High Art at the National Gallery

In the January 1931 issue of The Criterion—T. S. Eliot’s magazine and The New Criterion’s namesake—the British biochemist and scholar Joseph Needham argued that human complexity is only truly understood when religious and scientific minds transcend the gulf that divides them. By itself, each mind cannot comprehend the other’s embrace of mystery and order, respectively; yet both of these are key to the human experience in the West. In that essay for The Criterion, “Religion and the Scientific Mind,” Needham echoes the idea that science may explain God’s work. He praises Leonardo da Vinci for having stood “almost alone in his time maintaining silently the right of science to be scientific.”