Cover: Portrait of Maffeo Barberini

30 year old Caravaggio, 1599 Oil on canvas, 124 x 90 cm Private collection, Florence

Barberini was a Florentine by birth, but grew up in Rome where he inherited enormous wealth. He received a Doctor of Law degree from the University of Pisa in 1589 – the year that Galileo joined the faculty. Barberini was ordained in 1592, made Cardinal by Pope Paul V in 1606, served as a papal legate to the Court of King Henry IV in France, and elected Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Urban and Galileo’s friendship was affectionate but their falling-out is legendary as a template of how-not-to-treat-your-friend.

PREFACE

Against The Grain is an account of the work of 16th century contemporaries, Galileo Galilei and Michelangelo Merisi (aka Caravaggio). Each was a colorful character, each with an engaging and even tragic story. We regard them today as revolutionaries since one dramatically changed science and the other, painting. This book is an attempt to explore the idea that creating a new ways of representing the world – in these two seemingly different endeavors – have similar characteristics. Broadly: our subjects are science, art, and change.

“Representation” is a big, loaded word. In philosophy, it can refer to the notion that we acquire knowledge through mental images standing for objects in a real world. This has implications in cognitive psychology, philosophy of knowledge, physics, and mathematics.
Representative art refers to a painting or sculpture that “looks like” or depicts an object in the world.
Our subject matter is painting of the Renaissance and Baroque periods which are indeed of “recognizable things,” so representative in this sense. My thesis might ultimately apply to non-representative, abstract art as well.
Context will make clear my use of this word: usually I’ll mean it in a non-technical, generic sense. If we are speaking or writing or painting about the world, then in a general sense, that’s my representation.

My title, “Against The Grain” is a nice phrase to describe my two protagonists’ paths but it brings to mind a status quo and a breaking free and when novel insight leads to deeper understanding, a new world. It’s not smooth. It’s against the grain. That’s how you get into textbooks: you make worlds.

“Worldmaking” pays homage to the philosopher Nelson Goodman who worked in both the philosophy of science and the philosophy of art. In Ways of Worldmaking, he made the direct connection of art and science each abstracting and symbolizing descriptions of the world as an active action by the observer – the world-maker.

Against the Grain is an historical, scientific, and aesthetic ride through the late 16th and early 17th centuries, capping a wild time in Italy. Uniquely, our two guys turned against the grain and created ideas with staying power. I want to explore this within the context of a method that we’ll develop as we go along. I’ll track the inherited intellectual and social climate which forged their early commitments. Ultimately, they broke free and when they were done, their new worlds became the foundations for centuries’ worth of progress in painting and physics.

I’ve been a professional particle physicist for almost half a century and I’ve found that I suffer from an unusual affliction that affects my undergraduate and even graduate-level teaching — and my research. Before I can learn something new or teach something old, I have to know its history. This isn’t an especially efficient way to work but it’s led to a fulfilling pastime and I suspect broad classroom experiences.

I’m also fascinated by painting and sculpture and have enjoyed viewing and analyzing works in museums all over the world. I’ve developed an appreciation for the history and philosophy of art, actually catalyzed by my background in the history and philosophy of science.

Art and science are parallel ways of representing the world and I see commonalities worth exploring.

As a graduate student I considered jumping from my engineering degree to a program in the Philosophy of Science but after a joint physics-philosophy masters degree, I decided to go all-in with the former and I’ve not looked back. Much. But it stuck in my head.

Did you take a few “General Education” courses outside of your major in college? That’s a uniquely North American approach to higher education and credited to Harvard University president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell who began transforming undergraduate education in 1909. Under him, fields of concentration (majors) were established along with required sampling of courses outside of majors. “A well-educated man must know a little bit of everything and one thing well.” affected college education across America to this day. There’s plenty of evidence that general education science courses elevate American students’ appreciate for science beyond that of other parts of the modern world.

This book is an expanded account of part of such a course that I’ve taught at Michigan State University that follows the history of physics and art from the Greeks to the twentieth century.

So Against the Grain is a late-life attempt to finally settle an internal score. Glued together: my Philosophy of Science background, my lifetime as a scientist, my experience an art history amateur, and some ideas worth working out. I’ll be eager to see how this develops as we go!



