Dimensions of Reality: Art, Physics, and Philosophy

Vol. 1: Classical Greece, The Renaissance, and The Enlightenment

Triptych by me, 2021 — *Triptych* by me, 2021

“There are only two kinds of artists - revolutionaries and plagiarists.”

— Paul Gauguin

Artists of the revolutionary kind are lighthouses on a foggy night, faintly signaling a major change in a civilization’s perspective.

“Organized perception is what art is all about…”

“… It is a process, it has nothing to do with any external form the painting takes, it has to do with a way of building a unified pattern of seeing” - Roy Lichenstein

Revolutionary perceptions

Sandro Botticelli (March 1, 1445 - May 17, 1510)

Leonardo Da Vinci (April 15, 1452 - May 2, 1519)

Michelangelo (March 6, 1475 - February 18, 1564)

Artemisia Gentileschi (July 8, 1593 - 1653)

Rembrandt (July 15, 1606 - October 4, 1669)

Julia Margaret Cameron (June 11, 1815 - January 26, 1879)

Édouard Manet (January 23, 1832 - April 30, 1883)

Paul Cézanne (January 19, 1839 - October 22, 1906)

Claude Monet (November 14, 1840 - December 5, 1926)

Vincent van Gogh (March 30, 1853 - July 29, 1890)

Hilma af Klint (October 26, 1862 - October 21, 1944)

Wassily Kandinsky (December 16, 1866 - December 13, 1944)

Henri Matisse (December 31, 1869 - November 3, 1954)

Piet Mondrian (March 7, 1872 - February 1, 1944)

Constantin Brâncuși (February 19, 1876 - March 16, 1957)

Pablo Picasso (October 25, 1881 - April 8, 1973)

Edward Weston (March 24, 1886 - January 1, 1958)

Marcel Duchamp (July 28, 1887 - October 2, 1968)

Georgia O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 - March 6, 1986)

Man Ray (August 27, 1890 - November 18, 1976)

Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 - October 11, 1965)

Alexander Calder (July 22, 1898 - November 11, 1976)

Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 - October 13, 1984)

Alberto Giacometti (October 10, 1901 - January 11, 1966)

Barbara Hepworth (January 10, 1903 - May 20, 1975)

Mark Rothko (September 25, 1903 - February 25, 1970)

Bill Brandt (May 2, 1904 - December 20, 1983)

Salvador Dalí (May 11, 1904 - January 23, 1989)

Louise Bourgeois (December 25, 1911 - May 31, 2010)

Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 - August 11, 1956)

Irving Penn (June 16, 1917 - October 7, 2009)

Diane Arbus (March 14, 1923 - July 26, 1971)

Roy Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 - September 29, 1997)

Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 - April 21, 2009)

Donald Judd (June 3, 1928 - February 12, 1994)

Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 - February 22, 1987)

Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 - August 12, 1988)

`Andy Warhol’s Untitled from Marilyn Monroe 1967.`

`An animation of Newton’s cradle, a device that demonstrates Newton’s law of conservation of energy.`

The Revolutionary Artist and the Visionary Physicist

Art and the artist

Art exists in an imaginative realm structured by aesthetic elements
Art creates illusion
Artists often juxtaposes different features of reality, and structure
Artists often structure juxtaposing features of reality to create an art work that is greater than the sum of its total parts
Artists commonly use signs, symbols, and allegories to equate an image with features of experienced reality

Physics and the physicist

Physics exists in a world of abstract mathematical relationships between quantifiable properties
Physics dissolves illusion
Physicists aim to break the structure of reality down into fundamental parts to analyze the relationships of those parts
Physicists prove that A equal’s B or that X is the same as Y

🎨 🔬

Revolutionary artists and visionary physicists both investigate the nature of reality, sharing a desire to investigate ways that the puzzle pieces of reality fit together.

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Art functions as a silent early warning system of a change in the the collective thinking and perception of a society, where the artist creates the unfamiliar images that anticipate future abstract ideas, which are then only fully realized later in time with descriptive language. Revolutionary artist’s alert that a conceptual shift is about to take place in the systems structuring the perception of the world. Revolutionary art, as well as visionary physics, attempts to speak and explain things that do not yet have a language to describe them. This is why their languages are often misunderstood by people outside their respective fields, and this is why abstract ideas can only be later realized once a descriptive language is available.

