David Peat

The End of Representation 91The Christian vision, which dominated thinking throughout theMiddle Ages, pictured humanity as the pinnacle of creation. Our task,according to Genesis, was to “subdue the earth.” Christ’s incarnationand crucifixion were not simply concerned with the fate of humanbeings but represented a cosmic event at the core of the universe. Afterthe Fall, not only was the human race cast out of the Garden of Eden,but from that moment matter itself also fell from grace and awaitedredemption. As Jakob Böhme wrote, “all of creation groans toward theday of fulfillment,” and in Marlow’s Faustus the doomed Faustus criesout, “See Christ’s blood stream through the firmament.” The entirecosmos circled around humanity. Human beings were the descendentsof the Fall, and following that Fall the universe entered a state of expectantwaiting.All this changed with the Copernican revolution. Earth was demotedto become just another planet circling the sun, and humanitywas removed from its throne at the heart and center of the cosmos.Later, following the invention of powerful telescopes, the sun was foundto be just another star amongst countless billions. The Copernicanrevolution therefore produced a dramatic dislocation in our mentalmap of our place in the scheme of the universe. This shift in our pictureof ourselves in relation to the cosmos gave rise to a fracture betweeninner, psychological space (where we felt ourselves to be) andthe way we represented ourselves in relation to the new geometry ofthe cosmos.In fact, this change in perspective had to be seen to be believed. Asthe art historian Martin Kemp points out, the Copernican revolutionspawned a host of pictorial representations, from diagrams and drawingsto mechanical models. To look at one of these diagrams or modelswas to perform an act of mental projection. It was as if we were nowlooking in from outside, as if we had abruptly shifted our positionfrom living within the center of all that exists to watching the cosmosfrom its periphery.A similar revolution in vision occurred when the first pictures ofearth taken from space were published. Not only were they actual imagesof the earth, they also heralded a new and symbolic way of “seeing”our planet from within the imagination. That object, pictured as