful study
of reflections on surfaces and the convergences of rays of light10. This was of
course an analysis of lines in the finite, sometimes extended “eis apeiron”,
without limit, as in Euclid, thus potentially towards infinity. For instance, in
the calculation of angles subtending an object that is moving away from the
eye. Ibn al-Haytham (Egypt, 11th Century) was one of the great masters of
these calculations. But actual infinity, a difficult metaphysical judgment, was
not to be found here, this projective point is at the asymptotic limit which
structures space and strength and imposes a viewpoint for every observer.
Geometrical optics, however, played a massive part in the work of

painters from the 15th Century onwards; it introduced a new geometric rigor
and augmented the figurative repertoire so as to better represent distance and
arrange figures in projective space. But it was not at the origin of the
metaphysical turning point, a century earlier, that led to the pictorial
invention of space that is being discussed here.
On the subject of this new technical rigor, in a rarely cited article, Daniel
Arasse takes the example of Brunelleschi’s tavoletta, regarded as the first
example of rigorous geometry in the prospettiva construction: he describes
the actions of the Florentine engineer/architect when verifying his
perspective representation of the Baptistry and suggests to the reader that the
verification process, as written by Antonio Manetti in his biography of
Brunelleschi, could be reversed.
10 Simon, G. (2001). Optique et perspective: Ptolemy, Alhazen, Alberti. Revue d’histoire des
sciences, 54(3)325–350.
Brunelleschi drew the Baptistry as seen from the entrance to Santa Maria
del Fiore. He then made a hole on a level with a vanishing point and turned
the tablet with the drawing on back to front. He placed his eye opposite the
hole and looked at the real-life Baptistry. Then, he raised a mirror to the
level of the drawing and looked at the reflection; by lowering the mirror and
raising it again, he verified the conformity between what he saw before him
and the lines of his drawing11.
Figure 1.4. Brunelleschi’s experiment with linear perspective,

looking through the tablet and mirror
Daniel Arasse imagines the subject by first looking at himself in the

mirror, then raising his arm with the back-to-front tavoletta between himself
and the mirror, and placing one eye to the hole pierced in the tablet, to see
the drawing. The reflection of the man looking at himself is hidden by the
reflection of the Baptistry, and then, when lowering the mirror, by the sight
of the real-life building. “… The theoretical model of painting perspective
consists in hiding the image of myself in the mirror, substituting it with the
image of all that is visible”12.
This notion of reversing the steps when carrying out a verification process
elevated by art history to the status of cognitive paradigm, leads us to
11 Manetti, A. (1887). Opere Historiche. G. Milanesi, Florence, pp. 83–85.

12 Arasse, D. (1983). La peinture de la Renaissance italienne et les perspectives du Moi. In
Image et signification. La Documentation française, Paris, p. 237.
compare the story of Brunelleschi’s verification to the other founding myth

of painting, the myth of Narcissus, whose face is annihilated in the spring.
But in our case, the subject comes back. As the viewpoint is always chosen
by the painter, the choice of where to place the horizon is recommended as
the first thing to decide, by Alberti. Thus, from the 1450s onwards, a horizon
placed especially low or high reflects a precise awareness of the presence of
a viewer, who will be struck by the effect of having a bird’s eye view or a
worm’s eye view. In choosing the point of projection, the supposed position
of the viewer determines the painting space. “What is of particular note
there, is that the image does not exist without the person who created it”13.
The modern notion of subject, painter, viewer, has been invented14.
These inventions can also be found under the brush of the other great
“perspecteur”, Andrea Mantegna, this time in a painting of a corpse. Not just
any corpse, but that of the Redeemer, immediately after being taken down
from the Cross, and not in his grave but on a marble surface. Through a
sublime perspective foreshortening, we are placed right beside the feet of
Christ and we look at Him not da sotto in su, but from feet to head.
Mantegna’s choice was bold, to the point where the Dead Christ is
traditionally considered as the artistic legacy of the Paduan.
For a fuller understanding of the picture, let us start by looking at the

studies. Among pictures recently attributed to Mantegna and published, we
can see the research of a perspecteur, with a fondness for foreshortened
corporeal representations, as in the preliminary drawings for the Dead
Christ: the drawing is a study of Christ’s body seen from the feet and then
from the head, but always at a slight angle to the plane of representation, and
not at 90 degrees, as in the final painting.
During the same years, Paolo Uccello used the same technique. When his
wife used to call for him at night, Vasari tells us, Paolo would join her in bed
murmuring: “Oh! this perspective is such a lovely thing!” … The elongated
bodies in the Battle of San Romano give the battleground all its depth.
13 Arasse, D., La peinture de la Renaissance italienne et les perspectives du Moi. op. cit.,
p. 238.
14 Longo, S. (2014). Voir et savoirs dans la théorie de l’art de Daniel Arasse. PhD Thesis in
Art History, to appear, Éditions de la Sorbonne, Paris, 2021.
Figure 1.5. Andrea Mantegna, Study for the Dead Christ, pen
and brown wash on paper, 1460–1465. Milan, private collection
Figure 1.6. Paolo Uccello, Battle of San Romano, detail,

1456, tempera on wood. London, National Gallery
But the invention we noted in the Dead Christ is unique: the viewpoint
chosen is that of the penitent, the faithful worshipper bending over the
stigmata – perhaps the viewpoint of Mary Magdalene. Her vial of ointment
is placed on the marble near Christ’s head.
Figure 1.7. Andrea Mantegna, The Dead Christ, tempera

on canvas, Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, 1490
The head is resting on a cushion, also in light pink marble, so as to not

detract from the mineral chromaticism of the whole of the painting (body,
sheet and bed, everything is in stone). On the left, three figures mourn the
corpse. At the bottom is where we are. We look at this body, and the painter
has taken great care to show all of it: the soles of the feet and the backs of
the hands torn by the nails, the lateral malleoli and the fibula and then, on the
torso, the navel, the stigmata on the right side and the chest. Finally, on the
face, the chin, mouth, nose, eyes, eyebrows, forehead and hair, everything is
perfectly visible and identifiable.
A rigorous geometric perspective foreshortening, derived from a simple

calculation from a viewpoint, would have never permitted that. The forehead
would have been hidden by the nose, the nose by the chin, the torso by the
stomach, and above all, the feet would have been immensely bigger. The
linearity of the perspective and the geometrical optics are deliberately
overridden by the painter’s decision. We can say, to put it positively, that the
viewpoint is not exactly level with the feet, that we are slightly elevated and
that the head of Christ is also raised, on the marble cushion. However, the
impression of foreshortening is certainly there, we are at Christ’s feet, but our
worship extends to his whole body, hence it is the whole body that the artist
must make visible. There is no realism in this, as confirmed by the arms,
which are connected to the upper body by strange and impossible muscles
starting from beneath the chest. Anatomically, the body is monstrous;
pictorially, it is perfect in its “monstration”. In brief, perspective, in appearance
and in principle, is so rigorous, is in no way absolute, and is less objective. It is
a relative through which the observing subject fashions the form.
A final example, another Annunciation, painted by Piero della Francesca

around 1470, for the Tertiary Sisters of the Order of St. Anthony of Perugia.
Figure 1.8. Piero della Francesca, Polyptych of Perugia,

1470, Perugia, National Gallery of Umbria
Figure 1.9. Polyptych of Perugia, upper register (see Figure 1.8)
The Annunciation that decorates the cyma of this large altarpiece is

painted in a space that is not closed by the frame. Perspective makes it
possible for Piero to give the illusion that what we see, which is cut into by
the imposing stepped frame, is only one part of a much larger space, that of a
cloister. Unlike in the middle register, where the golden background gives
spatial unity but little depth, and in the lower register, a traditional predella
where each scénette has its own closed, unified perspectival narrative space,
the upper register shows an infinitely large space, to the sides (each
architectural element exceeds the frame) and also in depth (the succession of
columns is impressive). Gabriel is kneeling before Mary, looking up at her.
Mary has her hands crossed and her head slightly bowed in a sign of
acceptance. She is not in front of the architecture, as Gabriel is, but under a
protrusion from the building. The reader should observe the clusters of
columns to the right and left of the figure of Mary: they are the only
elements of the painting placed in the foreground. The Virgin is directly
opposite Gabriel, at the same distance from us, as we can see from their feet
being on the same white strip of paving, behind the plinths. What is the
visual effect of this arrangement of the figures in the architecture?
Figure 1.10. De Martone, art. cit.
Less than half a century ago, art historians with a special interest in
perspective noted a paradox within the great geometric complexity of this
painting. From Gabriel’s viewpoint, Mary is invisible. She is hidden by the
second cluster of columns that is not visible to us, as viewers, because we

are at almost 90 degrees to the row … but this cluster must be there, since
opposite Mary, up above, two arches can be clearly distinguished. Thus, she
is bowing her head to the columns, not to Gabriel. Thomas Martone, who
raised and discussed this contrivance, used the wonderful expression
“trompe-l’intelligence”15. Piero della Francesca, artist–geometrist par
excellence, toys with the paradoxes arising out of a dual viewpoint, ours and
that of the angel, not to trick our eye, but to trick our mind.
We, the faithful in prayer, see Gabriel and Mary face to face and we
contemplate their dialogue, their spiritual exchange, which become our
prayers, our faith. We have to believe that they see each other in order to
speak to each other. But geometrically, rationally, Piero tells us (in secret)
the pair cannot see each other, because they see each other in their minds,
their dialogue is mute and blind. Theologically, between them there is the
divine, the miracle in all its invisibility which is not explicable rationally,
much less geometrically, but is made possible by the subtlety of the
geometric arrangement of space. Because painting, in the Quattrocento, was
not conceived as a simple reproduction of “everything seen under the sun”,
whose “purpose is to please” (Poussin, 1665, letter to his friend Frédéric de
Chambray). It is also the stuff of the invisible, of faith in a mystery that lines
and colors are not there to explain but, through interplays of visibility, to
show that there are mysteries16. The paradox emerges from applying
geometry so rigorously to make it possible to place the protagonists in a
situation chosen theologically, and to do this in a way far removed from
naïve realism. Driven by this paradox, the viewer has a dual role, visual and
spiritual; geometric objectivity is employed in the glances between the
protagonists, in the viewpoints, in what is shown to the viewer and what is
hidden17.
15 Martone, T. (1985). Piero della Francesca e la prospettiva dell’intelletto. In Piero teorico

