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.

The medium of visual representation played a crucial role in the Enlightenment project of taking intellectual possession of nature, and of dominating it. Pictures helped to categorize the various natural phenomena, to disseminate knowledge about their appearance and, so to speak, to capture them on paper or canvas. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, natural historians treating extreme and threatening natural phenomena, such as volcanoes, earthquakes, waterspouts or geysers, increasingly supplemented their written accounts with engraved illustrations. In this paper, I concentrate on the visual treatment of earthquakes in learned publications. I discuss two different types of graphic representation of this natural phenomenon, which had always been considered as virtually ‘undepictable’.

After the great earthquake of Lisbon in 1755, research into the subject was greatly stimulated. Two scholars, the British natural philosopher John Michell and the Dutchman Johan Drijfhout, published earthquake treatises in learned journals, and each complemented his text with a diagrammatic illustration. By translating their theoretical considerations into the abstract form of geological sections, these natural philosophers moulded a new visual language for seismology and earth history. An entirely different example of visual representation as a tool in research into earthquakes can be seen in the approach to the earthquake in Calabria in 1783. The Neapolitan Academy of Science and Letters sent some of its members to investigate the devastating effects of this earthquake on the landscape and the nature of the country. The topographical changes were recorded on the spot by trained draughtsmen, with the aim of providing accurate and comprehensive visual documentation. The pictures are remarkable in the way they reveal a conflict between the new demands of modern empirical science and the established ‘picturesque’ conventions of landscape painting.

One of the educational by-products of German botanical scholarship was the publication of sets of large ‘wall diagrams’ (Wandtafeln) for use in the lecture-room. Most British University Departments of Botany dating from the period before the first world war probably had at least one of these sets. In my own department I have used these excellent diagrams occasionally, realizing that they combined clarity, size and accuracy to an unrivalled extent.

This passage from a recent essay by S. M. Walters forms an appropriate introduction to the topic of this paper. From the start, it should be noticed that the use of such diagrams (referred to as ‘wallcharts’ in the rest of the paper) was by no means limited to botany nor to university studies. As will become clear, they were one of the most important media for the teaching and learning at different levels of education and within different fields.

For the artist, mathematics does not consist of the various branches of mathematics. It is not necessarily a matter of calculation but rather of the presence of a sovereign power; a law of infinite resonance, consonance, organisation. Rigour is nothing other than that which truly results in a work of art, whether it be a Leonardo drawing, or the fearsome exactness of the Parthenon (comparable in the cutting of its marble even with that of machine-tools), or the implacable and impeccable play of construction in the cathedral, or the unity in a Cézanne, or the law which determines a tree, the unitary splendour of roots, trunk, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit. Chance has no place in nature. Once one has understood what mathematics is – in the philosophical sense – thereafter one can discern it in all its works. Rigour, and exactness, are the means behind achieving solutions, the cause behind character, the rationale behind harmony.

Le Corbusier, 1948

Probably everyone reading this article has heard of Le Corbusier, no doubt the most famous architect this century, but the images he will arouse in their minds may vary greatly. Some will blame him for those theories promoting standardized high rise construction, which have dominated town planning policy in post-war Europe. Others will admire his highly individual, sculptural buildings such as the church at Ronchamp (1950–55) (see Figure 1), the revolutionary public housing scheme of the Unité d'Habitation at Marseilles (1946–52) (Figure 2), its ground-level pillars (pilotis) and roof-level service stacks alike transformed into enigmatic statues, or his pre-war Purist villas in the Paris suburbs (1920s). His work displayed a wide variety of forms and spaces at any one time, and his career spanned almost sixty years, during which he was constantly questioning, and reformulating theories, and in consequence changing his formal language.

National exhibitions and festivals perform a number of roles at the same time. In the first half of the twentieth century exhibitions were first and foremost trade fairs, occasions on which to promote British goods but at the same time provide an opportunity for cementing imperial relations. Exhibitions are also sites of aesthetic discourse where, for example, particular architectural or design ideologies may be promoted; in addition, they provide platforms for the conspicuous display of scientific and technical achievement; and finally, they provide opportunities for creating and projecting ideas of national identity, however multi-faceted those might be. Furthermore, in order to encourage the widest possible attendance and popularity, most exhibitions from the late nineteenth century onwards included a large number of purely entertaining attractions, which of course provided places for the mingling of social classes, something that appealed to post-1945 notions of a properly democratic society. Exhibitions therefore always perform a number of functions, some of which may indeed conflict with each other, and need to be analysed on a number of levels.