INTRODUCTION

I ain’t gonna pay no attention to your rules. – AC/DC, Breaking The Rules

Every town in Italy has fathered genius, and then banished it. – Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Renaissance

The late critic, Robert Hughes was hard to please. So it was noteworthy when he remarked about a 1985 Metropolitan exhibition, “…there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same…” The subject of his admiration was the 17th century hooligan, Michelangelo Merisi, who named himself after his northern Italian village, Caravaggio.

If Hughes had written “science” instead of “art,” his sentiment would have almost perfectly described a Caravaggio contemporary. Another Baroque troublemaker, Galileo Galilei.

Wait. Those two portraits look the same.
Glad you asked. They both sat for the preeminent Roman portrait artist, Ottavio Leoni. So they were themselves famous enough to be sketched and both while in Rome. (The Caravaggio piece was done after Caravaggio’s death.) The Galileo sketch is from 1624, a year when he was riding high and enjoyed six audiences with Pope Urban VIII.

Durant’s observation at the top hints at something was strange about Italy. There was, but the rest of Europe wasn’t sleeping as burgeoning science was happening all over. Elizabeth I’s physician, William Gilbert, was doing recognizable experimental science on magnetism in England during this same time. Francis Bacon was trying to describe the inductive process in way too many words. Plus, the sad-sack, Johannes Kepler — a real revolutionary — was remaking astronomy in Germany as it lurched towards the terrible 30 Years War. And in the arts, Shakespeare lived in time right alongside Galileo and Caravaggio. Meanwhile, Velazquez discovered black and Rubens discovered full-figured ladies. So no, it wasn’t only in Italy where new things happened. But important historical strands came together in Italy with consequences that apply to both of my Italians and their new ideas.

New' ideas? These two worked at a whole different level of New.

Against The Grain (ATG) is a story about two rebels who didn’t just break the rules — they ignored them. We’re fascinated by such characters because most of us don’t have the courage to live regulation-free. But with bad manners and attitudes…these two seemed incapable of avoiding tragic life choices, disappointing their supporters, and enraging their critics. Yet for all of the turmoil, in their wake worlds changed and rules were rewritten.

You’ve probably remembered some stories of Galileo since myths about him are woven into our western cultural fabric. I’ll bet that the first time you heard of the Leaning Tower of Pisa was from the Galileo fable. Beyond supposedly dropping things from tall buildings, he will forever be the very definition of the persecuted hero: the sick, old man standing head-bowed in front of the Inquisition, tortured for his independent views. Together, we solemnly nod at his uncompromising bravery in the face of unwarranted oppression, mumbling to himself after the verdict that “it moves.” A Legendary Warrior for Truth! Nope. It didn’t happen like that. These and other stories, all made up.

These two guys were contemporaries and seemed to have a handful of secondary overlaps, but never actually met.

In my business we speak and teach of Galileo as the Father of Physics for many reasons. Most famously, he made — and interpreted, published, and promoted — astonishing astronomical observations. For we physicists, his big score was the long-overdue, correct description of motion. But by themselves, these accomplishments alone didn’t sire physics. No, his legacy is more subtle, informed by the spirit of his Florence and enunciated in increasingly reckless ways as he entered late middle age: he invented how to do physics at great personal cost.

Galileo will be my focus, but his turbulent life was wrapped around the mad Caravaggio saga which has captivated readers for 400 years. Here we’ll visit the operatically tragic life of Caravaggio. The Bad Boy of Painting…street-gang brawls around Piazza Navona by night, and by day, lucrative commissions for his outrageous religious paintings. Biographers feast on his story: running for his life from the Pope (who’s successor he’d painted and who would later prosecute Galileo), a knighthood, a jail break, a holdup, a hospital, a runaway ship, malaria, death, and a Cardinal whose sticky fingers adhered to an artistic fortune.

Oh, but those Caravaggio images. They grab you by the lapels like no contorted mannerist fluff can do.