Art and philosophy in Classical Greece

Both physicists and artists share a philosophical interest in space, time, and light. Painters, sculptors, and philosophers since the time of classical Greece have made attempts at constructing a cohesive model of the relationships underlying space, time, and light. With the introduction of rational doubt in the ancient Greek system of thought, philosophers were able to begin investigating the nature of reality using reason and logic, and were no longer delimited by magical and mystical explanations.

Invention of the Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet was as revolutionary in its time as the advances of computer technology were in the early twenty-first century. It condensed thousands of images that made of older systems of communication like hieroglyphics, into twenty-four symbols. It was the civilization’s first abstract art form and when arranged together on a horizontal line in a non-arbitrary sequence, the abstract symbols become a decipherable entity that’s capable of transferring and embodying information. The meaning of these arrangements made of strings of conceptual entities, depends on a linear sequence, and therefore subtly impose causality onto the thinking process of the alphabet’s users.

Continual use of the Greek alphabet over a long period of time emphasized three aspects that were the foundation for the new conception of space, time and light, which was realized centuries later as a result of repeated use.

abstraction

linearity

continuity

Euclid

Euclid was a Greek mathematician who encoded space into a field of knowledge called geometry by translating abstract concepts into a coherent system of diagrams. His coherent system of space laid the framework for an entirely new science, and served as the basis for future models of time, space, and light. Five postulates, which Euclid formulated after defining terms and axioms in the system, serve as the infrastructure of Euclidean Geometry, and have held true for over two thousand years.
A straight line segment may be drawn from any given point to any other.
A straight line may be extended to any infinite length.
A circle may be described with any given point as its center and any distance as its radius.
All right angels are congruent.
if a straight line intersects two other straight lines, and so makes the two interior angels on one side of it together less than two right angels, then the other straight lines will meet at a point if extended far enough on the side on which the angels are less than two right angels.

`Euclidean space: uniform, continuous, and homogenous`

Euclid’s Elements

Collection of definitions, postulates, and propositions spread across thirteen different books. The book of all thirteen is possibly the second most widely read book in the history of the world, illustrating how Euclid’s worldview has remained nearly unchanged since it was proposed around twenty-three hundred years ago.

main-image (1).jpeg — The horizon line

is the only perfect obvious straight line that exists in nature, and is the central orienting line in our experience of reality.
Gustave Le Gray *The Great Wave* 1857

The essence of beauty is order, proportion, and limit

Aristotle

Created linear time and developed a problem-solving system of rational thinking based on the rules of logic. Proposed that the sun was the source of light, and that the rays it emitted bounced off objects in reality and into our eyes.

Socrates

Was one of the first philosophers to investigate the nature of reality using rationalism and reason, which separated the Greek system from traditional systems founded in religious beliefs.

Plato

Proposed that our eyes were the source of light, from which light rays emitted from.

`Golden ratio: two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities.`

`Pythagorean theorem: the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares on the other two sides.`

Detail of Parthenon Frieze c. 443 - 437 BC.

Detail of Parthenon Frieze with Poseidon, Apollo, and Artemis c. 443 - 437 BC.

Egastinai Frieze Louvre c. 445 - 435 BC.

The ancient Greek friezes in the gallery above were created long before the conception of Euclid’s space model, and their linear orientation of the figures illustrates how Greek artist’s and architects had been aware of the advantages of a uniform and continuous space model before it came to exist. All the forms exist on a single plane, and all the movement is in one direction.

The Renaissance awakens Stationary Perspective.

Perspective: a way of making an image on a two-dimensional surface in a way that the objects represented in it appear to have the same shapes, sizes, and positions, relative to each other.

Giotto di Bondone’s perspective (1276-1337)

Giotto was a Florentine painter who was the first artist in history to intuitively realize the benefits of painting a scene as if it was being viewed from a stationary point of view, that was organized around a horizontal and vertical axis. He also redefined the artist’s framework of time, treating each instance of visual experience similarly to a camera. Each of his paintings represented a single frozen instant in time, unlike the art previous to him which contained simultaneous representations of different events in the same image. In the middle of the fourteenth century, Nichole d’Oresme, invented a graphical means to plot scientific functions, allowing a means to express visually the abstract concepts of space, time, and motion. Giotto di Bondone’s perspective model and the scientific graph structured by a horizontal and vertical axis, illustrate how the key geometrical principle underlying art’s perspective and science’s graphs is the same.

