Shadows and Enlightenment

The book by British art historian Michael Baxandall (1933–2008), one of the founders of visual culture studies, is built around several questions intertwined in its title. How important is the problem of shadow in the scientific and artistic inquiries of the Enlightenment, how were these inquiries connected, and how did they resonate in the informatics of the second half of the 20th century? What is the enlightening significance of shadow, that is, what is its cognitive value? And finally, what is the technical function of shadow in perception, in visual art, and in information technologies, for example in robotics? Behind all these questions lies a more general problem of understanding shadow as a cognitive phenomenon, and around them forms an interdisciplinary network revealing unexpected and instructive intersections of the physics and optics of the 18th century, Rococo painting, and developments in artificial intelligence of the 1970s and 1980s.