Art, science, and visual culture in early modern Europe

ISIS

Volumn 97, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 83-100

  Smith, Pamela H ^a  

^a Columbia University ^*  (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33646394313     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/501102     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. Leonhard Fuchs, De historia stirpium (Basel, 1542), pp. x-xi.
2. I have used the translation in James S. Ackerman, "Early Renaissance 'Naturalism' and Scientific Illustration," in The Natural Sciences and the Arts: Aspects of Interaction from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century: An International Symposium, ed. Allan Ellenius (Uppsala/ Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1985), pp. 1-17, on p. 17.
3. Andreas Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body: A Translation of De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, trans. William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman (San Francisco: Norman, 1998), p. lvi Septem
4. quoted in Pamela O. Long, "Objects of Art/Objects of Nature: Visual Representation and the Investigation of Nature," in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 63-82, on p. 77.
5. Recent work, above all by Sachiko Kusukawa, has shown how complicated Vesalius's use of images was. Pictures were meant by Vesalius to be employed in an active process of matching res and verba; they did not substitute for active investigation and dissection, nor for the use of words and texts. In other words, texts, verbal discussions, images, and cadavers all played off one another in dissections and demonstrations carried out in the anatomy theater, and this dynamic relationship resulted in understanding and knowledge. See Sachiko Kusukawa, "Andreas Vesalius and the Canonization of the Human Body: Res, Verba, Picture," paper presented at the workshop "Seeing Science," Princeton University, March 2005; this was based on a longer paper, "From Counterfeit to Canon: Picturing the Human Body, Especially by Andreas Vesalius," Preprint 281, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, 2004.
6. Georgius Agricola, De re metallica, trans. Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (New York: Dover, 1950), p. xxx.
7. The literature on these figures is far too voluminous to cite extensively, but I will mention a few easily overlooked essays. On the development of nature study among artists see Fritz Koreny, "A Coloured Flower Study by Martin Schongauer and the Development of the Depiction of Nature from van der Weyden to Dürer," Burlington Magazine, 1991, 133:588-597;
8. David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470-1550 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1994), esp. p. 257.
9. On the intermediary function of printers see F. David Hoeniger, "How Plants and Animals Were Studied in the Mid-Sixteenth Century," in Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, ed. John W. Shirley and Hoeniger (Washington, D.C.: Folger, 1985), pp. 130-148.
10. On Agricola as a humanist see Owen Hannaway, "Georgius Agricola as Humanist," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1992, 53:553-560
11. For a sense of how these naturalistic illustrations differed in their epistemological and cognitive functions from the illustrations in alchemical treatises, e.g., see Barbara Obrist, Les débuts de l'imagerie alchimique (XIVe-XVe siècle) (Paris: Editions le Sycomore, 1982);
12. William B. Ashworth, Jr., "Natural History and the Emblematic World View," in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 303-332;
13. and Adrian Johns, "The Physiology of Reading," in Books and the Sciences in History, ed. Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 291-314, esp. p. 296.
14. Sachiko Kusukawa's projected study on the use of images in early modern scientific texts will be crucial to understanding the social and intellectual processes involved in the making of knowledge using pictures.
15. William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (1953; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969);
16. Peter Parshall, "Imago contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance," Art History, 1993, 16:554-579 (on the counterfeit);
17. Landau and Parshall, Renaissance Print, 1470-1550 (cit. n. 4), pp. 257-258.
18. Petrarch is quoted in Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), p. 175.
19. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 11991);
20. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991);
21. J. V. Field, The Invention of Infinity: Mathematics and Art in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997);
22. Field, "Mathematics and the Craft of Painting: Piero della Francesca and Perspective," in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen, and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, ed. Field and Frank A. J. L. James (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 73-95;
23. Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1990);
24. David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 15, 323.
25. See also Michael Baxandall, "The Bearing of the Scientific Study of Vision on Painting in the Eighteenth Century: Pieter Camper's De Visu (1746)," in Natural Sciences and the Arts, ed. Ellenius (cit. n. 1), pp. 125-132.
26. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general, 2.7, quoted in J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), p. 21;
27. Agricola, De re metallica, trans. Hoover and Hoover (cit. n. 3), pp. xxx-xxxi.
28. For early emphasis on first-person experience see Albertus Magnus, Books of Minerals, trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), pp. 153, 200;
29. Albertus Magnus, Libellus de alchimia, trans. and ed. Virginia Heines (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1958), p. 7: "nothing else shall I write beyond what I have seen with my own eyes."
30. On sixteenth-century claims see Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: Univ. Texas Press, forthcoming);
31. Daniela Bleichmar, "Books, Bodies, and Fields: Sixteenth-Century Transatlantic Encounters with New World Materia Medica," in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. 83-99.
32. Both Antonio Barrera, "Local Herbs, Global Medicines: Commerce, Knowledge, and Commodities in Spanish America," in Merchants and Marvels, ed. Smith and Findlen (cit. n. 2), pp. 163-181,
33. Schiebinger and Swan, eds., Colonial Botany, make clear just how inextricably linked natural history and commercial exploitation were in the age of European expansion.
