ABSTRACT
The point, an indivisible form defi ned by Euclid’s Elements as “that which has no parts,” was the foundation of not only fi fteenth-century geometry but also artistic practice. 1 This initial mark materialized the physical world delineated in form, name and sensation. As artistic practices changed, however, from the fi fteenth to the seventeenth century, artists stopped locating the foundation of their practice in the point and began focusing on the line as the limit of representation. While Euclid defi ned the point as “that which has no parts,” the line was described as “length without breadth.” In order to designate the delimitations of this “length without breadth,” Euclid stated that points demarcate the termination of a line. Although Euclid designated the point as the line’s terminus, throughout early modern translations of Euclid the point and the line increasingly were determined in an interrelationship of absence and movement. As opposed to defi ning the line as “length without breadth,” the line became characterized as “a series of points” or as “the trace of the point’s movement.” The point and the line remained distinct entities although they existed in a necessary relationship, as fundamental as that of form to matter, space to geometry and numbers to arithmetic. This chapter will map out this trajectory from the point to the line, considering how and why the line surpassed the point as the foundation for artistic practice. While the interconnection between drawing and the line may seem obvious, it is historical. In the art theory of the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries, the point was the origin of the visual world of forms. The history of the point and the line tells a story about changing notions of magnitude/ space and multitude/number that formatted a new structure of knowledge, in which the line became the foundation of artistic practice.
