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Glen,
The hypotheisis should be testable to some degree.
Look at the drawings from yesteryear in the old books, charts and published works and compare them to both drawings of today and images throughout the ages.
You might even be able to have a timeline that shows the change in "perception" as the knowledge and information became available.
You could even segregate the images into black and white film, DSLR amateur through to high quality amateur and Hubble level
As Alex says - when you know something should be there you just keep looking harder till you see it !
There is probably already some good published research on the process of visual sensing, visual perception, brain processing and then the reprocessing from memory when the drawing process is occurring.
Im guessing the medium used is also very much an influencer
eg Quill, Pencil, Graphite, Ink Pens, Ink markers, water colour, acrylic paint, airbrush etc etc
Each medium and the user will have a different take on on how to represent what their mind "saw"
Just like we see different porttraiture of the same person - an art class has a subject and everyone paints the same subject - yet everyones art looks very different.
Is that imagination or is that actually something slightly different - eg perception, level of memory skill for detail, knowledge as stated, skill using that particular medium, limitations or advantages of the medium in use.
You might also find that objects like the moon where a telescope is capable of resolving a high level of detail might influence an artist from rendering merely dark and light patches of the surface into craters and full three dimensional detail ! . . . as compared to other much more recently discovered detail in globs, galaxies, planets, nebs, large scale structures, faint galactic structural features and maybe even including dust.
A trend might emerge that artistic representation and level of detail and correctness in detail follows discovery and published detail.
Its a really interesting question - someone could probably wangle a PhD on this I reckon !
Rally
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