Diagram-by-Leon-Battista-Alberti-of-perspective-lines-leading-to-a-vanishing-point-from.png — 1435: Leon Battista Alberti publishes a treaty on perspective that underscored the importance of a single vanishing point.

By painting a scene from one stationary perspective, an artist could now structure the axes of space in their proper relationships. Perspective turns the flat canvas into an illusory window, and stabilizes the visual experience.

The rise of Humanism during the Renaissance

A strong belief in an individual’s ability to judge for themselves engendered a new self-confidence and enthusiasm for the integrity of each person’s individual ideas, this cultminated into a philosophy known as Humanism. With Humanism the science and art of the age was expected to be the product of one person working alone.
`To the left is Leonardo Da Vinci’s Proportions of the Human Figure which he made in the spirit of the Humanism age.`

1665: Francesco Grimaldi observes that the shadows surrounding an opaque object have a thin layer of interference fringes.

Thirtteen years before Huygen’s 1678 wave theory, the post-Renaissance painter goes against the positions of Galileo and Newton, proposing that light was not a stream of particles, but was rather a fluid-like substance that could flow around objects.

Da Vinci presents a new way to see the world, before Newton discovers a new way to think about the world.

Both Da Vinci and Newton developed a code of laws that constitute the physical universe. Da Vinci formulated his code through seeing the world from an analytical perspective, while Newton’s code originated through thinking about the world in terms of mathematical relationships and formulas. Newton used mathematics to study and work out what Da Vinci was able to express concisely in his drawings and studies. Da Vinci changed the way people saw the world, and by doing so, prepared people to be receptive when Newton later introduced a new way to think about the world.

Artist: Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519)

Physicist: Sir Issac Newton (1643-1727)

The brain’s highest function: abstraction

Eruption of the Deluge (1514)

Da Vinci had an interest in abstract design, leading him to be the first European artist to draw a landscape, and marking the first steps in the direction of abstraction rather than symbolic or referential approaches to representation. Pure landscapes, void of any visual hierarchy of human-made things or people, are the origins of a change in vision that recognizes patterns in nature rather than objects. Eruption of the Deluge (above) illustrates Da Vinci’s ability to create an abstract image that anticipated by four hundred years abstract work like those from Kandinsky or Mondrian.

Invention of calculus (1660s)

Like Da Vinci, Newton believed that pure mathematics was the highest expression of the mind, and invented calculus as a way of reducing the visual world down to mathematical relationships that explain the nature of reality. A German mathematician by the name of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz got a hold of Newton’s notes on calculus and claimed to have invented calculus on his own. Newton at first was reluctant to come forward and claim credit for inventing calculus, but was convinced to finally unveil his calculus by publishing it in the proceedings of the Royal Society. He then wrote letters to the society under fake names, disputing Leibniz’s claim, and was persistent enough that the Royal Society gave him the official honor of discovering calculus.

Motion nerds

The subject of motion took up a significant portion of their contributions to humankind. Newton’s interest to explain celestial motion culminated in the formulation of his three laws of motion. Da Vinci came close to the essence of Newton’s laws, but rarely gets acknowledged for his observation about inertia that he came up with two centuries before Newton did.

Da Vinci’s Principle of Leonardo

“All movement tends to maintenance, or rather all moved bodies continue to move as long as the impression of the force of their motors (original impetus) remains in them.”

Newton’s First Law of Motion

“Every body continues its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.”

newton's-first-law---examples-example-2---ball-moving.362acc1.gif

Da Vinci’s contributions to our knowledge of light from his paintings

No artist in the history of art, other than Da Vinci, has been able to capture the mysterious iridescent quality of light in a way that is accurately representative of the visual world, and that permeates the painting with a transcendental quality. Da Vinci achieves this dialectic effect through a highly skilled handling of sfumato, a technique that uses subtle gradations of light and shadow to model form.

Da Vinci’s Artifacts

Battle of Anghiari: the most detailed anatomical descriptions of humans and animals in motion in the history of art (1505).

Da Vinci's invention of the helicopter (1452-1519).

