Science and art are important ways of representing and understanding the world, and there is an inseparable relationship between them. How to define scientific representation is an important problem in western philosophy of science. Roughly, scientific representation can be understood as describing a thing by means of another thing to which the former is similar/or isomorphic. Firstly, this study summarizes the basic theory of scientific representation from the aspects of its composition, demarcation, and standardization. Starting with the discussion of representation in art, based on Goodman's classic "representation view", this paper examines the representational features of Renaissance pictorial art. Secondly, we analyze the representational features of Renaissance anatomical illustrations. Anatomy aims to accurately describe the visual and structural aspects of the human body; thus, anatomical illustrations are a typical case of scientific representation. Pictorial representation is a topic of common concern for science and art. By analyzing the anatomical illustrations in relation to the pictorial techniques of the Renaissance, this study shows how the scientific revolution in anatomy during the Renaissance was underpinned by a corresponding revolution of visual language. In addition we analyze the influence of the new representational techniques on the characteristics on the style and accuracy of scientific representation. Finally, this study will try to supplement and improve extant accounts of scientific representation, provide a general definition of representation style that takes into account the intersection of artistic and scientific features. This amounts to a solution to the problems of style and accuracy in scientific representation.

Bakhmetev's experiments on anabiosis (or body-freezing) in the late 1910s, promising to extend life, were taken on in the first Soviet decade as the government was planning to fashion the New Soviet Person and recasting the human-environment nexus in hierarchical terms, contrary to the mutual exchange of matter among systems postulated by prerevolutionary ecological thought (Vernadsky, Fyodorov, Bogdanov). Science-fiction writers explored the possible consequences of developing Bakhmetev's discoveries in their storyworlds. I aim to show how two short stories from the 1920s, Boris Pil’niak “Neither Life Nor Death” (“Ni zhizn’ ni smert’,” 1926) and Alksandr Beliaev’s “The Affair of Death” (“Delo smerti,” 1928), explore human metabolism through the practice of anabiosis and employ it as an extended metaphor to describe the regulatory system of the social body and the metabolic activities of non-human agents, thus engaging with distributed agency, cross-species contamination, and unusual temporalities.

The impact of eloquent speech on the body, central to the mind-body relationship, has long been debated in philosophy and medicine. This paper explores early modern neurophysiology of emotional persuasion, focusing on the roles of the rete mirabile and animal spirits in mediating the soul-and-body interaction. Premodern naturalists believed that eloquent speech stirred emotions, moved bodily humors like bile and blood, and thus influenced the brain. In Galenic medicine, these processes centered around the rete mirabile—a “wonderful net” of blood vessels—believed to enrich the blood with heat and gases while filtering vital spirits into animal spirits within the brain ventricles. These animal spirits, described as “subtle bodies” (Göttler et al., 2007), were believed to interact with the soul in governing emotions, imagination, reason, and will, enabling emotional persuasion. Early 16th-century anatomists, such as Magnus Hundt and Johannes Dryander, adhered to Galenic conventions, depicting the rete mirabile in humans. However, the anatomists Berengario da Carpi and Andreas Vesalius soon revealed that, while existing in some animals, the structure is absent in humans. Despite this discovery, the concept of animal spirits—produced through the rete mirabile—persisted, not as an anatomical fact but as a theoretical model to explain psychophysiological processes that could not be observed. This paper examines the evolving early modern understanding of the neurophysiology of persuasion, situating it within the broader context of advancing anatomical knowledge and the move of the seat of consciousness from the soul to the brain, emblematic of the rise of the “cerebral subject” (Fernando Vidal, 2017).

In 1730, Stephen Gray described one of his most famous electrical experiments: the flying boy. The experiment consisted of transmitting electricity to a boy suspended from insulating cords by bringing an electrified glass tube near him. Gray’s paper contained no visuals, but in the decade following its publication, the experiment was perpetuated in many pictorial forms. In this communication, I will discuss the origins and functions of different visuals of this experiment. One of them is the frontispiece in Jean Antoine Nollet’s Essai sur L’Électricité des Corps, published in 1746. The frontispiece was produced by Roch Brunet after an artwork by Blaise-Nicolas Le Sueur. This illustration appears in many scholarly works on the history of electricity. In the frontispiece, the experiment is demonstrated in front of a crowd inside a room full of objects and scientific apparatuses. I will argue that this depiction was not an exact reproduction of Gray’s experiment. In fact, it was probably produced as a piece of decoration, an enticement for potential readers of the Essai. In addition, I will show that the flying boy experiment might have not been a practical arrangement, what explains why Nollet did not explain the experiment in the Essai, and included other visuals to account for the same phenomenon – the transmission of electricity – that Gray first intended to explain. Finally, I will discuss how this approach could be useful for both science educators and historians who intend to comprehend the nuances of illustrations of science scenes.