The Preservation of Ambiguity and the Mechanism of Wonder in Both

(Seventeenth Century) Art and Science

De Mey, Marc

Successful achievements in both art and science will be seen as involving multiple strata of organisation combined by means of principles of transversal integration. Principles of conservation express the preservation of identity despite changing and apparently contradictory perceptual appearances. They are illustrated in the developmental experiments of Jean Piaget as well as in scientific principles of conservation. The basic mechanism of wonder driving scientific search and artistic creativity can be analyzed in terms of the tension evoked by seemingly incompatible levels of organisation. The basic achievement in both domains involves the discovery of an arrangement that allows the different and apparently contradictory levels of organisation to coexist, i.e. the preservation of ambiguity. The dynamics of such creative processes seem to require a kind of symmetry that allows to go forth and back between the different interpretations without weakening them. This is true for the case of simple drawings of reversal figures as well as for Piagetian reversibility in the cases of conservation. A number of artistic and scientific achievements from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century seems particularly suited for the clarification of this multi-strata organisation in cases of greater complexity because of intriguing interactions between science and art in that period, especially for the study of vision. Extending an exploration of pictorial perspective from both artistic and scientific viewpoint, we propose to focus on some scientific and artistic illustrations on optics in the early seventeenth century, comparing Kepler's theory of vision (1604) with Jan Breughel's allegorical representation of the sense of Sight (1618). This should allow to trace to what degree the cultivation of ambiguity could be a productive process in the elaboration of the complex stratified cognitive systems that evolve in art and science.