Da Vinci's invention of the parachute (15th century).

Andreas Vesaliu's De humani corporis fabrica: the first modern medical textbook, published in 1543, owes a majority of its existence to Da Vinci's anatomical studies.

Codex Atlanticus: 12 volume set of notes, drawings, schemes, studies, and facial profiles that contain some of the Da Vinci's astonishing revelations (1478).

Newton’s Artifacts

Newton's Principia: mathmatical principles of philosophy (1687).

Newton's Opticks: a treaty on light that is concerned with understanding the nature of light rather than seeing the effects of light (1704).

Newton's light experiment that explains how white light can be broken down into different colors when refracted through a prism (1672).

Newton's invention of the reflecting telescope (1668).

giphy (1).gif — “The eye is the window of the human body through which it feels its way and enjoys the beauty of the world. Owing to the eye the soul is content to stay in its bodily prison, for without it such bodily prison is torture.”

Leonardo Da Vinci

Neoclassical realism and Newton’s classical mechanics in the Age of Reason (1715-1789)

By around 1725, science had taken religion’s place and reigned as the supreme social force in Western culture. Neoclassical realism and Newton’s classical mechanics became the standard ways to see and think. Line and geometry, the vehicles of reason, prevailed in art and science. In painting, perspective sat at the throne, serving as the essence of painting at the time. Perspective became so vital to artists that measurements and theorems triumphed intuition in the creative process, and artists organized space mathematically, in a similar fashion to physicists.

The Enlightenment

Period in which democracy, personal liberty, capitalism, socialism, industrialization, technological innovation, urbanization, modern science, electricity and oxygen, chemistry and natural science, and the doctrine of progress emerged among other modern concepts, all driven by modern philosophy and Newton’s mechanics. Also referred to as the Age of Reason.

Realism

The realistic depiction of objects as viewed in perspective.

Empiricism

The idea that knowledge comes from practical experience rather than the abstract thought or religious revelation. For Newton this entailed personally collecting data and observations, and applying this information in a rational, logical way.

Determinism

The doctrine that every effect had an antecedent cause.

Neoclassicism: a “new classicism” that illustrates the virtuous actions and deeds of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and embraces the logic and morality of the Enlightenment (1760s-1850s).

The collection of paintings below come from two revolutionary artists of the Neoclassical period who came to virtually epitomize the Neoclassical period.

Oath of the Horatii by Jacques-Louis David (1784)

The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons by Jacques-Louis David (1789)

The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David (1793)

Portrait of Madame Récamier by Jacques-Louis David (1800)

The Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David (1807)

The Distribution of the Eagle Standards by Jacques-Louis David (1810)

Grande Odalisque by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1814)

Louise de Broglie, Countess d’Haussonville by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1845)

“Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments.”

John Constable

Philosopher’s sixth essence: 🧠

While the physicist’s world consisted of five essences: space, time, motion, matter, and light, philosophers striving to bring the same level of organization to their field had to contend with a sixth essence: the mind.

René Descartes (1596-1650)

Young philosopher who emerged at the threshold between the fall of the Vatican’s reign and the rise of modern European philosophy. Taking advantage of rational discourse’s stipulation that allowed for doubt from its practitioners, unlike religious teaching, Descartes systematically began doubting every single one of his beliefs, proclaiming that “in order to reach the truth, it is necessary, once in one’s life, to put everything in doubt - so far as possible.” In doubting everything, Descartes believed he had reached a ground zero from which he could construct a new philosophy. His philosophy was founded on a strict dualism between mind and matter where each was said to be separate and distinct. Believing that there had to be a reason for everything, his philosophy also was rooted in determinism, and described a universe of cause and effect. Descartes also discovered analytic geometry, translating pure abstract mental functioning of algebra into concrete visual shapes of geometry. By doing so, he fused pure thought with visual space, which was key for future progresses in science.

`“No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.”`

John Locke (1632-1704)

A post-Renaissance philosopher who was obsessed with addressing issues of the mind, and sought to know who was doing the reasoning. Locke proposed that all knowledge about the world came from experience and through our senses, proposing that “there is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses. The mind is at birth a clean sheet, and sense-experience writes upon it in a thousand ways, until sensation begets memory and memory begets ideas.” Locke’s philosophy was founded in materialism, and according to him, sensations were the rudimentary seeds of thought, and since sensations were activated by matter from the outside world, matter was therefore the raw material that made up the mind’s completed thoughts. Aiming to cohesively connect mind and matter, Locke said that the mind is like a dark room, and internal and external sensations let pictures of the outside world into it.

