Introduction

Art and science are both terms whose meanings have been subject to change over time. At the end of the twentieth century, the terms tend to be used antithetically. Current views of the relationship between the spheres of activity that they connote range from a sweeping dismissal of any connection to an opposing but less extreme conviction that scientists and artists have something in common. The latter belief apparently at least partly stems from an underlying feeling that at any one time both activities are, after all, products of a single culture. The woolly shade of C. P. Snow's idea of there being ‘two cultures’ in the Britain of the 1950s at once rises to view if one attempts to pursue analysis along these lines.In setting up a conference called ‘The Visual Culture of Art and Science from the Renaissance to the Present’ the organizing committee was not attempting to resolve any kind of debate that may be perceived to exist in regard to the separation or otherwise of the domains of art and science. Rather, we wished to bring together historians of science working on areas that are of interest to historians of art, and historians of art working on areas that are of interest to historians of science, as well as practising artists and scientists of the present time who show an interest in each others' fields. We were, of course, aware that this agenda raised questions in regard to present-day relationships between art and science, but we hoped that, as we were dealing with a range of historical periods, any light that was shed would be moderately illuminating rather than blindingly lurid. The meeting, which took place on 12–14 July 1995, mainly at the Royal Society in London, was organized jointly by the British Society for the History of Science, the Association of Art Historians and the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) – a joint committee of the Royal Institution, British Association and the Royal Society. The historical examples presented at the conference showed a wide variety of interactions between art and science. The success of the conference (it attracted an audience of about 200) suggested very strongly that art, which has a large public following, can be used to encourage an interest in science, whose public following, according to scientists, could be better.