Submission #16: To what extent do scientific advances influence the way art is created?

Before photographs and the ability to capture exactly a moment, artists would capture these moments through their art. They would paint things that they could see with their naked eye; landscapes, people, flowers, etc. However, once telescopes and microscopes were invented, people had a better understanding of how the world looks. So, do scientific advancements influence what art is created; do they influence what is painted and how it is painted?

            To clarify with a situation, did the invention and further advancements of the telescope affect how the sky was painted in art during those time periods? Were there more stars painted because we now know that they are out there? With a microscope, were details of faces and bodies more realistic because the people finally understood what was going on in the tiny cells in our bodies? Changes in scientific tools helped people better understand the world and helped them realize what happens and why it happens. In an article by BigThink titled “Scientific Revolutions in Optics Made Vermeer a Revolutionary Painter” (http://bigthink.com/Picture-This/vermeers-revolution-in-seeing?hash=ce934b50-b1ed-4292-8616-2ea2c373cd39), historian-philosopher Laura J. Snyder explored how the camera obscura helped Johannes Vermeer create paintings using a new perspective in her book Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Revolution in Seeing. She explained that the camera obscura, which was “a device known that concentrates colors to a chromatic intensity by narrowing the range of brightness, thus allowing the viewer to see colors even in shadows, while transforming a three-dimensional image into two dimensions, thus allowing the viewer to better perceive perspective.” Due to this camera, Vermeer was able to paint paintings that showed the different colors of shadows. Snyder explains this as “What Vermeer was painting was the way the eye actually sees, not the way the mind thinks it sees”. She means that “the mind thinks shadows are black and that lines shouldn’t somehow meet off in the distance, but as modern art had conditioned us to see and perspective has taught us, haystacks with purplish shadows and vanishing points do exist.”