dell’arte. Gangemi, pp. 173–185. See also Jean Petitot, Morphologie et Esthétique,
Maisonneuve et Larose, Paris, 2004, pp. 75–84.
16 On the issue of mysteries made visible and hidden, see the comments by Marin, L. (1989).
Opacité de la peinture : essais sur la représentation au Quattrocento. Usher, Paris.
17 We might here go back to Van Frassen’s comment about Copernicus in the previous note:
taking the Sun’s perspective to observe the solar system and the game of hide and seek of the
planets and their satellites is not “realistic”; more deeply, it is the invention of a scientific
perspective.
This interplay between relative and objective, anchored in the

relationship with the space of the observing/knowing subject, in making a
subjective viewpoint explicit, in order for objectivity to be constructed, was
to be at the heart of modern science through to the present day, as we will try
to show. The pictorial form of the infinite in actuality, contributed to the
invention of this space and of the scientific notion. Let us now explore
various articulations, mathematical and practical, of this infinity and these
spaces.
1.4. The limit of time, calculus and algebra
First, let us come back to the issue of infinity. Ever since Aristotle, time
has been regarded as a paradigmatic potential infinity, because it is never
present in its entirety in our minds. What “temporal” meaning could its
projective limit have18? On the other hand, it is interesting to see, in
mathematics, the appearance of an early symbolic expression of actual
infinity, founded in religious debate, which came about via painting –
explicitly mathematized painting, notably by Piero della Francesca, who as
we have mentioned, was an artist and a geometrist. This makes sense when
we consider that the conceptual construction and geometry of an infinite
space is not necessarily based on an actual infinite: Descartes’ space can
very well be conceived as a potential infinite, an endless extension from its
point of origin. The actual infinite, however, is inherent in projective
construction, especially when it is employed for the two-dimensional
representation of a three-dimensional space. And vanishing point objectifies
the actual infinite, by showing it, at the back of the painting. In short, in the
Renaissance, as a result of the central role of painting in the arts and the
construction of knowledge (think of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings) –
including theological knowledge – three-dimensional space was conceived
mathematically, drawing it first; to make it intelligible (visible) on a plane, it
was therefore necessary to project it, thus showing a (symbolic) form of this
18 In an attempt to make relativity consistent with the Big Bang theory, some physicists
conceive the origin of time as an asymptotic inverse limit, that is, the inverse of the temporal
order created by the expansion of the universe. In fact, Noether’s theorems (energy
conservation as the invariant of the equations of motion through temporal translations) are at
the heart of the relativistic turning point and are incompatible with an origin of time; see
Bailly, F. and Longo, G. (2011). Mathematics and Natural Sciences: The Physical Singularity
of Life. Imperial College Press, London (translation and revision of the book for Hermann,
Paris, 2006).
infinity of God, in actuality, that was so clearly defined by the Christian

philosophers of the Middle Ages.
Two centuries later, Desargues made this projective synthesis between

infinity and geometry fully mathematical. In mathematical analysis, Newton
and Leibniz proposed the concepts of derivative and integral as operations
with infinite limit, at the heart of differential calculus. In the 19th Century,
Cantor subsequently objectified actual infinity, through a syntax, associating
it to a new, and this time scriptural, symbol, ω. By algebraic manipulations,
he generated from that symbol an infinity of infinites, ω+1, ω+2 … and
2 3 ω
invented an arithmetic of infinites, ω+ω, … ωxω = ω , ω , … ω …, the
transfinite ordinals. Nothing stabilizes a concept better than a mathematical
praxis, the technical use of a sign for the concept, whose meaning will be
enriched by this very usage. The debate on the infinity of God also interested
Cantor, a deeply religious man: God is (at) the limit of all these limits,
beyond transfinites19.
It should be noted that, in all these cases, mathematical infinity gives us a

tool for the intelligibility of the world. In Renaissance painting, projective
geometry, this theological decision and this asymptotic gesture, to infinity,
arranges man’s space for a fuller humanity, in its finitude. Likewise, from
the spaces of Descartes and Desargues, to the actual infinity of Newton and
Leibniz, mathematical physics gave intelligibility to movement in the finite,
around us, through the infinites of infinitesimal calculus. In logic, ever since
Gentzen (1935), the ordinal analysis of proof has been based on Cantor’s
arithmetic of infinites20. Moreover, Galileo had already explained to
Simplicius, in the analysis of a mathematical sphere resting on a plane by a
single point (nonsense, said Simplicius), that mathematics is a science with
infinite limit21. The finite makes a fetish of iteration and has become its
prisoner22. The finitist-formalist, who rejects infinity, declaring it to be
19 Charaud, N. (2019). Georg Cantor, Infini et inconscient, Spartacus IDH [Online].

Available: https://spartacus-idh.com/collections/nouvelles-visions-des-sciences.html#.
20 In fact, infinity comes into proof as an infinity between algebra and geometry, that of the
“orderliness” of integers, Longo, G. (2011). Reflections on Concrete Incompleteness,
Philosophia Mathematica, 19(3), 255–280 (articles (co-)authored by G. Longo can be
downloaded at https://www.di.ens.fr/users/longo/download.html).
21 A story that is a starting point for Gargani, A. (1975). It senza sapere Fondamenti.
Einaudi, Turin.
22 Châtelet, G. (1993). Les enjeux du mobile. Seuil, Paris.
outside the world and outside of physics, does not grasp the human meaning,
for our designs and our praxes of intelligence, and this act of placing the
infinite inside the world, while organizing this same world through language,
geometry and writing, including asymptotic gestures.
An epistemology of this organizational concept can only be historical: a

history of ideas and constitutive praxes, a critical history, to be kept under
constant review.
1.5. Rational spaces: from trade to physics
Thus, the birth of modern science came about through the construction of
an infinite space of possibilities, a space and a time of every possible
phenomenon and all possible physical dynamics. The choice of origin of
Cartesian coordinates provides the frame of reference in which all possible
trajectories can be described and in which physics can be constructed, after
Galileo. In fact, Descartes’ analytical approach posits the origin and
measurement of space and gives it a prospettiva, from which we are able to
set the upper and lower bounds and understand the world. As an invariant of
diverse mathematical representations, this space of all curves, of all
trajectories, is doubtlessly made possible by a plurality of acts of experience.
Therefore, in the 16th Century, the mapping of new geographic explorations,
joint to the Arabic optic23, contributed to a greater clarification of the
geometric perspective, as a new framework for the world. In particular,
Francesco Maurolico (1494–1575) developed a remarkable synthesis of the
ideas of Islam’s great mathematicians and algebraists, one aspect of the
fertile marriage of Western and Eastern traditions in mathematics24.
In this context, the rich, innovative Galilean relationship between

experiment and theory, and physical theorizing itself, is intended to render
23 Kheirandish, E. (1998). The Manāẓir Tradition through Persian Sources. Les sciences dans le
monde iranien, Vesel, Ž. et al. (eds). Tehran, repr. 2004, pp. 125–45. Kheirandish, E. (ed. and tr.)
(1999). The Arabic Version of Euclid’s Optics: Kitāb Uqlīdis fī ikhtilāf al-manāẓir, 2 vol., New
York.
24 Islami. A. and Longo, G. (2017). Marriages of Mathematics and Physics: A challenge for
Biology. In The Necessary Western Conjunction to the Eastern Philosophy of Exploring the
Nature of Mind and Life, K. Matsuno et al. (eds). Special Issue, Progress in Biophysics and
Molecular Biology, Vol. 131, pp. 179–192.
phenomena intelligible and predictable: first we observe, we take

measurements, and then the theory should generate a prediction to be
verified. Scientific, or actually mathematical, forecasting of the future is thus
placed at the center of the intelligibility of the world proposed by modern
science. And this prediction is made in the space and time of physical events,
described mathematically by Cartesian analytical representation, enriched by
what we can call “Galilean relativity”: the modern space-time of physical
phenomena was born out of an analysis of the transformation from a
(Cartesian) frame of reference, one viewpoint, to another, while still
preserving the laws of physics. More specifically, in the infinite space-time
of possible trajectories, given a priori, invariants are described in terms of
symmetries – the Galilean group of transformations between frames of
reference in relative uniform-rectilinear (inertial) motion. This then is the
objectivity of scientific law given by the relativity of frames of reference, the
possible transformations from one into another: the relative makes the
objective possible, as invariant under transformations of reference systems.
It is however the subject who chooses these frames of reference, takes his
place within them and settles on one viewpoint out of others, as did the
painter, in positing the viewpoint for the viewer. The scientific certainty of
the law (an invariant) thus allows prediction, calculation, and proves the
theory.
We should however contextualize the shift towards the myth of rational

prediction of a scientifically predictable future in the space of possibilities,
as having likewise occurred in the early Italian Renaissance. The audacity of
obtaining an insight into the future by rational means, within a given space
of possibilities, can be traced back to the appreciation of progress and the
ability to assess it quantitatively, in Italy in the 14th and 15th Centuries. That
was when the artisan technologies and large production facilities
(the “arsenale di Venezia” which Galileo mentions) began to change the
relationship with work and with the transformation of nature herself25. And
that was also when we invented bank loans, in the same era as Lorenzetti’s
painting, also in Tuscany26. After that, mathematics played a massive part in
this progress: Luca Pacioli (1445–1517), in particular, with his Summa de
Arithmetica, Geometria and other writings, greatly developed the arithmetic
25 Rossi, P. (1962). I filosofi e le macchine. Feltrinelli. (ristampa, 2002).