Caravaggio’s artistic development is hard to figure out. He didn’t write. He didn’t live long enough to form a school or cultivate followers and yet almost no painter after him wasn’t influenced by his work. Rembrandt, Vermeer, David, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, and on and on are inconceivable but for Caravaggio’s magic. As the 17th century Painter-Noir, even modern movie-makers still pay him homage.

So why one more story about Galileo or Caravaggio, much less both of them? I’ll explore the obvious reasons why they are in our textbooks, but I’d also like to suggest that their legacies grow from related origins. This particular time in history — this unusual period in the late 1500s — was as critical to the histories of science and art as were the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

ART AND SCIENCE, RE-PRESENTED

Over and over in the history of both art and science we see how champions reinvent the New by blazing different intellectual trails, making it safe for the rest of us to follow, just not as the tip of the creative spear. For Galileo and Caravaggio, science and art needed to be monumental. Picasso remarked, “…painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” Oh, yes. For these two Rebels With Causes, the instruments of their war were there talents and attitudes.

We’ll dig deeper for the similarities in spirit with artistic and scientific change, revolution, and observation. But there are other interesting parallels. Here’s my five-cent rendition of what an painter does: a painter uses a set of specialized skills, guided by inspired imagination, to depict nature by making symbolic marks with a brush. “Nature” can be the “outside” world of things (landscapes, portraits, still lifes); an “inside world” of ideas (super heroes, fictional accounts); or a hard-wired world of our basic cognitive, visual machinery (lines, colors, or forms).

This is almost exactly what a physicist does: she uses a set of specialized skills, guided by inspired imagination, to depict nature by making marks with pencil.

I’m going to try to convince you that many art and science are similar in many ways: in how they progress, how they’re presented, and how they’re interpreted. Here we go:

1. The history of art suggests that it is episodic.
2. Art relies on observation and perception.
3. Art is public.
4. Art is a form of non-verbal language.
5. Art has a number of heroes and a community of exceptional practitioners
6. Art is a practice of abstraction.
7. Old art is as ``useful’’ as new art.
8. What is or is not art is debated in society at large.

What about Science?

1. The history of Science suggests that it is episodic.
2. Science relies on observation and perception.
3. Science is public.
4. Science, especially physics, uses a form of non-verbal language.
5. Science has a number of heroes and a community of exceptional practitioners.
6. Sciences, especially physics, is a process of abstraction.
7. Old Science is sometimes as “useful” as new Science.
8. What is or is not science is debated in society at large.

That was fun. There are probably other disciplines that fit this list. Economics? Psychology? In any case, this set alone is fuel for an interesting discussion. But I’m thinking that similarities go deeper.

The top two of these parallel lists are my focus and I’d like to contrast their applications in two seemingly disparate fields of physics and painting.

THE EPISODIC NATURE OF PROGRESS

We commonly speak of distinctions among periods of art and periods of physics. This implies change, new ways of behaving, and then another change. Are there similarities? That’s interesting.

CHANGE IN THE HISTORY OF ART

If we were to play the standard late-night game of sticking a microphone in pedestrian’s faces with a question: “Can you name an artistic movement?” I predict that almost everyone would come up with an acceptable answer. “Renaissance” would be a favorite. “Impressionism” would be another. Maybe “Baroque” or “Romanticism” or “Abstraction” would also emerge. These are all good answers.

If you visit an art museum, it’s typical to wander through galleries that are side by side, connected by doors so that you can avoid the crowded central hallway. You’ll find that the art is arranged by color. The first room will feature paintings which are predominantly red. The next room, yellow. The next after that, green. And so on. No? Maybe you’ll find in some museums that the first room will contain paintings of only women. The next, paintings of mountains. Then, a room of children paintings followed by one of old men…and so on. Right?

Of course that’s silly. Each room in most large museums divides artworks chronologically, and usually by “period.” Early Renaissance, Late Renaissance, Mannerism, and so on. The clear assumption is that one room contains art that’s collectively similar among the pieces and discernibly different room to room. Artistic periods evolve and sometimes in relatively abrupt and even dramatic ways. It follows then, that one person or a group was first — first to see and render their surroundings in new ways.

It wasn’t always so. Before Georgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Vasari and Getscher 2003) artists didn’t realize they were participating in movements. After that, everyone thought that way.

