Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art and Science

by Martin Kemp

Martin Kemp's provocative essays on the interplay between art and science have been entertaining readers of Nature, the world's leading journal for the announcement of scientific discoveries, since 1997. These short, illustrated, highly regarded essays generally focus on one visual image from art or science and provide an evocative and erudite investigation into shared motifs in the two disciplines. Gathered together here with a delightfully rich introduction by the author, the essays take our understanding to an exciting new level as they transgress the traditional boundaries between art and science.

The images under consideration cover Western art from the Renaissance to the present day, and the science ranges from abstract mathematics to the illustrative modes of natural history and medicine. Kemp skillfully discusses the Mona Lisa as well as horror films, Galileo's moon drawings and diagrams in modern physics, Renaissance pottery and logos on trucks, the invention of perspective, and contemporary masterpieces.

Rather than charting the mutual influence of art and science upon each other, these essays look to the deeper structures that find expression in art and science; they reveal the "structural intuitions" shared by artists and scientists when confronting the world. This volume contains all the pieces published in Nature under the banners of "Art and Science" and "Science and Image," together with some from Kemp's recent "Science and Culture" series. The essays are presented thematically rather than chronologically, arranged to stimulate critical ideas about the nature of the image at the intersection of art and science, now and in the past.

Genres: Art, Science

220 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Martin Kemp is professor of the History of Art at Oxford University, and the author of many books including The Science of Art, Visualizations and the recent Leonardo. He is also a frequent contributor to Nature, the international science journal, where he writes on science and art. Together with Antonio Criminisi, he wrote an article in NEW 1_2005: "Paolo Uccello's 'Battle of San Romano': Order from Chaos" is the most recent report on how they apply 3D graphic techniques to the process of art history investigation.

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Jeremy Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating tour d'horizon(s)
Martin Kemp is Professor of the History of Art at Oxford University, and writes extensively on imagery in art and science. This book is a compilation of his columns from Nature, for which he's been writing since 1997. The articles range over a wide variety of topics, from Galileo's sketches of light and shade on the moon, through the modelling of scenes in Vermeer's paintings, to Hooke's description of the eye of the housefly and the naturalistic sculptures of Andy Goldsworthy. Working to a 500-600 word limit in each piece, the author briefly sets the scene before describing a specific image and drawing out some general points from his analysis and, in some cases, making connections with images discussed in other articles.

I greatly enjoyed this book, coming to it from a strong - even professional - interest in visualization, and having a vague idea about how it can act as a conduit between ideas and explanation in art and science. The author examines this in some depth, drawing on a large set of examples from different points in history and which use scales from the cosmic to the microscopic. I finished this book with a renewed appreciation of the power of visualization (and even learnt a new word - bucephadonically apparently means using S-shaped motion). The author also draws together some general points nicely in some specially-written material to bookend the articles, with some illuminating and erudite musings on the aesthetic impulse. The only slight criticism I had of the book was that I found the articles' alliterative titles too tiresome (e.g. "Lucid looking", "Maculate moons", "Abbott's absolutes", etc). But I soon developed the knack of not reading them.

Originally reviewed 24 June 2008

[Nilendu Misra · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Shuffle of things” - namely how the then state of science influenced contemporary art, like Durer’s Four Apostles embodying four “humours” - sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic. Or Monalisa - despite being a painting - can be a near-lab quality proof of “Cosine Law of brightness” - perceived brightness of a surface is proportional to the cosine of the angle light falls upon it. Many real gems!

[Christina Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting elements, and the starts of good ideas, but barely scratches the surface of what this book could be.