`“To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all is nothing but to perceive.”`

David Hume (1711-1776)

An essayist, skeptic, and one of the most important philosophers to write in English. Hume founded his philosophy in naturalism, and according to him, the mind exists solely as an abstraction that weaves together perceptions, memories, and emotions to become the “I” of an individual’s identity. The self is then nothing but a non-material collection of experiences that are not solely dependent on either sensation or matter, but both. Hume says, “when I enter most intimately into what I call myself I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” So, no matter how critically we examine our own self, we can never observe anything beyond a perception of transient feelings, sensations, and impressions. Therefore neither mind nor matter could be the sole source of thought because our observations are led by perception, and our ideas feed our perception. Hume proves that experience and reason have no explicit link between them. Additionally, Hume also declared that the laws discovered by science were not inherently linked to the world but only products of the scientists’ minds. Relating to this idea, Hume says, “we never perceive causes or laws. We only observe events that occur in space in a certain sequence. Sequence, however, should not be confused as a law of causality. Just because B follows A, it does not mean that A caused B.” So according to Hume, there is no necessity of cause and effect in any sequence of events, but our minds impose continuity that is generated by our steadfast belief in cause and effect. However, mathematical equations are the exception. Hume says that they have necessity, and alone are inherently true and immutable, two plus two will always equal four.

Rationalism. Antirationalism?

Philosopher-critic: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

“Although all knowledge begins with experience, it does not necessarily all spring from experience.”

Kant did for philosophy what Newton did for science, crossing the threshold that Locke hoped to, and placing reason on a plane coequal with Newton’s calculus. First he made the declaration that our knowledge of the world is not completely derived from our experiences, instead he proposed that there is a large collective knowledge about ourselves and the world that is inextricably linked to our minds the moment we being to exist. After observing that experience never gives us the complete truth, Kant began questioning whether we have knowledge independent of our senses and experience, some truth that is absolute. Kant reasoned that some truths are independent of experience, for example that “the straight line between two points is the shortest” is an absolute truth because it “carries with it necessity, which cannot be derived from experience.” According to Kant, the mind uses a selection process in order to maintain order over our senses, and Kant believes that this process was dependent on space and time. Space and time, the same basis structures of Newton’s external system of the world, were built directly into the structure of our thought and were organs of perception. He proposed we know how to use causality because it’s an absolute truth innate in us, and we analyze the world in terms of causal relations to organize our thoughts. In Kant’s model of space, there could only be three dimensions and it had to be Euclidean. Additionally, Kant argued that “time is nothing but the form of inner sense, that is, of the intuition of ourselves and of our inner state,” however it is still flowing at a constant rate in a single direction. Countering Hume’s skepticism, Kant proposed that space, time, and casualty are are inherent in the mind, absolute truths which allow us to agree with one another that our inner worlds (or perceptions) are similar enough to each other’s that we can assume we think and see the world the same. Kant’s philosophy became known as Transcendental Idealism.

Mystic-artist: William Blake (1757-1827)

“Nations are Destroy’d or Flourish in proportion as Their Poetry, Painting and Music are Destroy’d or Flourish.”

Blake was a mystic-artist and anti-rationalism proponent who sought to eradicate linear perspective in the arts and deterministic logic in the sciences. He claimed to experience otherworldly visions on a daily basis, telling one of his friends, “I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you what Ought to be Told. That I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven, Daily & Nightly.” He was a strong advocate against anything Newton related and warned against “single vision and Newton’s sleep” in one of his poems, accusing the stationary perspective that emerged from the Renaissance and Newton’s mechanics, of casting a spell upon the West. He believed that we are all divine beings and that God used our imaginations as a vehicle that travels into the physical world in the form of art. Throughout the entire time that perspectivist art dominated, Blake never drew figures in their exact perspectivist relationships. He promulgated the belief that the way to truth and higher consciousness was by contemplating art in an immersive way as to experience not just for aesthetic pleasure, but as a parallel to a meditative experience.