When art advanced science
Albrecht Dürer is arguably the greatest German artist of the Northern Renaissance, famed for his masterful woodcuts, coper engravings, watercolors, and oils. His celebrated “Adam and Eve” (1507) is considered a signature masterpiece of a time when artists commonly depicted only religious, mythological, biblical, and allegorical themes. But Dürer was more than an artist, said Harvard art historian Susan Dackerman in a Harvard Art Museums “In-Sight Evenings” lecture on Wednesday. In fact, he greatly influenced 16th-century science with his cartographic and anatomical work. It was so innovative, she said, that it shows Dürer as a science collaborator — an equal partner in creating knowledge, not a servant charged with depicting it. Consider the examples Dackerman offered her audience in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum lecture hall: Dürer’s iconic woodcut of a rhinoceros, so enduring that it was the animal’s staple scientific image until the 18th century; a groundbreaking terrestrial map, “the first...