Our Imagination Is Fired By What We See. How Does That Work?

Learning to see is not an innate gift; it is an iterative process, always in flux and constituted by the culture in which we find ourselves and the tools we have to hand. Harriot’s 6-power telescope certainly didn’t provide him with the level of detail of Galileo’s 20-power. Yet the historian Samuel Y Edgerton has argued that Harriot’s initial (and literal) lack of vision had more to do with his ignorance of chiaroscuro – a technique from the visual arts first brought to full development by Italian artists in the late 15th century.