26 The loan from the Bardi and Peruzzi Bank to Edward III, King of England, dated 1332. It
was never repaid – as all Italian students and our colleague Alberto Peruzzi in Florence know
perfectly well.
of Fibonacci da Pisa (1170–1250) and invented the “partita doppia”, a

fundamental tool for finance and trade.
In short, in Italy, towards the middle of the 14th Century, money-lending

became permissible, particularly in the form of “letters of credit” or paper
money. Since it was no longer a sin, it was possible to bet on future progress,
to obtain money from a bank, then to invest and to forecast the return of the
money invested with calculable interest, and thus to make personal gains,
which was revolutionary both economically and conceptually. There was no
longer any need for magic or divination in forecasting progress and in the
ability to predict the future; rather it was a case of rational, or mathematical,
knowledge. Of course, unknowns were possible, but within a pre-defined
space of possibilities: in the same way as when you roll a dice, you take a
chance, but out of six possible outcomes, no more and no fewer – and the
symmetries of the dice give us the probabilities. Expectations and wagers are
rational: we can assess the risk, in a pre-set space of finance, Pacioli, or a set
of dice (G. Cardano, Liber de Ludo Alea, 1560; G. Galilee, Sopra le scoperte
dei Dadi, 1612).
Hence the society of forecasting future progress from a predetermined list

of possible dynamics was born. A society in which we can take the risk of
borrowing and lending money and constructing scientific knowledge within
a mathematically predetermined, albeit infinite, space of future trajectories; a
science where it is possible to predict, by using a scientific theory, the result
of an experiment or an economic or commercial activity. Painting, as we
have seen, made these spaces of human action geometrically possible by a
vertiginous cross-contamination with the infinity of God. And scientific
objectivity has been achieved through making the relativity of the viewpoint
explicit, highlighting the role of the subject who observes, this viewer is not
neutral in his relationship to space, to the point of being able to “force” how
to see, beyond or even against the linearity of the costruzione leggittima, as
with a great master of perspective, Mantegna.
1.6. Setting a priori conditions of representation and knowledge
The revolution inspired by the pictorial use of perspective and its

theorization was summarized in 1500 in Pomponio Gaurico’s De Sculptura:
before painting an object, the painter must construct the spatial frame (the
locus) to contextualize it – the “locus” precedes the bodies that inhabit it.
Panofsky makes explicit reference to Gaurico in order to highlight the birth

of a Kantian vision of space as an a priori or a “condition of possibility” for
practicing science27.
After Newton, Kant posited space and time as a priori conditions of

possibility of scientific construction: technically, in order to write and solve
equations, we must first give all the relevant parameters and functions’ target
domains.
Then, in the 18th Century, Lagrange and Laplace gave us the

mathematics of modern “state determined systems”. Indeed, in solving
Newton’s equations in Descartes’ and Galileo’s spaces, “we should be able
to predict all the facts of mechanics” (of celestial mechanics, Laplace said,
but in fact he was referring to all the facts of physics). Pascal’s and
Laplace’s mathematical analysis of probability also treats unpredictability as
random, but a randomness that has nothing to do with determination, to be
analyzed in terms of probability, thus in some measure on a space of all
possibilities. In any case, for them, unpredictable events take place within
the infinite but predetermined Cartesian space of all possible trajectories and
possible facts. In the 19th Century, this space was generalized to phase
space, that is, the space of relevant observables and parameters: to energy
we associate time, to momentum we associate position. Here we have one
possible path that takes us from the unified space, often a room or a
courtyard, within which the meeting took place between the infinity of God
and the finite of a woman, to the very general spaces of contemporary
mathematical physics. The rigorous, infinitary, perspectival structuring of
this room or courtyard is a fundamental historic transition.
At the end of the 19th Century, in these mathematical spaces, Poincaré

integrated the unpredictable into determination, by showing us the
unpredictability of perfectly deterministic dynamics. In a quite different way,
quantum mechanics introduced randomness into theory, in the form of
intrinsic indeterminacy. However, the spaces of possible “trajectories” and
events, of phases, will always remain mathematically predeterminable,
27 An extensive synthesis of the debate on the birth of the modern-day concept of space and
the role of perspective, from Gaurico to Panofsky, can be found in De Risi, V. (2012). Arte
e scienza della Sfera. La nascita del concetto moderno di spazio fra la teoria rinascimentale
della prospettiva e la geometria di Leibniz. Sphaera Forma immagine e metafora, tra
Medioevo ed Età Moderna. Olschki, Rome. Concurring with Damisch and Arasse, we have
highlighted the interplay between theology and humanism that lies at its origin.
whether they are infinite, from Descartes to Poincaré, or whether they are
infinite-dimensional spaces – Hilbert or Fock spaces in quantum mechanics.
In these spaces, the trajectory of a law of probability, determined by the
Schrödinger equation, beyond ordinary space-time, determines the quantum
dynamics; measurement projects this dynamic of probability onto a real
number, a probability value; jointly, they yield the nondeterministic
character of quantum mechanics. It follows that this theory also gives a
priori the spaces of possible evolutions that can satisfy the most
unpredictable quantum event, such as the creation/annihilation of a quanton.
Thus, in the 20th Century, as in Renaissance perspectival inventions, the
subject was to come back again, on a massive scale, into scientific
construction: a quanton is the result of interaction between the subject, with
his eyes on the measuring device, and microphysical “reality” – it takes
shape and changes shape, it constitutes itself, under those eyes. And, in new
forms, the knowing subject comes back.
We should note, and this is important, that the finite description of these
infinite spaces, from Cartesian spaces to infinite-dimensional quantum
spaces, is made possible by their regularities: these are given in terms of
mathematical symmetries, in other words, as sets of invariants and
transformations preserving these invariants. Symmetries make the finite
synthesis possible, that is, formal and axiomatic, of infinite- and even
infinite-dimensional spaces; chance, even quantified, will be mathematically
regulated, and it will remain within the predefined space of possibilities.
Finally, we should note that in the fertile explorations of the Renaissance

painters, we catch a glimpse of an inverted paradox of chance and space,
perfectly unrealistic, in one of the paintings from which we have looked in
detail, one of Paolo Uccello’s three Battles of San Romano. The “Cartesian
axes” of the plane are provided by the broken spears and halberds, which,
having fallen randomly in the chaos of battle, are strewn across the ground in
a perfectly orthogonal way, thereby generating space.
In conclusion, in this section, we have tried to reconstruct a constitutive

path of the power of the mathematics of infinite spaces of all the possibilities
of physics, even when these possibilities are given in terms of (quantum)
probabilities, starting from a theological origin that found its first symbolic
expression in 14th-Century painting.
Figure 1.11. Paolo Uccello, Battle of San Romano, 1456,

tempera on wood. London, National Gallery
1.7. Spaces of possibilities for the evolution of life?
This is where we are having an issue today: in the analysis of life

phenomena, not only biological but also societal phenomena, there is no way
to predetermine (mathematically) that space of possible evolutions, the
“phase space” of life. Let us try to further clarify this idea. The randomness
of throwing a die or a coin, or of a quantum event, operates, as we said
earlier, in a predefined (infinite) space of possible dynamics and results. We
have learned how to obtain mathematical infinites, from Lorenzetti and Piero
della Francesca, Descartes, Desargues, Newton, Cantor and Hilbert. Their
symmetries (mathematical invariants) allow us to define these spaces (of
phases, of possibilities) geometrically and formally.
However, there is no way to predetermine the space of possible future

phenotypes (biological forms and functions) over the course of evolution –
and phenotypes, that is, organisms, are the biologically relevant observables.
There was absolutely no sign of mammals’ noses in the “forms” or the
bacterial DNA from 800 million years ago. Neither could we have put on a
list of possibilities, the internal bones of their ears, as derived from the
double jaws of a few vertebrates (gnathostomes) from 250 million years ago
(an example of “exaptation”, ex post adaptation28): every phenotype is the

result of historical events, of a vast genetic network and of evolving,
changing epigenetic interactions.
But even the list of possible biological events over the coming centuries
cannot be found in mathematically predeterminable spaces: in the course of
evolution, phenotypes and ecosystems co-constitute themselves and jointly
produce the space of possibilities, from the niches that each organism
constructs in and with its environment. And the slightest fluctuation in these
interactions, internally, that is, between the different levels of organization,
does not merely change “trajectories” in pre-given phase spaces, as in
physical dynamics, but the spaces themselves. Symmetries, in other words,
the transformations that define invariance and which used to govern physics
magnificently, are being continually changed because biology is the never-
identical iteration of a morphogenetic process, beginning with cell
reproduction right through to the most complex morphogenesis, which
simultaneously co-determines the structure of the ecosystem. Structural
stability preserves some global symmetries (e.g. the basic organizational
plans or Bauplan), but each mitosis represents a symmetry change and breaks
the physico-mathematical invariance: the two new cells are never identical,
not even to the mother cell. This “never-identical” cell – a diversity in
proteome, DNA, membranes, chromatin, etc., the reconstitution of the matrix
of a tissue, after mitosis in a multi-cellular organism – is a symmetry change.
And this is fundamental to the existence of the variability and diversity

that make evolution and ontogenesis possible. The diversity of each
embryogenesis, lower or higher (Goldschmidt’s “hopeful monster” could be
one result), pertains to the production of evolutionary changes. Because
these constant changes (of symmetry), especially in the context of relevant
observables, phenotypes, lie at the heart of variability, hence diversity and
the very possibility of the living state of matter. They enable selectivity from
new forms, and adaptability, and they contribute to alterations in the
ecosystem. In short, for us, the phylogenetic and ontogenetic trajectory of an
organism is a cascade of symmetry changes29.
28 Gould, S.J. (2002). The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Harvard University Press.
29 For a general framework in this perspective, see Soto, A., Longo G. and Noble D. (eds)
(2016). From the Century of the Genome to the Century of the Organism: New Theoretical
Approaches, a special issue of Progress in Biophysics and Mol. Biology, Vol. 122, 1.
Elsevier, Amsterdam.
Clearly, exclusively molecular, or genocentric, analyses, where the

observables are in fact pre-definable, are inherently incomplete, though still
very useful: they cannot describe the hereditary transmission of certain
acquired deformities of the membrane of ciliates, or even their lipid
structures30, or proteome dynamics in induced modifications inherited from
the lactose operon – thus, in this case, even at the purely molecular level.
Mathematics is a science of invariants and of invariant preserving

