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It has often been said that the revolution in consciousness that gave rise to modern science was felt first, not in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century experimental philosophy, but in fifteenth-century representational art. Filippo Brunelleschi, the inventor of perspective drawing, was also "the first professional engineer,"and much has been made of this fact — perhaps especially by Giorgio de Santillana (1959). Rolling Brunelleschi's innovations into one general procedure, de Santillana characterizes that procedure as an "early counterpart or rather first rehearsal" of "the "social breakthrough' that the new science of Galileo effected through the telescope" (44–45). The history that entwines perspective, engineering, and the emerging science over the two centuries between Brunelleschi and Galileo is surely more complex than de Santillana intuited, yet the novelty of Brunelleschi's perspective does seem clearly to have been linked with new possibilities of both planning and intervention (see, e.g., Kuhn, 1990) and with new notions of descriptive knowledge. From its origins, classical perspective provided at least a metaphor for faithful knowledge of the natural world acquired by rule-bound observation and documentation.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-25249-7_8

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