The traditional method for teaching history is the textbook, and for teaching art history the slide lecture. "The Art of Renaissance Science" is one of the growing number of cross disciplinary projects available on the World Wide Web that incorporates both features.

Created by Joseph W. Dauben, Professor of History and the History of Science at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and by Gary Welz, Lecturer in Mathematics at John Jay College, it is an on-line investigation, through Hypertext digitized color pictures, digital audio and digital video, of a period in 15th century Italy when scientists and artists alike were making major scientific discoveries. "The Art of Renaissance Science" is not only a complex and visually-engaging look at its subject but offers an interesting case study of how a project created in traditional medium and format can be adapted to multimedia computer technology.

The project began as a series of illustrated slide lectures written by Dauben on the history of Italian Renaissance science. In 1991, Dauben and Welz (who had earlier taught at Lehman) collaborated on an instructional video which was entitled "The Art of Renaissance Science: Galileo and Perspective." Produced by Welz's company, Science Television, it was distributed by various scientific societies, including the American Mathematical Society.

It was Welz who, two years later, suggested that they turn the project into a World Wide Web document. They used Daubens's script, then had slides made into digital images at a photo shop and placed on a compact disk. They digitized both audio and video material on a Macintosh at CUNY/CIS. With support and technical assistance from CUNY/CIS under the aegis of the Multimedia Courseware Development Program, Welz used Hypertext Mark-Up Language (HTML) to create a self-contained, multi-part Web document in the form of a Hypermedia essay.

The document begins with a biographical introduction to Galileo himself, from his early development as a scientist to his imprisonment for heresy, a charge based on his assertion that the earth revolves around the sun. This section also gives illustrated descriptions of his best-known experiments, such as the dropping of two objects from the bell tower of the Pisa Cathedral to prove that gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate.

Galileo's attempt to understand natural forces was echoed in the efforts of artists to develop a realistic depiction of the world, beginning with the image of the human body. The second section of the document investigates the interest artists took in emulating the anatomical studies of the scientist Andreas Vesalius. Daubins's text is interspersed with high-resolution reproductions of paintings and drawings by Giotto (represented by a scene from the Arena Chapel in Padua), Masaccio (from the Brancacci chapel in Florence) and Luca Signorelli (from the cathedral at Orvieto).

The third section presents further examples of science and art interacting. It considers the wide-ranging effects of the origins of linear perspective in the hands of the architect Brunelleschi, and it traces this discovery to the work of both Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, whose "School of Athens" with its intricate meshing of figures and architecture painted for the Vatican, is examined in detail. The document's concluding section summarizes the interplay of science and art and suggests how this interaction extended beyond the years of the Renaissance.

The result is a densely-layered essay that brings together aspects of Renaissance culture often treated as discrete subjects. While the experiments of Galileo and of Brunelleschi are well-known, the fact that these figures were members of a single extended intellectual community is often forgotten -- perhaps in part because this model of cooperation is no longer widely in practice.

Part of the value of documents like "The Art of Renaissance Science" lies in the fact that they themselves are part of a larger, interconnected body of knowledge available on World Wide Web, where other sources of related information exist and can be accessed. At present "The Art of Renaissance Science" is "pointed at" by several sites beyond CUNY. These include the Virtual Library for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Australia, the server at CRS4 - the major Italian center for supercomputing applications on Sardinia - and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States. In addition, the Padua Astronomical Observatory has put it on its server and will supplement it with a free-standing Web document detailing Galileo's life and work at Padua.

The addition of related material by the Paduan server is very much in the spirit of the Web document as Dauben and Welz initially conceived it: as a work in progress on a still-young network. "The document will always be incomplete," Welz says, "because we will always be interested in adding links to the sources of information relevant to its content. While there may be nothing on the Web now about, say, Brunelleschi, there surely will be in the future."

-- by Delia Bennett