From Skies to Screens
Our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by digital technology. This is stripping us of our sense that the physical landscape is infused with meaning.
“Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths,” Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács remarks in his 1916 book, The Theory of the Novel. In such ages, “the world is wide and yet it is like a home.” The perceived harmony of nature offers a wellspring of knowledge and discovery. As Lukács observes, “The mind’s attitude within such a home is a passively visionary acceptance of ready-made, ever-present meaning. The world of meaning can be grasped, it can be taken in at a glance.” Similarly, the classicist Edith Hamilton wrote that for the ancient Greeks the gods were not alien intelligences but neighbours, more powerful and more alluring than human beings but ultimately companionable, dwelling among us. The Iliad and the Odyssey were the paradigmatic expressions of this sense of the union of nature with the divine. The Greeks lived in “a humanized world,” writes Hamilton, which freed them from the blinding terror of a hostile cosmos.
The idea that the order of the cosmos could be rendered comprehensible at a human scale also influenced the artists of the Western Renaissance, for whom, Lukács remarks, the visual world presented a system of ideas that could be instantly apprehended simply by looking. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the “remembered earthly being” of each character is conveyed through a direct, unmediated physical encounter with the poet. He comes to know them by seeing them. Leonardo da Vinci, who left school at the age of thirteen, called himself “a disciple of experience” meaning that he had learned not from an intellectual authority such as Aristotle, but through direct perception of the natural world. The chasm that Descartes opened between mind and body two centuries later did not yet exist. What the eye could discern, the hand could render, and the mind could grasp; seeing was not just believing but knowing. The quality in Dante’s work that Lukács evokes as “the coincidence of life and meaning in a present, actually experienced transcendence” exactly describes the world as depicted by Leonardo and his contemporaries. The feeling of awe and wonder often evoked by works like Leonardo’s Annunciation, Michelangelo’s David, and Botticelli’s Primavera, is the result of that depiction of transcendence.
