According to Hans Blumenberg, there are two inventions whereby the modern age cleanly breaks with the past: Florentine linear perspective and absolute space.1 They are the same thing in many ways since one is unthinkable without the other and vice versa. But this is of little import at the moment. Of immediate concern, although it has heretofore escaped notice, is that the first sighting of the New World was an avowedly perspective view in the Florentine sense of the term. Indeed, as in ancient myths, the real significance of the discovery of America resides in what at first sight appears to be a useless, even misleading complication, if not a glaring incongruity or logical contradiction. An entry in what remains of Columbus’s blog2 notes the complicated event of that sighting under the date of 11 October. At 2 h past midnight, the crew of the Pinta sighted land, and Rodrigo de Triana claimed the promised reward. Yet he would never receive it because Columbus asserted he had already seen it about 10 pm the evening before when, standing on the poop deck, he had glimpsed in the same direction a flickering light like that of a wax candle. Much excited talk ensued. As calculated later, Columbus’s position was about 56 miles, nearly 90 km, from land, a distance which seemingly would have made it hard to have seen anything of the kind. Even the versions of Las Casas and Fernando Columbus, which mention people walking along the coast carrying a sort of lantern, are less than convincing. In the event, the reward went to Columbus, and one tradition has it that poor Rodrigo, resentful and embittered, converted to Islam and emigrated to Africa. Yet what are we to make of this story? Indeed, is it possible to find a sense whose ‘real content’ coincides perfectly with its ‘truth content’, or, as Benjamin3 might have put it, the content whose import is what comes to light with time because it is exemplary and acknowledged as the key to what is to follow?
...MoreBook De Risi, Vincenzo (2015) Mathematizing Space: The Objects of Geometry from Antiquity to the Early Modern Age.
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