"Le visible et l'invisible: images du corps, de Descartes aux encyclopèdistes"

The scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe opened up a dual path for human knowledge in the field of life sciences, broadening its perspectives from both a methodological and a conceptual/theoretical point of view. Methodologically, this expansion took place through the abandonment of a sapiential and hermetic conception of knowledge as the privilege of a select few, and the parallel acquisition of an entirely experimental procedure – even if magical residues remained as a legacy of the Renaissance era, with its animism and vitalist naturalism – in the investigation of the living world. On a conceptual level, this expansion was achieved through the development of new models of representation of living beings, particularly the organic body, which attempted to make visible the image of the real process of generation, as it actually occurs in nature. These rational models, even if produced by hypothetical and conjectural means, will no longer have much to do with bodily qualities, qualitative notions that are imponderable and unimaginable to ordinary mortals. In short, between the 16th and 17th centuries, human knowledge became “scientific” insofar as it became universal, i.e. open to all men, without distinction.