Exploring the In-Between of Art and Science. Shared Structures and Languages

Up to the nineteenth century, the term “science” (scientia) referred to any branch of systematic knowledge, including the arts and fields associated with the humanities today. In the 1950s, C.P. Snow coined the term “two cultures,” denoting a fundamental divide between both fields as a major cultural force of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This led historians of science and anthropologists to investigate how such an increasingly hierarchical disciplinary divide emerged. As a reaction to that discussion, we identify structural “in-betweens”—liminal spaces that reveal connections between the two areas in the early modern period. These belong to the field of rhetoric (energeia, metaphor, acutezza, figura), artisanal practice, geometry, and analogies with the human body. Identifying these deeper structures helps us reconstruct correspondences between culture and nature that have become buried in later centuries and highlight the ways in which early modern intellectuals conceived nature.