Marshall McLuhan, in his essay “The Gutenberg Galaxy” (1962), analyzes the profound impact that printing had on the mental and cultural structure of the West. According to McLuhan, the invention of printing not only revolutionized communication, but also radically changed the way human beings perceive and organize reality. Print, as a linear, sequential and visual…
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During the 18th century, the increasing availability of books and the emergence of an educated and critical public sphere fueled Enlightenment thought. The ideas of reason, liberty, tolerance and natural rights spread widely, becoming the theoretical basis for events and orders that celebrated the birth of modern Western democracies, beginning with the French Revolution and…
With printing, widespread access to classical texts, including in the original ancient languages, fueled humanistic and Renaissance culture. The first forms of newspapers, posters, gazettes with a few sheets, which were far more widespread than books, were also born. The era of publishing also developed-since Gutenberg, both inventor and entrepreneur, destined to exert a profound…
It is around 1450, the invention of movable type printing by Johannes Gutenberg, marks the beginning of a profound intellectual revolution. Adapting an existing technology used, for example, to print images on textiles, Gutenberg introduced movable type printing for the reproduction of alphabetic text. The book, a rare and precious commodity reserved for a few…
The construction of the perspective method of graphically representing three-dimensional reality is the triggering moment of the parable of Renaissance art, emblematic of the convergence of art and science. Florentine painting of the Renaissance is one of the highest episodes in the history of universal art, and it includes a series of masters of absolute…
Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise “De pictura” describes for the first time the perspective method, which allows painters to create on a flat surface a three-dimensional space governed by precise mathematical laws. The procedure is basically the one still used in all art schools around the world. By following a precise procedure, starting with…
After the crisis of the ancient world and the medieval era, a profound cognitive revolution in Western culture occurred in the Renaissance, and particularly in the world of the visual arts. Linear perspective is a system for representing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface devised in Florence in the 15th century. It is based on…
Other codes fundamental to the history of civilization, such as coins, also derive their inspiration from the alphabet, understood in a physical and mathematical sense. Sociologist Karl Polanyi considers currency a semantic system “similar in a general sense to language, writing, or weights and measures.” Tradition has it that the coin was first minted by…
Judaism and Greekity, united by the same writing technology, thus take the first and fundamental steps of Western culture. Pictographic and ideographic forms of writing existed, and still exist, before and outside the history of the West. However, these techniques were complex and elitist, their use restricted to a few scribes and priests in the…
Aeschylus writes, in “Prometheus Chained,” “for them, I invented numbers, the first among all sciences, but I also taught humans how to combine letters, memory of all things, mother of all arts.” In the history of civilization, numbering systems preceded writing, particularly for practical and accounting needs. However, in Western culture it is Greece that…
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