transformations, and is thus a science of symmetries. Will we be able to
invent new mathematics to deal with continual symmetry changes? Why
not? The founding fathers invented their tools, the mathematics of
invariance, from Euclid to Newton and Riemann and Grothendieck – his
notion of “topos” as a categorical, very broad notion of space is currently the
upper limit of a philosophy and practice of mathematics as a science of
invariants and the transformations that preserve them – we have come on a
long journey from Lorenzetti, but he played a part in leading the way. In any
case, we must dare to invent, in order to address life as well as any historical
science, such as economics, well away from the absurd theories of
equilibrium in pre-given spaces: no ecosystem or economic system is in a
state of equilibrium, nor approaching equilibrium, with its unique pre-given
space of geodesics, unless all its “agents” are dead. Not only is life a process
far removed from equilibrium, but it is also permanently in “transition”, at a
critical threshold: from a mathematical viewpoint, it is (in) an “extended
critical transition” (see Bailly, Longo, cited). Like the economy, it is always
“in crisis”, that is, from our perspective, it continually changes the space of
possibilities and its symmetries.
1.8. Conclusion and opening: heterogeneous spaces of biological

evolution
We have tried to sketch a possible common thread, down through history,

of the mathematical concept of space, so deeply interwoven with that of
infinity. Explicitation of the role of the knowing subject is another part of it,
in a complex interplay with the “relativizing” construction of scientific
objectivity. The theological–pictorial origins of modern physico-
30 Cavalier-Smith, T. (2004). The membranome and membrane heredity in development and

evolution. In Organelles, Genomes and Eukaryote Phylogeny: An Evolutionary Synthesis in
the Age of Genomics, Hirt R.P. and Horner D.S. (eds), pp. 335–351. CRC Press, Boca Raton,
FL.
mathematical space give it especially deep roots and make it an a priori that
appears to escape scientific criticism. Its transition from theology to
mathematics via painting is the thesis being put forward. And yet,
epistemology enriched with a possible history can help change attitudes and
practice, in terms of the constitution of our spaces of knowledge.
The challenge of the changing dynamics of the space of possibilities

arises in any historical science, as we have said. In particular, nothing in
biology can be understood, other than in the light of a temporal perspective,
of a specific historicity, that of evolution31. This history is characterized by
the emergence of new “phase spaces” or, to be more precise, new
observables, Darwinian phenotypes and organisms. We have mentioned the
emergence of the inner ear of vertebrates; out of many other examples, we
could cite another, which has to do with the “dimensions of time” as a tool
of intelligibility: biological rhythms, such as breathing, the heartbeat, etc.,
came about in the course of evolution, and they differ from physical
frequencies. These rhythms are better understood if they are inscribed in a
second time dimension, which implies a new observable and its own
mathematical space32.
Three books and several articles written in collaboration with Francis

Bailly, Maël Montévil and jointly edited with Ana Soto (see http://www.
di.ens.fr/users/longo/) outline new conceptual frameworks to better
understand the physical singularity of the living state of matter: the change
of perspective on symmetries is at the heart of a scientific proposal of this
nature. The concept of a space of pre-given possibilities, hence invariant, a
fundamental symmetry in physics, where, after Lorenzetti, we can include
God, will no longer suffice. Even the predictability of the space of
possibilities, is no longer central to the construction of knowledge. This
construction seeks to understand the historical contingency of life (and,
potentially, of society – but we will not pursue our analyses that far). This
should not interfere with our awareness of the role of our actions in a
fundamentally unpredictable world, with no subtending space, in which we
31 Dobzhansky, T. (1973). Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
American Biology Teacher, 35(3), 125–129. For a modern-day view: Montévil, M. (2020).
Historicity at the heart of biology. Theory in Biosciences, to be published.
32 For a recent comparative survey, see Longo, G. (2020). Confusing biological twins and
atomic clocks. Today’s ecological relevance of Bergson-Einstein debate on time. In
Conference “What is Time? Einstein and Bergson 100 Years later”, Campo, A. and Ronchi,
R. (eds). April 4–6, 2019 (proceedings in preparation).
reach decisions as best we can, by making the perspective (and values) that
guides our actions explicit.
In short, the theoretical challenge is therefore, how to invent the tools

designed to understand but not necessarily to predict, as René Thom said.
Darwin’s theory of evolution does not predict anything, but it gives us an
extraordinary framework for knowledge. Qualitative estimates of the impact
of an activity can enable us to take action in the world, if these estimates are
based on criteria for robust development such as diversity and adaptability.
Science is one of our active forms of being in the world, between

knowledge and praxis. We also construct knowledge in order to take action
in this world, and we do actually need predictability, but it may possibly be
provisional and qualitative; we may be compelled to depart from the myth of
these pre-given possibilities, as nice and soothing as Piero’s spaces, while
still keeping the focus on intelligibility, which leads to rational action.
Attempts of a theoretical33 and mathematical nature are ongoing, such as
those of the Cardano group34 and the “Post-structural Dynamics” team35
centered on a new differential calculus – whose operators generate their own
spaces of possibilities36. In this, the inspiration of semiotics and dialogue
with contemporary art is explicit.
33 Longo, G. (2020). Naturalizing physics. Or, embedding physics in the historicity and
materiality of the living. Deleuziana, 11 (special issue), “Differential Heterogenesis: Deleuze,
Mathematics and The Creation of Forms”.
34 http://cardano.visions-des-sciences.eu/fr.
35 https://enseignements-2019.ehess.fr/2019/ue/2691/.
36 Sarti, A., Citti, G., and Piotrowski, D. (2019). Differential heterogenesis and the
emergence of semiotic function. Semiotica, (230).
2
Geometry and the Life of Forms
2.1. Introduction
Seeking to grasp the life of forms in its widest sense is to contemplate it

over the long term: on the geological timescale for natural forms and on the
historical timescale for geometric forms deriving from art or mathematics. In
both cases, the same tendency towards complexification can be observed,
with a clear acceleration from the 20th Century for art and mathematics.
This chapter focuses on the recent history of interactions between

geometry and the plastic arts. We will look at 20th-Century advances in
geometry: non-Euclidean geometries, catastrophe theory, numerical/
algorithmic geometry, fractal theory, etc. We will show how artists have
incorporated them and drawn inspiration from them, especially through the
various geometric abstraction movements – from suprematism to digital art,
via optical art, kinetic art, conceptual art and minimalism.
Our approach to the “life of forms” will be multi-faceted. We will

consider the respective statuses of form and formation, drawing upon
selected artists, scholars and philosophers; we will look at the role of time
and movement in the perception of forms; we will include catastrophe
theory, which modeled abrupt changes of form. We will also question the
existence of forms on the scale of extreme dimensions: are they appropriate
in defining quantum particles and the universe in its globality?
Chapter written by Ruth SCHEPS.
Mathematics in the Visual Arts,

First Edition. Edited by Ruth Scheps and Marie-Christine Maurel.
© ISTE Ltd 2020. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
To conclude, we will examine the pertinence of boundary and content as

determining criteria of mathematical or artistic forms, and we will put
forward the hypothesis of a life of forms that exceeds geometry and calls for
a sensory or spiritual approach.
2.2. Taking form
The life of forms (geometric or non-geometric) goes far beyond their

assignment to the science of geometry. The French word “forme” appeared
in Middle French in the 11th Century. Formed (!) from the Latin forma, it
means, “all the external characteristics of a thing”1 – a being, an object, an
event, an idea – or the way in which they materialize or present themselves.
More scientifically, “form” can be defined as all the geometric information
that remains of an object when its position, scale and rotation effects have
been filtered out. In any event, a form recognized as such is indissociable
from how it is perceived; even its algebraic definition cannot make it
properly exist, unless it is completed by the geometrical drawing.
2.2.1. Early geometries
Knowledge of geometric forms goes much further back than the word
used to refer to them. Humans have in fact always sought to understand and
reproduce the forms around them. The first drawings of geometric forms
appeared in paleolithic times, and the first recognized notions of geometry
around 3,000 BCE in Egypt, in ancient India and among the Babylonians.
The 1st or 2nd Centuries BCE saw the appearance of The Nine Chapters on
Mathematical Art, a fundamental treatise of Ancient Chinese knowledge,
with calculations of area and volume, and a formulation of Pythagorean
theorem. It was Ancient Greece (600 BCE onwards) that turned geometry
into a separate science, by generalizing and establishing laws from numerous
empirical rules that had been known for a long time. The followers of
Pythagoras (6th and 5th Centuries BCE) already had empirical knowledge of
1 TLFi, Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé, 1971–1994. Among the list of French
nouns that are direct derivatives, we find: formation, conformation, déformation, format,
formateur, formatage, formalisme, formalisation, formule, formulaire, formalité,
malformation, méforme, néoformation, plateforme – semantic riches that reflect the long
history of the term and its non-specific nature.
Geometry and the Life of Forms 31
three solids – the tetrahedron (pyramid), the hexahedron (cube) and the
dodecahedron. Following them, Plato identified five regular polyhedrons,
which have since been named “Plato’s solids”: tetrahedron, hexahedron,
octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron2. Far from being purely
mathematical, these basic shapes are deeply inscribed in Plato’s philosophy:
in his Republic, they appear as sensitive forms whose reality is owed solely
to their being part of the intelligible transcendental essences (which are
themselves subject to the supreme, simple and unconditional Good):
“Mathematicians construct their reasonings, not having in mind these figures
themselves [the five basic solids] but the perfect figures of which they are
the visible images and that none may contemplate except in thought”3. In
Timaeus4, Plato presents the four elements as being composed of particles
that are, respectively, tetrahedric (Fire), cubic (Earth), octahedric (Air) and
icosahedric (Water), the sphere of the world (the All) being a dodecahedron.
About 60 years later, Euclid was to propose, with Elements, a complete
mathematical study of Plato’s solids5, which, because of their aesthetics and
their symmetries, continued to be studied long after the Greek
mathematicians.
2.2.2. Geometrizing complexity
Around the beginning of the 20th Century, the emergence of non-

