Review - Seen | Unseen

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Review - Seen | Unseen - Martin Kemp

Art/science crossover books present the author with a hugely difficult task - and rarely succeed. One of the problems is that the authors almost always seem to come from the art side. This is odd, when you consider there are many more scientists that appreciate the arts than there are artists that appreciate science. But Martin Kemp, an art historian, boldly goes where few dare to tread, into territory he describes as "art, science and intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope."

In practice, the science makes a dramatic leap from around Galileo to Darwin with little in between, but there's certainly plenty to enjoy in this 350 page book on glossy pages, loaded with illustrations. In fact in size and feel it sits halfway between a normal non fiction book and a coffee table book, and my suspicion is that it will be used more as the latter.

Things get off to a rather bumpy start, when those responsible for the introduction of perspective in art are implied (with certain provisos) to have lead the way for those who used coordinate space in science. This is a very tenuous claim - Roger Bacon, for instance, in the 1260s was already advocating maps based on X/Y coordinate systems, and the study of the Earth's surface using 3D polar coordinates. Just because Descartes formalized the relationship between "Cartesian" coordinates and algebra doesn't mean that the concept wasn't around in science long before.

After that the book settles down, and comes up with some interesting intertwining of art and science, even though it's hard to resist the occasional misinterpretation of quantum theory's probabilistic nature with a more sophisticated version of the classic "arty" interpretation typified in the disastrous movie What the **** do we know?, an interpretation that thinks that quantum theory implies there is no objective reality, just what we perceive.

The book is at its best with science that has a more easy contact with art - in botanic drawing, the connection between fractal images and nature and early photography, for example. However, after getting through it at some length, it was hard not to think "and?" The central tenet is supposed to be the way that scientists and artists recognize "regular structural intuitions" in their work. I can't say I was left convinced, and in the end felt that the effort of working through the sometimes extremely wordy prose didn't deliver.

Only in hardback

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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