Horror Vacui: The Horror of a Vacuum in Science and Art
The Latin expression Horror vacui means the Horror of the vacuum. It reflects one side in one of the most fundamental debates in science and philosophy over the millennia: Can a vacuum exist? Aristotle wrote against the concept, arguing that should a vacuum exist, then motion therein would be infinitely fast. During the seventeenth century, with the work of Evangelista Torricelli, Blaise Pascal and Otto von Guericke, the idea of a vacuum being possible became widespread. Nevertheless, this idea had strong opposition, from people such as René Descartes, who insisted that there only exists a plenum of corpuscles of different granularities, with no gaps between. See my post Descartes's Vortices Keep Resurfacing.
Numerous authors have written against the vacuum. For example, Gottfried von Leibniz wrote extensively against the idea of a vacuum in both his Anti-barbarus physicus [literally The Antibarbaric Physicist, commonly translated as Against Barbaric Physics1] and in his correspondence with Samuel Clarke2. I quote below a passage from the latter:
To omit many other arguments against a vacuum and atoms, I shall here mention those which I ground upon God’s perfection, and upon the necessity of a sufficient reason. I lay it down as a principle, that every perfection, which God could impart to things without derogating from their other perfections, has actually been imparted to them. Now let us fancy a space wholly empty. God could have placed some matter in it, without derogating in any respect from all other things: therefore he has actually placed some matter in that space: therefore, there is no space wholly empty: therefore all is full. The same argument proves that there is no corpuscle, but what is subdivided. I shall add another argument, grounded upon the necessity of a sufficient reason. ‘Tis impossible there should be any principle to determine what proportion of matter there ought to be, out of all the possible degrees from a plenum to a vacuum, or from a vacuum to a plenum. Perhaps it will be said, that the one should be equal to the other: but, because matter is more perfect than a vacuum, reason requires that a geometrical proportion should be observed, and that there should be as much more matter than vacuum, as the former deserves to have the preference before the latter. But then there must be no vacuum at all; for the perfection of matter is to that of a vacuum, as something to nothing. And the case is the same with atoms: what reason can any one assign for confining nature in the progression of subdivision? These are fictions merely arbitrary, and unworthy of true philosophy. The reasons alleged for a vacuum, are mere sophisms. [pp.44-45]
But little did I know that the expression Horror vacui also has meaning in art. When browsing in the The Bogotá International Book Fair 2024, I came across the following book, which is the catalogue3 for a Baroque art exposition that took place in 2017 at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogotá.
It turns out that during the Baroque period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was common to cover walls with paintings, leaving no gaps. Here is the inside cover of the above catalogue, translated into English by Deepl:
The exhibition ‘Horror Vacui: a collection of baroque painting’ shows for the first time to the public unpublished works, mostly from a private collection. In a novel way, the works are mounted in the manner in which they would have been arranged in the living spaces of the colonial period, occupying all available areas of the walls, a presentation known as ‘baroque walls’ or horror vacui.
For me, science is an integral part of human culture, and so it is common that scientific ideas of a given era are reflected in the artistic endeavours and the political ideas of that same era; in turn, the art and politics of a given period tend to influence the scientific ideas of that same period.
I will return to the question of a vacuum in future posts.
G.W. Leibniz. Against Barbaric Physics. In G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays. Translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianopolis & Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989, pp.312-320.
H.G. Alexander, editor. The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence. Manchester University Press, 1956.
Juan Francisco Hernández Roa, Paula Jimena Matiz López, María Constanza Villalobos Acosta. Horror vacui: una colección de pintura barroca. Bogotá: Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano, 2017.