The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution

Historians of science have long known that conceptualization is a prerequisite for science, and geology is no exception. Art history records that the Western concept of landscape preceded the science of landscape, and it also helps explain how it could be that one of Europe's preeminent seventeenth-century anatomists, Nicholas Steno, founded the science. The Renaissance rediscovery of Arabic and Greek geometry and artists' unprecedented use of it to describe nature, particularly the structure of the human body, facilitated the concept of landscape as a material object of integrated parts and functions. That anatomical analogy, which Steno embraced, replaced and had far fewer associations than the earlier analogy of the human body as a microcosm for the macrocosm of Earth and the greater cosmos. In turn, the new paradigm facilitated the modern understanding of evolution of landscape and life. These developments were part of the larger, contemporaneous spatial reorganization within Western civilization that encompassed revolutions in economics, land ownership, distribution of political power, etc.-in a word, the Western experiment in democracy. They suggest that contemporary creationists' rejection of evolution reflects anxiety over the individual's potential for change in a democracy. These associations are strengthened by a comparison with the case of China, which eschewed geometry until the nineteenth century. China did not develop a geometric sense of either landscape or life until well after Europe had done so, despite the geological discoveries that China is credited with having made well before Europe entered the Renaissance. Nor did China undergo the geometric reorganization of its bureaucracy and power structures, as did the West. Consequently, China held fast to a very different idea of evolution of landscape and life in nature and of the individual in society.