The Episodic History of Art: Characteristics?

Now most of us accept that art has changed over time and in identifiable, chunky ways. But that’s one of those concepts that’s easy to say and hard to define. What makes Renaissance painting different from Mannerist painting? Romanticism from Realism? How does one know that the world has passed from one style to another? This 16C idea of Vasarri is now a 21C (and 20C and 19C) given. And a way for folks to agree and disagree about what characterizes Change.

Is there a formula or a pattern for artistic period change?

CHANGE IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

A working project in the Philosophy of Science that there is a formula for scientific period change. The question is which one?

In the early 1970s while I was actively reading philosophy and writing a masters thesis in Physics and the Philosophy of Science, philosophers of science had become an excited bunch: they’d discovered that the history of science was a critical element in the philosophy of science. As obvious as that sounds, unbelievably only by the 1960’s had the philosophy community’s study of how science progresses been compared against what actual scientists do. Rhyming with Lenin, Imre Lakatos was one of the new ones:

“Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.” Imre Lakatos

Maybe you’ve heard the phrase, “paradigm shift”? Before the physicist-turned-philosopher Thomas Kuhn resurrected it, nobody said “paradigm.” After his historic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), it became “paradigm this,” and “paradigm that,” inside of the philosophy of science, but then everywhere.

Wait. I’ve heard that word.
Glad you asked. Before Kuhn, “paradigm” was an anachronism. Ask Mr Google about how “paradigm” functions now. He’ll give you 120 million hits to choose among.

Beyond dusting off an old word, Kuhn started something new — a revolution, so to speak — in the Philosophy of Science itself. There had been others with the same inclination, but Kuhn got the credit and the blame.

The central idea in Kuhn’s philosophy of science was first, that science goes through periodic revolutions following standard features and second, that the before and after are so different that proponents of one couldn’t even communicate with proponents of the other. In some ways it’s like transitioning from baseball to football seasons. The aims of the two sports are the same and there are social elements of team play and competitiveness that are common. But the rules of the games are entirely different and football and baseball players would have an impossible time competing in the other’s league.

Between revolutions? That’s “normal science” for Kuhn and that’s where most of us work. He suggested that we approach our jobs as puzzle-solvers, working within a set of norms and accepted ideas. We lower our gaze when facing contradiction and keep working, unless those contradictions persist and become impossible to ignore. Then: Revolution.

The Episodic History of Science: Characteristics?

In the section before I asked if there was a formula to describe change in art history. The issue since then has been how, rather than whether, does a formula for scientific change work.

There is much that doesn’t ring true in Kuhn’s approach and Imre Lakatos and Larry Laudan attempted to go beyond him, and we’ll talk about them. I’ll have an opinion as a scientist who’s worn ill-fitting philosopher spectacles throughout my scientific career.

Here’s the idea: While reinterpreting Kuhn, et al. in my own way will be fun, I’m really interested in exploring whether a scientific change formula can be adapted to help interpret the History of Art.

But wait, there’s more.

Here’s an additional ingredient that’s worth exploring.

Is observation a neutral operation? See and paint. See and theorize. That particular commitment changed in the Philosophy of Science and in the Philosophy of Art, at about the same time. Isn’t that interesting?

Maybe one way to distinguish epochs in both science and art stems from what artists and scientists as well as observers bring to the table when they perceive their world.

THERE’S MORE TO SEEING THAN MEETS THE EYE

About 1960 a notion was simmering in both the Philosophy of Science and in the History of Art that to observe is not the neutral, “blank slate” process that was commonly accepted. Intriguingly, this notion of a “theory-ladenness” (the Philosophy of Science phrase) in observation happened independently in both fields. These ideas are most associated with Ernst Gombrich (Art and Illusion, 1960) and Norwood Russell Hanson (Patterns of Discovery, 1958). Their common timing and lack of overlap is interesting.

