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Lynn Gamwell's Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual is a handsomely appointed text, offering visual delight from the design of its cover through the profusion of carefully selected illustrations. In this, the author lays a feast for the eye and provides an engaging read as well. Gamwell, director of the art museum at the State University of New York, Binghamton, invites the reader in with a provocative question: “Mystery has shrouded abstract art since it emerged in the late nineteenth century. Where did it come from? How did shape, color, and line come to be the vocabulary of the modern painter?” (p. 9). In response, the author traces modernist abstraction to its tenable roots—the secularized, evolutionary worldview signaled by Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, published in 1859. With this, she shapes the book's premise into a study of abstract visual art, as affected by the modern scientific zeitgeist. Beginning with nineteenth-century romanticism, she demonstrates how artists plumbed scientific ideas, both microscopic and telescopic, to express visible and invisible realities. No mean undertaking, the thirteen chapters are devoted to the exploration of geology, evolution, the human mind, the science of color, Einsteinian relativity, quantum physics, and the nature of the atom. Indeed, each chapter holds the seed of another book (or several books) and draws on the more comprehensive studies of others. Cast in twenty-first-century idiom, Exploring the Invisible recalls in its grand scope the eighteenth-century Encyclopedia of the philosophe Denis Diderot—an Enlightenment text intended to chronicle the relationships between technological progress, society, and art.