Euclidean geometry (Bernhard Riemann, 1854), the quantum theory (Max
Planck, 1900) and the theory of relativity (Albert Einstein, 1905) brought
about a spatio-temporal conception of the world and produced forms that
2 Plato’s five solids (polyhedrons) and their faces (polygons): tetrahedron or pyramid
(4 equilateral triangles); hexahedron or cube (6 squares); octahedron (8 equilateral triangles);
dodecahedron (12 regular pentagons), icosahedron (20 equilateral triangles).
3 Plato’s Republic, VI, §10.
4 Timaeus: One of Plato’s last dialogues, written around 360 BCE. The Pythagorean
philosopher Timaeus of Locri reflects on the origin and nature of the physical world and the
human mind, posing questions to do with scientific knowledge and the role of mathematics in
the explanation of the world.
5 A regular polyhedron is one of Plato’s solids, if and only if: (1) all of its faces are regular
convex isometric polygons, in other words, congruent; (2) none of its faces meet except at the
edges; and (3) the same number of faces meet at each of the vertices. Additionally, in
Euclidean geometry, the sum of the angles at the vertices of regular polygons must be strictly
less than 360°.
previous eras could never have imagined: the Möbius strip (popularized by
the work of M.C. Escher), the Klein bottle, projections of forms with more
than three dimensions, etc.). Whether the physical realities to which they
refer are possible or impossible, they go beyond the ideal forms of Euclidean
geometry, whose purpose was to describe real forms as closely as possible.
These new mathematical theories and hypotheses were to revive artists’

interest in science (a trend dating back to the invention of perspective) and
inspire Cubist, Constructivist and Surrealist approaches, “provoking in the
references of art a sudden disorientation, a kind of abstraction before
abstraction”6. To give just one example of the way in which artists took
ownership of these new scientific constructions, let us cite René Magritte,
who was able to exploit them to propose paradoxical representations of
impossible objects7, where the principal effects of depth are contradicted.
Regardless of their dimensionality, forms “live” within the linear or

curved spaces with which they interact. But the meaning of a singular shape
also derives from the other shapes with which it can be associated. For the
mathematician, “what is interesting, what a form really expresses, is a family
to which it belongs, a group into which it falls. And in order to see, as to
express, which family a form falls into, […] one solution is to manipulate the
form to make it generate a family of forms, of which it will be in some way
the representative. And a good method is to manipulate it in time, to make
the form move”8. Finally, a geometric form can be generated from an
algebraic equation that uses imaginary numbers. It should be noted that in
this case, the geometric form obtained is one specific interpretation of the
original equation, which can allow several interpretations.
6 de Loisy, J. (2014). Formes mathématiques. In Formes simples, de Loisy, J. (ed.). Exhibition,

Pompidou-Metz Centre, June 13 to November 5, 2014.
7 Impossible object: a representation of a fictitious object, in contradiction of the known laws
of physics. Penrose’s triangle (also used by M.C. Escher) is an iconic example: the drawing,
supposedly the exact representation, in projection onto a plane of a real three-dimensional
object, is ambiguous because it cannot be interpreted as such. Consequently, the theoretical
object which should correspond to the drawing is impossible. In general, these drawings apply
the rules of perspective “perversely”, placing contradictory indicators on the position and size
of objects.
8 Dhombres, J. (1994). Qu’est-ce qu’une forme ? In Les sciences de la forme aujourd’hui,
Noël, É. (ed.). “Points sciences” Collection, Le Seuil, Paris.
Geometry and the Life of Forms 33
In topology (the study of geometric forms and their relationships), few

mathematicians have made as significant a contribution to the life of forms
as René Thom9. The wonderful article devoted to him in the Encyclopædia
Universalis, entitled, “De l’algèbre à la géométrie et de la géométrie au
monde” (From algebra to geometry and from geometry to the world),
underlines that “René Thom is one of the undisputed masters of geometry.
His mathematical work, like that of Riemann and of Poincaré (with whom he
shares the same intuitionistic, synthetic, holistic perspective and the same
correlative aversion to pure formalism) is dominated by one essential
question: algebra’s ‘return’ to geometry.” Catastrophe Theory focuses on a
qualitative approach to geometry, destined to become a phenomenological
science. Thom’s “catastrophes” (about which he was fond of saying that they
had never killed anyone!) are sudden changes in form, discontinuities
described in the form of abstract mathematical surfaces. Thom defined seven
elementary catastrophes, seven forms that could be controlled with a
maximum of four parameters – the four dimensions of our environment:
length, width, height and time. As they evolve, these forms reach
singularities, in other words, points of discontinuity: a fold, a dovetail, a
crease, a butterfly, an elliptical umbilicus (the tip of a needle), a parabolic
umbilicus (a mushroom), a hyperbolic umbilicus (the crest of an unfurling
wave). This theory attracted great interest from many scientists and artists
including Salvador Dali, the creator of a painting entitled “Dovetail” (1983).
However, attempts to apply it to the human sciences, particularly in
linguistics and psychology, met with vigorous opposition.
In the 1970s, by virtue of computer-aided design (CAD), geometry was

enriched by a new discipline, algorithmic geometry. From this point on, the
computer tool enabled designers to model surfaces in three dimensions (3D),
which opened up new fields of application to artists. Three-dimensional
forms that elude the human eye became measurable, from the atomic scale to
the astronomical scale. However, the forms concerned were still relatively
simple. It was the emergence of massive 3D data, structured by algorithmic
geometry, that made it possible to represent complex forms. There was an
important issue in this respect, concerning the representation of continuous
9 René Thom (1923–2002): French mathematician, author of The Catastrophe Theory in the
1960s. This was popularized in the 1970s by the mathematician Christopher Zeeman, who
continued to apply it to biological and behavioral sciences. René Thom was awarded the
Fields Medal (the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize) in 1958 for his work in
topology.
geometric forms by discontinuous models10, for which it was necessary to be

