Although nowadays we often consider art and science as two poles of magnet – one represents for objective and the other subjective -- they have always worked together since 18th century. In that time, scientific atlas was a burgeoning domain that usually made by cooperation between scientists and artists used in educational purpose. In order to get beautiful and precise illustrations for their atlas, scientists must have artists to do what they can’t – drawing pictures. Here, art and science converged in intertwined judgments of truth and beauty.
The notion truth-to-nature emerges as an epistemic virtue in the early 18th century, as a reaction to the overemphasis by earlier naturalists on the variability of nature. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s words we can see this Enlightenment naturalists’ principle, “To depict it, the human mind must fix the empirically variable, exclude the accidental, eliminate the impure, unravel the tangled, discover the unknown.” But what scientists believe in truth-to-nature calls for a further step from this simply selecting, comparing and judging. They do not want to be the slaves of nature, instead, they need to control this process. In this way, these 18th century scientists’ biggest problem centered on the untamed variability of nature. How to extract the essential form of one species and transit into a single picture? Here we see Goethe’s hypothesis again. He believed all plants could be derived through metamorphosis from a single prototype and this became the foundation of image-making in scientific atlas. In order to get this prototype from various different individual samples, artists have to look through a lot of them and then forget all of these. The next step is using their memory and imagination to depict an ideal picture of this species. The question is, the one who draws illustrations is artist but not scientist, how does scientist be sure what artist does is exactly what he wants? Sometimes scientists would choose an apprentice since they were young and train them through many years to make sure they can achieve what they need. Artists need do a lot of practice to learn how to observe, select and edit, and this observation practice at first come from other scientific atlas and after several years only they can draw actual objects. The ideal relationship between scientists and artists is that artists can be the hand of scientists without mind that called four-eyed sight. For scientists, artists are more like a medium than a subordinate. In conclude, 18th century scientists who pursued truth-to-nature was required to be active: observing and interpreting nature, monitoring and correcting artists.
The notion truth-to-nature emerges as an epistemic virtue in the early 18th century, as a reaction to the overemphasis by earlier naturalists on the variability of nature. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s words we can see this Enlightenment naturalists’ principle, “To depict it, the human mind must fix the empirically variable, exclude the accidental, eliminate the impure, unravel the tangled, discover the unknown.” But what scientists believe in truth-to-nature calls for a further step from this simply selecting, comparing and judging. They do not want to be the slaves of nature, instead, they need to control this process. In this way, these 18th century scientists’ biggest problem centered on the untamed variability of nature. How to extract the essential form of one species and transit into a single picture? Here we see Goethe’s hypothesis again. He believed all plants could be derived through metamorphosis from a single prototype and this became the foundation of image-making in scientific atlas. In order to get this prototype from various different individual samples, artists have to look through a lot of them and then forget all of these. The next step is using their memory and imagination to depict an ideal picture of this species. The question is, the one who draws illustrations is artist but not scientist, how does scientist be sure what artist does is exactly what he wants? Sometimes scientists would choose an apprentice since they were young and train them through many years to make sure they can achieve what they need. Artists need do a lot of practice to learn how to observe, select and edit, and this observation practice at first come from other scientific atlas and after several years only they can draw actual objects. The ideal relationship between scientists and artists is that artists can be the hand of scientists without mind that called four-eyed sight. For scientists, artists are more like a medium than a subordinate. In conclude, 18th century scientists who pursued truth-to-nature was required to be active: observing and interpreting nature, monitoring and correcting artists.