James Bradburne reflects on how observation has influenced art, science and museums through the ages.

Are there practices that the doing of science and the doing of art share in common? If so, do these practices share a history? To what extent does this shared history influence institutions such as museums? I would argue that a central practice common to both art and science is that of observation - looking at things carefully. Although looking, and even seeing, is part of the human condition, the practice of observation is neither timeless nor universal and, like all cultural practices, it has a history.

Artists have always looked at things, certainly. But the nature of their looking has been subject to change, and influenced by the culture in which the artist found him- or herself. Until the early Renaissance, artistic practice - and artistic observation - in Western Europe was shaped by a culture dominated by texts. Artists portrayed themes drawn from canonical texts such as the Bible, and sought to convey emotions, by means of a language of gestures and postures, consonant with the interpretation of the Holy Word. The authority of the text provided a framework for cultural development for a thousand years, an authority enhanced by the enormous importance placed upon the text as the Word of God in the three major revealed 'Abrahamic' religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Textual practice left its mark on artistic practice. Artists sought to illustrate the Word, and monks illuminated the Word in countless scriptoria scattered about Europe. Towards the end of the 13th century, artists - among them Cimabue and Giotto - began to explore more realistic ways of representing the human figure, and to break away from the canonical postures inherited from Byzantine icons. This realism was still in the service of the Holy text, but emphasis was increasingly placed on the correct representation of the human body and the natural world. This led to a shift in artistic practice. If the world had to be looked at closely, the artist had to become an accomplished observer.

By the Renaissance, careful observation had become the privileged domain of the artist. Brunelleschi's 'discovery' of perspective was the key to unlocking the artist's desire to represent the world faithfully in all its correct geometric proportions. The world was God's book, and Nature - and its natural measure - became an object of devoted attention.

In the Renaissance, Leonardo's ideal figure, a man defiantly set within a circle and a square, arms outstretched, was only one of dozens of similar figures that proclaimed the consonance of the microcosm Man with the divinely ordained mathematical proportions of the Macrocosm. There was no question of a proportion adequately representing beauty, it was beauty. In the same way, neither did a talisman need to represent an abstract quality, it was the quality. In the Renaissance there are no gaps between thought and signs and between signs and reality, as there was later to be in Descartes. To the Renaissance thinker, relations between objects, numbers, and images were real relations, and they did not stand for relations in an arbitrary way. It is not without reason that Leonardo is often described as the ideal 'Renaissance man' - he was the intelligent observer par excellence. His passion for observation led him to develop theories about the natural world in unprecedented detail - fluid dynamics, anatomy, hydraulics, statics, optics - while at the same time manifesting itself in paintings of unparalleled beauty. In Leonardo's practice, observation, mathematics, art and natural philosophy were one.

By the latter part of the 17th century, faith in textual authority had begun to be supplanted by the 'language' of observation - the belief that observations, not texts, were the legitimate constituents of arguments about nature - which underpinned the authority of the emerging rationalist sciences. Once the power of observation had been unleashed, it was soon challenged by a surfeit of variety. Voyages of discovery multiplied enormously, and each ship returned home with a new cargo of wonders from distant lands and strange, never-before-seen cultures. Just as the printing press had unleashed a huge variety of new texts, instruments such as telescopes, microscopes, anatomical theatres and learned cabinets opened the floodgates to an explosion of observations - an explosion that risked capsizing the entire rationalist enterprise, and calling into question the authority of the privileged observer, whether an artist or natural philosopher.

Attempts were made to limit the kinds of observers that could make legitimate observations. The Royal Society was born from a desire to create a community of equals, disinterested free men attending to experimental phenomena without prejudice. This community of equals was, however, a community of gentlemen. Access to collections and to the scientific societies remained limited well into the following centuries.

Certainly there are isolated examples of private collections open to a more broadly based public, but these were the exception rather than the rule. Peter the Great's collection was opened to the public in 1719, and visitors offered a glass of vodka as an incentive to visit. As they were private, collections opened could also be closed. In 1774, Sir Ashton Lever, whose collection had been open to the public since the 1760s, transferred his growing collection to London where he opened a paying public museum, with the following caveat published in the newspapers: "This is to inform the Publick that being tired out with the insolence of the common people, who I have indulged with a sight of my museum, I am now come of the resolution of refusing admittance to the lower class except they come provided with a ticket from some Gentleman or lady of my acquaintance."

With the development of the so-called 'scientific' method, scientific observation could not remain the exclusive purview of gentlemen for long. In this new practice, it was the quality of the method by which the observation was made, and repeated, that guaranteed the observation, not the quality of the observer. Observations not only should, but must, be open to all observers. Likewise, it was increasingly felt that access to cabinets and collections should not be a decision left in private hands. A political demand was being made, notably on the part of the newly enfranchised merchant classes whose ingenuity was helping fertilize the soil for the Industrial Revolution, for increased access to cabinets and collections, to take a greater share of the social and cultural capital. In 1753, the first institution that might be tentatively called a museum in a modern sense, the British Museum, was founded in London. Tentative, as it remained for several decades a jumbled amalgam of the Cabinets of Petiver, Charleston and Sloane, and as one visitor wrote, was "impossibly overcrowded, and the classification and arrangement of the collections was, to put it kindly, chaotic".

The history of the museum allows us to capture a moment in the history of observation. Observation was once the work of artists, trained to look at the world and to render it faithfully. By the end of the 18th century, observation had become the work of scientists, armed with telescopes, microscopes and voyages of discovery. Freed from the burden of representation, Romantic artists would explore the realm of the passions, the emotions and the brute majesty of Nature, leaving scientists to grapple with the nature of nature itself.

A version of this article appeared in the Wellcome News Science and Art supplement, 2002.

Dr James Bradburne is Director of the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt am Main (mak. Frankfurt), Germany.