Elevated prints of Nicholas Saunderson’s diagrams

On 28 June 2025, the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici inaugurated ‘Cambiare la prosa del mondo’ (Changing the Prose of the World), the annual Fellows’ Exhibition (28 June – 8 September, 2025). Among the featured works was a collaboration between curator and art historian Pierre Von-Ow, a current fellow at the Academy, and Factum Foundation. Developed during Von-Ow’s year-long residency, the project explores how knowledge can be made both visible and tangible through reinterpretation and technology.

Installation view of ‘Cambiare la prosa del mondo’ © Daniele Molajoli

At the heart of the installation are six drawings, illustrating the phenomenon of the rainbow, originally conceived for the teachings of Nicholas Saunderson (1682–1739). Blind from the age of one, Saunderson was a pioneering English mathematician and physicist who served as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University for nearly three decades — a position also held by Isaac Newton and, centuries later, by Stephen Hawking.

Each diagram visualises the same principle: how the refraction of light gives rise to the appearance of a rainbow in the human eye. Factum Foundation was invited to translate these diagrams into elevated prints, using advanced relief-printing technologies to render them as tactile images on aluminium panels.

Printed white-on-white, the works invite close viewing. Under a raking light produced by carefully positioned LEDs, the relief surface emerges — shifting with the angle of light like the phenomenon they describe. In Factum’s versions, light, shape, and texture replace colour, echoing Saunderson’s own experience of perceiving the world without sight. The result is a contemplative and sensorially complex meditation on perception, science, and abstraction.

Installation view of ‘Cambiare la prosa del mondo’ © Daniele Molajoli

William Haswell, ca. 1725 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library GBR/0012/MS Add.2977

William Arderon, 1728 Norwich, Norfolk Record Office MC 500/11, 761X6

G. Aynscough, 1736 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library MS Add.6312

Edmund Hopkinson, 1723 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library MS Add.9752

John West, 1731 University College London MS. Add. 243

John Parnther, 1727-1729 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library MS Add.589

As noted in the introduction to The Elements of Algebra in Ten Books by Nicholas Saunderson, published posthumously by his family, colleagues, and friends, it is perhaps not surprising that a blind scholar could explain optical phenomena and even aspects of colour perception, because “if we consider that this Science is altogether to be explained by Lines, and subject to the Rules of Geometry, it will be easy to conceive that he [Saunderson] might be a Master of these Subjects.”

Through this collaboration, Factum Foundation and Pierre Von-Ow have transformed historical scientific drawings into multisensory experiences—meant to be explored by both touch and sight. The installation also includes printed transcripts and audio recordings of Saunderson’s lecture on the rainbow in multiple languages, further enriching the encounter between past knowledge and contemporary interpretation.