The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

by Thomas S. Kuhn

For many centuries, both in antiquity and again in early modern Europe, painting was regarded as the cumulative discipline. During those years the artist’s goal was assumed to be representation. Critics and historians, like Pliny and Vasari, then recorded with veneration the series of inventions from foreshortening through chiaroscuro that had made possible successively more perfect representations of nature.1 But those are also the years, particularly during the Renaissance, when little cleavage was felt between the sciences and the arts. Leonardo was only one of many men who passed freely back and forth between fields that only later became categorically distinct.2 Furthermore, even after that steady exchange had ceased, the term ‘art’ continued to apply as much to technology and the crafts, which were also seen as progressive, as to painting and sculpture. Only when the latter unequivocally renounced representation as their goal and began to learn again from primitive models did the cleavage we now take for granted assume anything like its present depth.