able to characterize the complexity of a geometric object. This was achieved
by Herbert Federer (one of the creators of Geometric Measure Theory) using
a “reach”, a value which, in itself, summarizes the way in which the object is
geometrically immersed in space. This concept, which simultaneously
considers the object’s curvature (a local notion) and its constriction (a global
notion), has been applied, notably, to very large-scale universal structures
(galaxies and galaxy clusters).
Figure 2.1. Reuven Berman Kadim, Hovering Object #1. Digital image, 199711
10 Two iconic examples of discontinuous (or discrete) models are: (1) Voronoi diagrams,
which represent proximity relationships and enable the modeling of growth phenomena in all
dimensions; and (2) the triangulation model, which is central to the interaction between
geometry and calculus.
11 Artist’s Estate, Reuven Berman Kadim, Geometric Art, The Hidden Order of Nature.
Yedioth Books, Israel, 2010.
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to regard him as one of important, modern, exponents of just that
development of the Kantian philosophy that became imperative after
Darwinism. He has indeed inaugurated for us that reading of the
431
“theory of knowledge” in terms of the “theory of life” which is his true
and real continuation of the critical work of Kant. Hypothetical although
it may be in many respects, it moves (owing to his thorough absorption
in the many facts and theories of the biology of recent years) in an
atmosphere that is altogether above the confines of the physical and
432
the mathematical sciences with which alone Kant was (in the main)
directly acquainted. It is time that, with the help he affords in his free
handling of the facts of life and of the supposed facts and theories of
433
science, we should transform the exiguous “epistemology” of the
past generation into the more perfect hold upon “criticism” and upon
the life of things that is represented in his thought.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Enough has now been said in the foregoing pages about
Pragmatism and the philosophy of Actionism in relation to
Rationalism, and to the Personalism and the Humanism that they
would substitute for it and for Absolutism. Indications have been
given too of the shortcomings and the defects of this very
Personalism or Humanism, and of some of the different lines along
which it would require to be reconsidered and developed to
constitute a satisfactory philosophy. In addition to some of the
greater names in the history of philosophy, I have referred—in the
footnotes and elsewhere—to the thoughts and the works of living
writers who might be profitably studied by the reader in this
connexion.
Pragmatism is in some respects but a sociological or an
anthropological doctrine significant of the rediscovery by our age of
the doctrine of man, and of its desire to accord to this doctrine the
importance that is its due. It represented, to begin with (in its
Instrumentalism chiefly), the discontent of a dying century with the
weight of its own creations in the realm of science and theory along
with a newer and fresher consciousness of the fact that there can be
no rigid separation of philosophy from the general thought and
practice of mankind. And even if we accept this idea of the
supremacy of the doctrine of man over both philosophy and science,
this does not mean that we exalt the worker and the prophet over all
knowledge, but simply that philosophy must have a theory of reality
that provides for their existence and function alongside of those of
the thinker or the student as such. The true philosophy is in fact the
true doctrine of man.
Another lesson that we may learn from Pragmatism and
Humanism is the truth of the contention that there can be no
philosophy without assumptions of one kind or another, without facts
and intuitions and immediate experiences. A philosophy itself is an
act or a creation, representative of the attention of the thinker to
certain aspects of his experience and of the experience of the world
which he shares with other thinkers and with other agents. And, as
Bergson has reminded us, it is often the great intuition underlying the
attention and the thought of a philosopher that is of more worth to
the world than the dialectic, or the logic, through the aid of which it is
set forth and elaborated. This latter he may frequently have inherited
or absorbed from the schools of his time.
The reason why the idealists and the dialecticians of our time
have so often fought shy of beginning with the immediate or the
“given,” is partly that they are not yet in their thoughts perfectly free
of some taint or tincture of the supposed realism or dualism of the
common-sense philosophy or the correspondence view of truth.
They seem to have the fear that if they admit a given element of fact
in speculation they will unconsciously be admitting that there is
something outside thought and immediate experience in the true
sense of these terms. In this fear they are forgetful of the great
lesson of Idealism that there is nothing “outside” thought and
consciousness, no “object” without a “subject,” that the world is
“phenomenal” of a great experience, which they and other men are
engaged in interpreting, and of which we may all become directly
conscious. And while to God the end of all experiences and
processes is known from the beginning, or apart from the mere time
and space limitations that affect us as finite beings, it is still true that
for us as men and as thinkers the reality of things is not “given” apart
from the contribution to it that we ourselves make in our responsive
and in our creative activity. In contending, therefore, for the reality, in
every philosophy, of this assumption of ourselves and of the working
value of our thought and of our activity, Pragmatism has been
contending in its own fashion for the great doctrine of the sovereignty
of the spirit which (when properly interpreted) is the one thing that
can indeed recall the modern mind out of its endless dispersion and
distraction, and out of its reputed present indifference. It is in the
placing of this great reality before the world, or, rather, of the view of
human nature that makes it a possibility, and in intelligibility, that (in
my opinion) the significance of Pragmatism consists, along with that
of the various doctrines with which it may be naturally associated.
There are many indications in the best thought and practice of our
time that humanity is again awakening to a creative and a self-
determinative view of itself, of its experience, and of its powers. Of
the presuppositions and the conditions under which this idea may be
regarded as true and intelligible I have already spoken. Its proper
interpretation, however, along with the exposition of the metaphysic
upon which it must be made to repose, is at least part of the work of
the philosophy of the future—if philosophy is true to its task of
leading and guiding the thought of mankind.
FOOTNOTES
1
See, for example, the concessions and the fresh statements of
the problem of philosophy, and the “clearing of the ground,”
etc., referred to on p. 76 and p. 74. Also p. 27 in reference to
the stir and the activity that have been excited by the
pragmatist controversy. See also p. 230, in the eighth chapter,
in reference to some things in such a typical intellectualist as
Professor Bosanquet that may be construed as a concession
to Pragmatism and Humanism.
2
Dr. Edward Caird affirmed in his memoir of his brother
(Principal John Caird) that idealists admit some pragmatist
charges.
3
Professor Stein, a contemporary European authority, to whom
we shall again refer below, says, for example, in his well-
known articles in the Archiv für Philosophie (1908), in
reference to Pragmatism, that we have had nothing like it [as a
‘movement’] “since Nietzsche” (“Der Pragmatismus,” p. 9).
4
See Chapter VIII., where I discuss the natural theology that
bases itself upon these supposed principles of a “whole of
truth” and the “Absolute.”
5
This statement I think would be warranted by the fact of the
tendency of the newer physical science of the day to substitute
an electrical, for the old material, or corpuscular, conception of
matter, or by the admission, for example, of a contemporary
biologist of importance (Verworn, General Physiology, p. 39)
that “all attempts to explain the psychical by the physical must
fail. The actual problem is ... not in explaining psychical by
physical phenomena but rather in reducing to its psychical
elements physical, like all other psychical phenomena.”
6
See p. 81, and p. 150.
7
See Chapter V. pp. 136, 138, where we examine, or reflect
upon, the ethics of Pragmatism.
8
The importance of these volumes in the matter of the
development, in the minds of thinking people everywhere, of a
dynamic and an organic (instead of the older rationalistic and
intellectualistic) conception of religion and of the religious life
cannot possibly be overestimated. Of course it is only right to
add here that such a dynamic and organic view of religion is
the property not only of Professor James and his associates,
but also of the army of workers of to-day in the realms of
comparative religion and anthropology.
9
Pragmatism, p. 300.
10
Or an admission like the following in the Meaning of Truth (p.
243): “It may be that the truest of all beliefs shall be that in
transsubjective realities.”
11
Meaning of Truth, p. 124, 5.
12
See p. 40 and p. 149.
13
Pragmatism, pp. 244–245.
14
A Pluralistic Universe, p. 34.
15
In respect of James’ later doctrine of “radical empiricism” we
may quote, for the sake of intelligibility, from Professor Perry
(his friend and literary executor) the following: “James’
empiricism means, then, first, that ideas are to be tested by
direct knowledge, and, second, that knowledge is limited to
what can be presented. There is, however, a third
consideration which is an application of these, and the means
of avoiding a difficulty which is supposed to be fatal to them.
This is what James calls ‘radical empiricism,’ the discovery that
‘the relations between things, conjunctive as well as
disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular
experience, neither more nor less so, than the things
themselves.’ ‘Adjacent minima of experience’ are united by the
‘persistent identity of certain units, or emphases, or points, or
objects, or members ... of the experience-continuum.’ Owing to
the fact that the connexions of things are thus found along with
them, it is unnecessary to introduce any substance below
them, or any subject above them, to hold things together”
(Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 365). In regard to this
radical empiricism, I am obliged, as a Kantian, to say that, to
my mind, it represents the reduction of all Pragmatism and
Empiricism to an impossibility—to the fatuous attempt
(exploded for ever by Hume) to attempt to explain knowledge
and experience without first principles of some kind or another.
It is a “new Humism,” a thing which no one who has penetrated
into the meaning of Hume’s Treatise can possibly advocate. A
philosophy without first principles, or a philosophy that reduces
the relations between experiences to mere “bits” of experience,
is indeed no philosophy at all.
16
See p. 82 and p. 154.
17
The Preface, pp. xv., xix.
18
See p. 159 and p. 212.
19
As for Dr. Schiller’s charge that Absolutism is essentially
“irreligious” in spite of the fact of its having been (in England)
religious at the outset, the best way of meeting this is to insist
that it is mainly in its form, rather than its content, that
Absolutism is (or was) irreligious in both Germany and
England.
20
British students of philosophy are quite well aware that it was
the religious and the spiritual motive that seemed to weigh
most with Hutchison Stirling and John Caird and Green in their
attempts (thirty years ago) to introduce German transcendental
philosophy to their fellow-countrymen. Stirling was impressed
with the idea of a working correspondence between
Hegelianism and Calvinism. John Caird’s animus was against
the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and of Mansel, and he
found inspiration in this connexion in Hegel’s treatment of
Kant’s theory of the limitations of the understanding. And to
Green the attractive thing about Kant was his vindication of a
“spiritual principle” in “nature,” and in “knowledge,” and in
“conduct,” a principle which rendered absurd the naturalism of
the evolutionary philosophy. Friends of this spiritualistic
interpretation of German Critical Rationalism find its richest
and fullest expression in the books of Edward Caird upon the
Evolution of Religion and the Evolution of Theology in the
Greek Philosophers.
21
The idea of a left wing is generally associated in the minds of
British students with the destructive criticism of Mr. Bradley in
Appearance and Reality, in which many, or most, of our
ordinary ways of regarding reality (our beliefs in “primary” and
“secondary” qualities of matter, in “space” and “time,” in
“causation,” “activity,” a “self,” in “things in themselves,” etc.)
are convicted of “fatal inconsistencies.” See, however,
Professor Pringle-Pattison’s instructive account of his book in
Man’s Place in the Cosmos, bringing out the positive side. The
“left” is represented too, now, in Dr. Bosanquet’s Individuality
and Value, which we examine below as the last striking output
of British transcendentalism or absolutism. See in this entire
connexion Professor James Seth’s recent account of the
“Idealist Answers to Hume” in his English Philosophy and
Schools of Philosophy.
22
See p. 244. I find a confirmation of this idea in what a biologist
like Professor Needham treats of as the “autogenetic nature of
responses” (General Biology, p. 474) in animals.
23
See the Studies in Humanism for all the positions referred to,
or quoted, or paraphrased, in these two paragraphs.
24
This is an important essay. It reminds the modern reader, for
one thing, of the importance of the natural theology of Aristotle.
It is an anticipation, too, in its way, of the tendency of modern
physics to substitute a dynamic for a static conception of
matter, or atoms, or substance. In it Dr. Schiller points out how
Aristotle’s doctrine of a perfect and self-perfecting Activity [an
ἐνέργεια that is not mere change or motion, but a perfect “life”
involving the disappearance of “time” and imperfection] is in a
sense the solution of the old [Greek] and the modern demand
for the substance or essence of things. We shall take occasion
(in speaking of the importance to Philosophy of the concept of
activity, and in speaking of the Philosophy of Bergson) to use
the same idea, to which Dr. Schiller has given an expression in
this essay, of God as the eternal or the perfect life of the world.
25
For a favourable estimate of the services of Dr. Schiller in
regard to Pragmatism and Humanism the reader may consult
the articles of Captain Knox in the Quarterly Review, 1909.
26
Studies in Humanism, p. 19. The remarks made in this
paragraph will have to be modified, to some extent, in view of
the recent (1911) appearance of the third edition of Dr.
Schiller’s Riddles of the Sphinx. This noteworthy book
contains, to say the very least, a great deal in the way of a
positive ontology, or theory of being, and also many quite
different rulings in respect of the nature of metaphysic and of
the matter of its relation to science and to common sense. It
rests, in the main, upon the idea of a perfect society of
perfected individuals as at once the true reality and the end of
the world-process—an idea which exists also, at least in germ,
in the pluralistic philosophy of Professor James; and we shall
indeed return to this practical, or sociological, philosophy as
the outcome, not only of Pragmatism, but also of Idealism, as
conceived by representative living thinkers. Despite, however,
these many positive and constructive merits of this work of Dr.
Schiller’s, it is for many reasons not altogether unfair to its
spirit to contend that his philosophy is still, in the main, that of
a humanistic pragmatism in which both “theory” and “practice”
are conceived as experimentally and as hypothetically as they
are by Professor Dewey.
27
See p. 106.
28
See Professor Bawden’s book upon Pragmatism.
29
Pragmatism, p. 58.
30
Ibid. 76.
31
Studies in Logical Theory, p. 2.
32
I endeavour to indicate what this Humanism and Personalism
may be in my sixth chapter.
33
Journ. of Phil. Psychol., 1906, p. 338.
34
From vol. ii. (p. 322) of Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy. Dr.
C. S. Peirce, formerly a teacher of mathematics and
philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, was made by James
into the father or patron saint of Pragmatism. James confesses
to have been stimulated into Pragmatism by the teachings of
Peirce.
35
Journ. of Phil. Psy., 1906, p. 340.
36
See pp. 78, 148; and in reference to the last striking
presentation of Absolutism, p. 230.
37
See Bourdeau, Pragmatisme et Modernisme, and W. Riley in
the Journ. of Phil. Psy., April and May 1911; the James article,
Journ. of Phil., 1906; Journ. of Phil., 1907, pp. 26–37, on
Papini’s “Introduction to Pragmatism”; The Nation (N.Y.),
November 1907, on “Papini’s view of the ‘daily tragedy’ of life.”
38
Reported to have been inaugurated by a Franco-Italian poet,
Martinetti. Of the question of any possible connexion between
this “Futurism” with the present Art movement bearing the
same name I know nothing definite.
39
I refer to the recent volume dedicated by some of his old pupils
to Professor Garman—a celebrated teacher of philosophy in
one of the older colleges of the United States.
40
The two large volumes on the Psychology of Adolescence.
41
The Psychology of Religion.
42
Even such a book—and it is no doubt in its way a genuine and
a noteworthy book—as Harold H. Begbie’s Twice-born Men is
pointed to by this wing as another instance of the truth of
pragmatist principles in the sphere of experimental religion.
Schopenhauer, by the way, was inclined to estimate the
efficacy of a religion by its power of affecting the will, of
converting men so that they were able to overcome the selfish
will to live. See my Schopenhauer’s System in its Philosophical
Significance.
43
See, for example, the declaration of James and Schiller (in the
prefaces to their books and elsewhere) in respect of their
attitudes to the work of men like Renouvier, Poincaré, Milhaud,
Wilbois, Le Roy, Blondel, Pradines, the valuable reports of M.
Lalande to the Philosophical Review (1906–7–8), the articles
of Woodbridge Riley in the Journal of Philosophy (1911) upon
the continental critics of Pragmatism, the books of Bourdeau,