I recognize this idea. Notoriously, discoveries in physics often follow missed opportunities. What separates discovery from mistake can sometimes be what individual scientists are prepared to accept as an observation…and what they are not. Among many examples, when the positron was discovered (a focus of Hanson’s) acceptance of it required Paul Dirac’s new theory of antimatter. Once it was confirmed by Anderson, “positrons” were found to have been previously lurking in many prior experiments! But those earlier scientists were not prepared for such an odd particle: their theories filtered their observations. A revolution of sorts was required in order to take that step.

Hanson (and others) convincingly suggested: observation and drawing conclusions from observation are colored by preconceived ideas.

Does this work in art? Might observation in art be theory-laden as well? Raphael wrote in a letter to Castiglione,

“I know that to paint a beautiful woman I should see several…”

suggesting that a (contemporary) theory of beauty was required in order to paint a beautiful woman. He couldn’t succeed by just painting what he saw.

This touches the new art history thesis from the 1960’s. From Art and Illusion: “There is no reality without interpretation; just as there is no innocent eye, there is no innocent ear.” (It’s subtitle is “A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation.”)

Gombrich (and others) convincingly suggested: observation and drawing conclusions from observation are colored by preconceived ideas.

THREE THEMES OF ATG

So I’m intrigued:

• Science and art appear to abruptly change in time. Are there commonalities?
• Observation in art and science seem both to rely on prior understanding and community norms. Are both similarly theory-laden processes?

In ATG we’ll do some philosophy of science. As a practicing particle physicist, I’ve had fun over 40 years secretly donning those ill-fitting philosopher-spectacles as I sometimes stood back and watched myself and my colleagues through that personal Thomas-Kuhn-lens. A part of my story will be my own tweaking of Kuhn’s philosophy – actually, Lakatos’ – and why some of their ideas do…and don’t… ring true to me. My first hope is that you will acquire a new tool that you can use to evaluate present-day as well as historical topics in science.

In ATG we’ll also do some history. My university life’s connection to art history is relatively recent. About 20 years ago I committed myself to teaching physics to non-science students and I taught a course on the history of physics for honors undergraduates. In that course, I weave my physics story with the contemporaneous history of art by following them both from the Greeks to the 20th century. Of course scientific and artistic deliverables matter the most, but real people create those outcomes. In our case, real people affected by the you-can’t-make-this-up political and social turmoil that was 17C Italy as well as a natural science and artistic tradition that was bursting at their seams. I found that my honors students all wished they’d known more about art and so my second hope is ATG can stimulate your interest in art as well.

In ATG let’s put them together and do something new. As I taught these two subjects together, I began to realize that some of the characteristics of how and when physics abruptly changes seemed similar in spirit to historical, sharp changes among artistic movements. I think that’s interesting and for no extra charge ATG includes a Project:

I think it will be fun to take those modern philosophical-algorithms that model scientific progress and apply them to the history of art. So I hope you’ll find this interesting and look at art and science from a new perspective. Likewise, having reviewed the scientific and art historic views on Representation, we’ll be observant to those aspects of art and physics history of our chosen era.

My two subjects were men with tragic failings, possessed of a painful abundance of imagination, impatient with their circumstances and their contemporaries. The price of remaking worlds.

So, in ATG, we will explore two heroic Baroque biographies as a backdrop to a question about relationships between artistic and scientific change and representation.

WHAT’S AHEAD

My ATG plan is the following:

I’ll build a narrative and gather the tools in Parts I-V.

• We’ll do some philosophy of science and art (Part I).
• In order to set the stage for Galileo, we’ll need a little Greek philosophy (Part II).
• Well review some of the political and artistic history of Italy (Part III).
• All of this will lead to an interleaved scientific and artistic biography of our two heroes as youngsters (Part IV) and professionals (Part V).

Then, the Project. In Part VI, we’ll begin the experiment inside of our little ATG laboratory: dusting off and repackaging tools originally designed to analyze the history and philosophy of science. I’ll apply them to Galileo’s work in Part VI as an experimental control.

• And then I want to test my scientific tool kit flexibility by doing an analysis of Caravaggio’s work and context in Part VII. That’s new.

So: two guinea pigs, Galileo and Caravaggio, analyzed in parallel from two overlapping, but separately named historical eras, the Artistic Baroque and the Scientific Revolution.

Let’s go to Vienna by way of central Germany.