@ARTICLE{10.21494/ISTE.OP.2020.0486, TITLE={Infinity of God and Space of Man in Painting, Conditions of Possibility for the Scientific Revolution}, AUTHOR={Giuseppe Longo, Sara Longo, }, JOURNAL={Art and Science}, VOLUME={4}, NUMBER={Issue 2
}, YEAR={2020}, URL={http://openscience.fr/Infinity-of-God-and-Space-of-Man-in-Painting-Conditions-of-Possibility-for-the}, DOI={10.21494/ISTE.OP.2020.0486}, ISSN={2515-8767}, ABSTRACT={The rich Greek and medieval debate on the nature of the infinite, potential vs actual infinity, finds a synthesis and an answer in the invention, in Italy and during the Renaissance, of the geometric perspective. From the middle of the 14th century, painter-theologians gave actual infinite of God its first symbolic form: the line or vanishing point in the Annunciations, the meeting place between the immeasurable and the measurable, between the incircumscribable and the locality, between God and man. The projective geometry of the Renaissance painters, a theological-pictorial decision, a gesture at the infinite limit, organizes then the space of men, for a fuller humanity, in its finitude, yet always confronted with the infinity of God. Then space and infinity will frame the physical dynamics, as conditions of possibility for the construction of modern science. At the heart of this new construction of objectivity, the role of the knowing subject and the relativity of reference systems is also to be found in the explicitation of the relativizing gaze of the spectator and the artist in painting. The question will be raised as to the relevance of these frames, impregnated with epistemic, even ontological a priori, in a historical science such as biology.}}