Hebert, Rey, Tonquedoc, Armand Sabatier, Schinz, Picard,
Berthelot, those of Poincaré, Renouvier, Pradines, and the
rest, the older books upon nineteenth-century French
philosophy by men like Fouillée, Levy-Bruhl, etc. There are
also valuable references upon the French pragmatists in
Father Walker’s Theories of Knowledge (in the Stoneyhurst
Series), and in Professor Inge’s valuable little book upon Faith
and its Psychology.
44
The outstanding representative in France during the entire
second half of the nineteenth century of “Neo-Criticism” or
“Neo-Kantianism,” a remarkable and comprehensive thinker, to
whose influence, for example, James attributed a part of his
mental development. His review, the Critique Philosophique,
was a worthy (idealist) rival of the more positivistically inclined,
and merely psychological, review of Ribot, the Revue
Philosophique. French Neo-Kantianism, holding, as Renouvier
does, that Kant’s ethics is the keystone of his system, is not in
general inclined to the “positivism” or the “scientific” philosophy
of some of the German Neo-Kantians. The critical work of
Renouvier proposes some very ingenious and systematic
rearrangements of Kant’s philosophy of the categories, and his
freedom-philosophy must certainly have done a good deal
(along with the work of others) to create the atmosphere in
which Bergson lives and moves to-day. With Renouvier, Neo-
Kantianism merges itself too in the newer philosophy of
“Personalism,” and he wrote, indeed, an important book upon
this very subject (Le Personnalisme, 1902). In this work, we
find a criticism of rationalism that anticipates Pragmatism, the
author explicitly contending for a substitution of the principle of
“rational belief” instead of the “false principle” of demonstrable
or a priori “evidence.” Consciousness, he teaches, is the
foundation of existence, and “personality” the first “causal
principle” of the world (although admitting “creation” to be
beyond our comprehension). He examines critically, too, the
notions of the “Absolute” and of the “Unconditioned,” holding
that they should not be substantiated into entities. “Belief” is
involved in “every act,” he teaches—also another pragmatist
doctrine. And like his great predecessor Malebranche, and like
our English Berkeley, he teaches that God is our “natural
object,” the true “other” of our life. The philosophy of
Personalism, the foundations of which are laid in this work, is
further developed by Renouvier in a comprehensive work
which he published in 1899, in conjunction with M. Prat, on
The New Monadology (La Nouvelle Monadologie). This is one
of the most complete presentations of a philosophy of
“Pluralism” that is at the same time a “Theism”—to be
associated, in my opinion, say, with the recent work of Dr.
James Ward upon the Realm of Ends, referred to on p. 162.
45
Philos. Rev. (1906), article by Lalande.
46
H. Poincaré (talked of in recent scientific circles as one of the
greatest mathematicians of history) is (he died about a year
ago), so far as our present purpose is concerned, one of the
important scientific writers of the day upon the subject of the
“logic of hypotheses,” and of the “hypothetical method” in
science—the method which the pragmatists are so anxious to
apply to philosophy. He seems (see his La Science et
l’Hypothèse, as well as the later book, La Valeur de la Science,
referred to by Lalande in his professional reports to the
Philosophical Review) to accept to some extent the idea of the
“hypothetical” character of the constructions of both the
mathematical and the physical sciences, believing, however, at
the same time that we must not be “unduly sceptical” about
their conclusions, revealing as they do something of the
“nature of reality.” He discusses among other topics the theory
of “energetics” of which we speak below in the case of
Ostwald. He insists, too, upon the idea that the real is known
only by “experience,” and that this “experience” includes the
comparison of the thoughts of many minds. And yet he
believes to some extent in the Kantian theory of the a priori
element in knowledge (see La Science, etc., p. 64). It is,
however, quite unnecessary for me to presume to enter into
the large subject of the precise nature of “hypotheses” in the
mathematical and the physical sciences.
47
A professor of mathematics in Paris and an ardent Bergsonian,
and along with Laberthonnière one of the prominent Catholic
defenders of Pragmatism and Modernism, author of a book on
Dogmatism and Criticism (Dogme et Critique). Not having had
the time to examine this book, as somewhat removed from my
immediate subject, I append for the benefit of the reader the
following statements and quotations from the useful book Faith
and its Psychology, by Professor Inge of Cambridge. It is easy
to see that the positions represented therein would give rise to
controversy as to the historicity or fact of Christianity. “Le Roy
gives us some examples of this Catholic Pragmatism. When
we say ‘God is personal,’ we mean ‘behave in our relations
with God as you do in your relations with a human person.’
When we say, ‘Jesus is risen from the dead,’ we mean ‘treat
him as if he were your contemporary.’... His main theses may
be summed up in his own words. ‘The current intellectualist
conception renders insoluble most of the objections which are
now raised against the idea of dogma. A doctrine of the
primacy of action, on the contrary, permits us to solve the
problem without abandoning anything of the rights of thought
or of the exigencies of dogma.’” Le Roy, by the way, has
published a book upon the philosophy of Bergson, which is
said to be the best book upon the subject. It has been
translated into English.
48
M. Abel Rey, author of a work on the Theory of Physical
Science in the hands of Contemporary Scientists (La Théorie
de la physique chez les physiciens contemporains). In this
book (I have not had the time to examine it carefully) M. Rey
examines the theories and methods of Newton, and also of
modern thinkers like Mach and Ostwald, reaching the
conclusion that the philosophy with which physical science is
most compatible is a “modified form of Positivism,” which bears
a striking resemblance to “Pragmatism” and the “philosophy of
experience.” The English reader will find many useful
references to Rey in the pages of Father Leslie J. Walker’s
Theories of Knowledge, in the “Stoneyhurst Philosophical
Series.”
49
Ibidem.
50
It was impossible to procure a copy of this work of M. Blondel. I
have tried to do so twice in Paris.
51
M. Lalande in the Philosophical Review (1906), p. 246.
52
Ibid. pp. 245–246.
53
I am inclined to attach a great importance to this idea (Kant
obviously had it) of “consulting moral experience directly,”
provided only that the “moral” in our experience is not too
rigidly separated from the intellectual. And it would so far,
therefore, be only to the credit of Pragmatism if we could
associate it with a rational effort to do justice to our moral
experience, as indeed possibly presupposing a “reality” that
transcends the limits of our mere individuality, a reality that
transcends, too, the subjective idealism that figures but too
prominently in modern philosophy. See my eighth chapter, p.
223, where I criticize Dr. Bosanquet for not consulting moral
experience directly.
54
Phil. Rev., 1906, p. 243.
55
See p. 160.
56
See p. 200 et. ff.
57
See p. 64.
58
For a later statement upon the philosophy of religion in France
see a report for the Phil. Rev. (vol. xvi. p. 304), by Le Roy. This
whole matter is, of course, a subject in itself of the greatest
theoretical and practical importance. It is enough for our
purpose to have indicated the different ways in which
Pragmatism and the “Will-to-Believe” philosophy have been
received in France, and the different issues raised by this
reception. The reader who would care to look at a constructive,
philosophical view (by the doyen of French philosophy
professors) of the whole issue between the pragmatist or
“voluntarist” point of view in religion and the older “intellectual”
view, cannot do better than consult Science and Religion in
Contemporary Philosophy, by E. Boutroux, a book that is
apparently studied everywhere at present in France. Its spirit
and substance may be indicated by the following quotations,
which follow after some pages in which M. Boutroux exposes
the error of “the radical distinction between theory and
practice.” “The starting point of science is an abstraction, i.e.
an element extracted from the given fact and considered
separately. We cannot expect man to be satisfied with the
abstract when the concrete is at his disposal. That would be
‘something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent
for a solid meal.’ Man uses science but he lives religion. The
part cannot replace the whole; the symbol cannot suppress
reality.”... “Not only is science unable to replace religion, but
she cannot dispense with the subjective reality upon which the
latter is grounded. It is pure Scholastic realism to imagine that
the objective and the impersonal suffice apart from the
subjective in our experience. Between the subjective and the
objective no demarcation is given which justifies from the
philosophical standpoint the divisions which science imagines
for her own convenience.” (p. 329).
59
Since writing these words, I have made (thanks firstly to Dr.
Schiller’s review in Mind, July 1911) the acquaintance of the
important work of M. Pradines upon the Conditions of Action.
In the central conception of this work, that action is “all-
including” and that all knowledge is a form of action, I find an
important development of much that the pragmatists have long
been endeavouring to express, and also in particular a
development of the celebrated action philosophy of M. Blondel.
I am inclined, with Dr. Schiller, to regard the volumes of M.
Pradines as apparently the high-water mark of French
pragmatist philosophy in the general sense of the term,
although I cannot but at the same time hail with approval their
occasional sharp criticism of Pragmatism as to some extent
“scepticism and irrationalism.” I am inclined to think, too, that
the ethical philosophy of M. Pradines has some of the same
defects that I shall venture to discuss later in dealing with the
application (mainly by Dewey) of Pragmatism to moral theory.
Of course his Conditions of Action is by no means as original a
production as Blondel’s book upon Action.
60
Fouillée speaks in his book upon the Idealist Movement and
the Reaction against Positive Science of the year 1851, as the
time of the triumph of “force,” of “Naturalism” (Zola, Goncourt,
etc.), and of the revival of Idealism by Lachelier, Renouvier,
and Boutroux.
61
See the celebrated work of A. Fouillée, La Psychologie des
idées-forces (Paris, 1890). I confess to having been greatly
impressed by this book when I first made its acquaintance. In
particular, I can think of an idea in Fouillée’s book that
anticipates even Bergson, namely the fact that every idea or
sensation is an effort that is furthered or impeded. But
Fouillée’s works out in this book the active of the volitional side
of nearly every mental power and of the mental life itself,
refusing to separate “mind” and “bodily activity.” It really
anticipates a great deal of the whole French philosophy and
psychology of action, including the work of Blondel and
Bergson.
62
M. Paul Desjardins (at present a professor of “letters” at
Sévres) was influential in Paris about 1892–93 as the founder
of a Union pour l’Action morale, which published a monthly
bulletin. This society still exists, but under the name (and the
change is indeed highly significant of what Pragmatism in
general really needs) L’Union pour la vérité morale et sociale. I
append a few words from one of the bulletins I received from
M. Desjardins. They are indicative of the spiritualizations of
thought and action for which the old society stood. “Il ne s’agit
de rien moins que de renverser entièrement l’échelle de nos
jugements, de nos attaches, de mettre en haut ce qui était en
bas, et en bas ce qui était en haut. Il s’agit d’une conversion
totale, en somme....” “La règle commune c’est la médiocrité
d’âme, ou même ce qu’on pourrait appeler l’athéisme pratique.
En effet, Dieu étant, par rapport à notre conscience, la Volonté
que le bien se réalise, ou la Règle vivante, on devient
pratiquement, athée, fût-on d’ailleurs très persuadé par les
preuves philosophiques de l’existence de Dieu, lorsqu’on perd
la notion de cette Volonté immuable avec laquelle la nôtre se
confond activement dès qu’elle mérite le nom de volonté libre,
etc.” In this last sentence there is a distinctly pragmatist note in
the sense of the action philosophy of Blondel and Bergson and
the rest.
63
See also the recent book by Flournoy on the Philosophy of
James (Paris, 1911), in which this interesting special subject is
discussed as well as the important difference between James
and Bergson.
64
Rey in his Philosophie Moderne, 1908, speaks of the “gleaning
of the practical factors of rationalistic systems” as the “new
line” in French philosophy (Journ. of Phil., 1911, p. 226).
65
From the Lalande article already mentioned.
66
This can be seen, for example, in the Preface to Die
Philosophie des Als Ob, the quasi-Pragmatist book recently
edited by Vaihinger, the famous commentator on Kant. “We
must distinguish in Pragmatism,” it is there stated, “what is
valuable from the uncritical exaggerations. Uncritical
Pragmatism is an epistemological Utilitarianism of the worst
sort; what helps us to make life tolerable is true, etc.... Thus
Philosophy becomes again an ancilla theologiae; nay, the state
of matters is even worse than this; it becomes a meretrix
theologorum.” This, by the way, is a strange and a striking
book, and is perhaps the last conspicuous instance from
Germany of the vitality, and of the depths of the roots of some
of the principles of the pragmatists. The very appearance of
the name of Vaihinger in connexion with it (as the editor) must
be a considerable shock to rationalists and to Kantians, who
have long looked upon Vaihinger as one of the authoritative
names in German Transcendentalism. Here, however, he
seems to agree with those who treat Kant’s ethical philosophy
of postulates as the real Kant, making him out, further, as the
author of a far-reaching philosophy of the “hypotheses” and the
“fictions” that we must use in the interpretation of the universe.
With Dr. Schiller, who reviews this work in Mind (1912), I am
inclined to think that it travels too far in the direction of an
entirely hypothetical conception of knowledge, out-
pragmatising the pragmatists apparently. The student who
reads German will find it a veritable magazine of information
about nearly all the thinkers of the time who have pragmatist or
quasi-pragmatist leanings. All the names, for example, of the
German and French writers to whom I refer in this second
chapter are mentioned there [I had, of course, written my book
before I saw Vaihinger], along with many others. It is as
serious an arraignment of abstract rationalism as is to be found
in contemporary literature, and edited, as I say, by the Nestor
of the Kant students of our time.
67
Especially in the open-minded and learned articles in the
Archiv für Philosophie, 1907, Band xiv., Professor Stein (of
Bern) is known as one of the most enthusiastic and
voluminous writers upon Social Philosophy in Germany. His
best-known work is an encyclopedic book upon the social
question in the light of philosophy (Die soziale Frage im Lichte
der Philosophie, 1903). His tendency here is realistic and
naturalistic and evolutionistic, and he thinks (for a philosopher)
far too much of men like Herbert Spencer and Mach and
Ostwald. What one misses in Stein is a discussion of the social
question in relation to some of the deeper problems of
philosophy, such as we find in men of our own country like
Mackenzie and Bosanquet, and Ritchie, and Jones, and
others. His work, however (it has been translated into Russian
and French), is a complete literary presentation of the subject,
and a valuable source of information. See my review notices of
it in the Phil. Rev. vol. xiv.
68
Mach and Ostwald both represent (for the purposes of our
study) the association that undoubtedly exists between
Pragmatism and the tendency of all the physical and natural
sciences to form “hypotheses” or conceptions, that are to them
the best means of “describing” or “explaining” (for any
purpose) either facts, or the connexions between facts. Mach
(professor of the history and theory of the sciences in Vienna)
is a “phenomenalist” and “methodologist” who attacks all a
priorism, treating the matter of the arrangement of the
“material” of a science under the idea of the “most economic
expenditure” of our “mental energy.” One of the best known of
his books is his Analysis of the Sensations (translated, along
with his Popular Science Lectures, in the “Open Court Library”
of Chicago). In this work he carries out the idea of his theory of
knowledge as a question of the proper relation of “facts” to
“symbols.” “Thing, body, matter,” he says (p. 6), “are all nothing
apart from their so-called attributes.” “Man possesses in its
highest form the power of consciously and arbitrarily
determining his point of view.” In his Introduction, he attempts
to show how “the ego and the relation of bodies to the ego give
rise” to “problems” in the relations simply of “certain
complexes” of “sensation to each other.” While it is
undoubtedly to the credit of Mach that he sees the “subjective,”
or the “mental,” factor in facts and things and objects, it must
be said that he ignores altogether the philosophical problems
of the ego, or the “self,” as something more than a mere object
among objects.
Ostwald is one of the founders of the theory of “Energetics,”
the theory of the school that believes in substituting a
dynamical philosophy, for the older, atomic, or mechanical
philosophy of matter and motion. He put this philosophy
forward in 1895 as the last gift of the nineteenth to the
twentieth century. He suggests how this idea of energetics may
be applied also to psychical processes, in so far as these may
be understood by conceptions that have proved to be useful in
our interpretation of the physical world. Our “consciousness
would thus come to be looked upon as a property of a peculiar
kind of energy of the nerves.” The whole idea is a piece of
phenomenalistic positivism, and although Ostwald makes an
attempt (somewhat in the manner of Herbert Spencer) to
explain the “forms,” or the categories, of experience as simply
“norms” or “rules” that have been handed on from one
generation to another, he does not occupy himself with

