7 - Visualization: An Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
Summary
The eye is the master of astronomy. It makes cosmography. It advises and corrects all human arts…. The eye carries men to different parts of the world. It is the prince of mathematics…. It has created architecture, and perspective, and divine painting…. It has discovered navigation.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)In the sixteenth century a new culture burgeoned in Western Europe, especially in its cities, as Bruegel celebrated in his print Temperance, discussed in Chapter 1. Hours were equal, mapmakers envisioned the earth's surface in degrees of arc, and ambitious men like Shakespeare's Cassio and Shylock, though their fingers might still flutter in reckoning insignificant transactions, calculated and recorded their major transactions and increasingly thought in Hindu-Arabic numerals.
It all seems quite normal to us, but only because we are Cassio's and Shylock's direct heirs. We are blinded by our “common sense” to the magnitude of the revolution in mentalité that produced our quantitative approaches to reality. A half millennium before Bruegel the quantitative trait in die Western European personality (if we may speak of such an entity) was recessive and, in the modern view, bizarre. Dozens of factors could override requirements for numerical clarity and exactness in measurement. As brilliant a thinker and mathematician as Roger Bacon was so passionately engaged in the pursuit of the numinous that he could accept 693 as close enough to the number of the Beast of Revelation to be just that.
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- The Measure of RealityQuantification in Western Europe, 1250–1600, pp. 129 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996