Our modern understanding of science and culture builds on two key concepts: a representationalist concept of space that presupposes the unification of arithmetic and geometry; and the concept of subjective autonomy. The theoretical formulation of these concepts can be traced back to Descartes’ Discours de la méthode, which was published together with his Dioptrics and Geometry in 1637. However, as I will demonstrate in a forthcoming book, both concepts had already rapidly emerged 200 years earlier after architect Filippo Brunelleschi’s public ‘demonstrations’ of the linear perspective in Florence in 1425. The modern concepts of science and culture were not invented by scientists, but were rather the outcome of an artistic vision of space. This explains why the accompanying vision of scientific realism was successful despite its anti-realist presuppositions and mathematical flaws.
In 1435 Leon Battista Alberti provided in his book De pictura what is assumed to be the first theoretical account of the principles that stood behind Brunelleschi’s experiments. This account built on Biagio Pelacani da Parma’s mathematization of the visual space with which he became acquainted at the lectures of Biagio’s disciple Prosdocimus de’ Beldomandis during his study time in Padua. Nicholas of Cusa may have met Alberti during these lectures, and he certainly made his acquaintance later at the ‘Florentine Stammtisch’ of his close friend Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli where Brunelleschi was also present. In his first philosophical book De docta ignorantia of 1440-42 Cusa developed a more mathematically rigorous account of the mathematization of space that avoids the simplifications of Alberti, and displays amazing similarities to the alternative liturgical vision of space in the north Burgundy paintings of artists such as Jan van Eyck.