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Mathematics in the Visual Arts Ruth

ISTE Ltd John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

© ISTE Ltd 2020

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942150

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Chapter 1. Infinity of God and Space of Men in Painting,

Chapter 2. Geometry and the Life of Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

2.3.2. From geometric abstraction to digital art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Chapter 3. Among the Trees: Iterating Geneses of Forms,

Chapter 4. The Passion of Flight: From Leonardo da Vinci

Chapter 5. Sculptor of Fluid Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

Chapter 6. Internal Geometry of “Salvator Mundi”

Chapter 7. Internal Geometry of a Night Scene by Georges

7.11. Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

Chapter 8. Emergilience, an Art Research Project . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

List of Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

Within the mathematical sciences themselves, geometry, born from the

Before characterizing this unquestionable presence of mathematics in the

Introduction written by Ruth SCHEPS and Marie-Christine MAUREL.

Visual artists of modernity have often taken their inspiration from

A certain parallelism between mathematical and artistic approaches has

The best established point of convergence between the artistic and

Let us turn to the contemporary aspects of the “marriage” between

Since the emergence of non-Euclidean geometries and new branches of

Another contribution of geometry to painting is highlighted by Jean-

A special case of artistic inspiration, derived from geometric and natural

presents the fractal geometric structure as a source of inspiration for the

At the interface of art and science, or belonging to both, scientific

Infinity of God and Space of Men in

1.1. A brief introduction to infinity

There is no space in Greek geometry. By drawing lines, using a ruler and

Chapter written by Giuseppe LONGO and Sara LONGO.

Mathematics in the Visual Arts,

Paolo Zellini2 explains that the Aristotelian distinction between this

1.2. Infinity in painting and the invention of mathematical space

The concept of actual infinity was clarified in a metaphysical debate,

The transition came about through the invention of perspective

The problem of depicting the scenes where narrative figures were to be

Figure 1.1. Giotto di Bondone, Life of St. Francis,

The geometrical perspective which Filippo Brunelleschi experimented

According to Erwin Panofsky’s foundational essay, published in

To support his argument, Arasse makes particular reference to a sermon

4 Panofsky, E. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Zone Books, New York, p. 65.

Figure 1.2. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Annunciation, tempera

In this Annunciation, there is a column, often a symbol of Christ, very

6 Longo, S. (2013). “L’Annonciation en Italie. Enjeux méthodologiques et historiographiques,

Piero della Francesca, this metaphysical dissertation in paint went on to also

Figure 1.3. Antonello da Messina, St. Sebastian, tempera on wood

And now this metaphysical and religious cosmology became a geometry

In fact, the Renaissance invention of perspective involved the

The idea of a chosen, unique, immobile viewpoint was a theoretical leap,

1.3. Geometrical optics and the subject in projective space

Geometrical optics, however, played a massive part in the work of

Figure 1.4. Brunelleschi’s experiment with linear perspective,

Daniel Arasse imagines the subject by first looking at himself in the

11 Manetti, A. (1887). Opere Historiche. G. Milanesi, Florence, pp. 83–85.

compare the story of Brunelleschi’s verification to the other founding myth

For a fuller understanding of the picture, let us start by looking at the

Figure 1.6. Paolo Uccello, Battle of San Romano, detail,

Figure 1.7. Andrea Mantegna, The Dead Christ, tempera

The head is resting on a cushion, also in light pink marble, so as to not

A rigorous geometric perspective foreshortening, derived from a simple

A final example, another Annunciation, painted by Piero della Francesca