34. Girolamo Cardano, The Book of My Life (De Vita Propria), trans. Jean Stoner (New York: Dutton, 1930), p. 189.
35. Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004);
36. Hanna Rose Shell, "Casting Life, Recasting Experience: Bernard Palissy's Occupation between Maker and Nature," Configurations, 2004, 12:1-40.
37. William Newman, Promethean Ambitions (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004), believes that the mimesis of the visual arts was in the main regarded as deceptive, while that of alchemy was often viewed as a true imitation of nature.
38. For other evaluations of the status of the arts in the Middle Ages and early modern Europe see Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 80[l]) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1990);
39. David Summers, "Pandora's Crown: On Wonder, Imitation, and Mechanism in Western Art," in Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture, ed. Peter G. Platt (Newark: Univ. Delaware Press, 1999), pp. 45-75.
40. The literature is voluminous, and only a part can be cited here: Ellenius, ed., Natural Sciences and the Arts (cit. n. 1);
41. A. C. Crombie, "Science and the Arts in the Renaissance: The Search for Truth and Certainty, Old and New," History of Science, 1980, 18:233-246;
42. David Freedberg, "Science, Commerce, and Art: Neglected Topics at the Junction of History and Art History," in Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, ed. Freedberg and Jan de Vries (Santa Monica, Calif.: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1991);
43. Giorgio Santillana, "The Role of Art in the Scientific Renaissance," in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1959), pp. 33-65;
44. James S. Ackerman, "The Involvement of Artists in Renaissance Science," in Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, ed. Shirley and Hoeniger (cit. n. 4), pp. 94-129;
45. Ackerman, "Early Renaissance 'Naturalism' and Scientific Illustration" (cit. n. 1);
46. Ackerman, "Science and Visual Art," in Seventeenth Century Science and the Arts, ed. Hedley Howell Rhys (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 63-90;
47. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993).
48. Otto Pächt, "Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar Landscape," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1950, 13:13-46;
49. Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, The Art of Falconry: Being the De Arte Venandi cum avibus of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, trans. and ed. Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1943);
50. Lynn White, Jr., "Natural Science and Naturalistic Art in the Middle Ages," American Historical Review, 1947, 52:421-435 (carved capitals and choir figures).
51. The literature on Dutch still-life painting is vast and growing. Of most relevance to art and science connections are Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1983);
52. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987);
53. Schama, "Perishable Commodities: Dutch Still-Life Painting and the 'Empire of Things,'" in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 478-488.
54. Ackerman, "Early Renaissance 'Naturalism' and Scientific Illustration" (cit. n. 1), usefully discusses the various forms "naturalism" took from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.
55. See also Claudia Swan, "Ad vivum, Naer het leven, From the Life: Defining a Mode of Representation," Word and Image, 1995, 11(4):353-372.
56. Katharine Park, "Nature in Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and Emblems," in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 50-73;
57. Sachiko Kusukawa, "Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures, J. Hist. Ideas, 1997, 58:403-427;
58. Landau and Parshall, Renaissance Print, 1470-1550 (cit. n. 4), p. 253.
59. The following paragraph is drawn from Smith, Body of the Artisan (cit. n. 13).
60. Amy Meyers, "From Nature and Memory: William Bartram's Drawings of North American Flora and Fauna," in The Culture of Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740 to 1840 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, forthcoming).
61. Heidrun Ludwig, Nürnberger naturgeschichtliche Malerei im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Marburg an der Lahn: Basilisken-Presse, 1998);
62. Mark Meadows, "Merchants and Marvels: Hans Jacob Fugger and the Origins of the Wunderkammer," in Merchants and Marvels, ed. Smith and Findlen (cit. n. 2), pp. 182-201;
63. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, "Introduction: Commerce and the Representation of Nature in Art and Science," ibid., pp. 1-25;
64. Eileen Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997).
65. On the communities formed and the overlap between science and art in the context of the Kunstkammer see Kaufmann, Mastery of Nature (cit. n. 14).
66. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998);
67. David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2002), p. 413.
68. Helen Watson-Verran and David Turnbull, "Science and Other Indigenous Knowledge Systems," in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff et al. (London: Sage, 1995), pp. 115-139.
69. Reijer Hooykaas, Humanisme, science et réforme: Pierre de la Ramée (1515-1572) (Leiden: Brill, 1958);
70. Hooykaas, "The Rise of Modern Science: When and Why?" British Journal for the History of Science, 1987, 20:453-473;
71. Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). There are many other more recent works on scholars and craftspeople;
72. see Pamela H. Smith, "Introduction," in Body of the Artisan (cit. n. 13), pp. 3-28, for a fuller list of recent authors.
73. On Coenen see Florike Egmond, "Natuurlijke historie en savoir prolétaire," in Komenten, monsters en muilezels: Het veranderende natuurbeeld en de natuurwetenschap in de zeventiende eeuw, ed. Egmond, Erick Jorink, and Rienk Vermij (Haarlem: Uitgeverij Arcadia, 1999), pp. 53-71.
74. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, MS Fr 640, R 62 039, p. 109, feuillet 107.
75. Vannoccio Biringuccio, The Pirotechnia, trans. Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi (New York: Basic, 1943), pp. xvi, 143.
76. Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone, 1998).
77. James Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1995);
78. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone, 1999);
79. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2002).
80. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972);
81. Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1980);
82. Alpers, Art of Describing (cit. n. 15).
83. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987);
84. Harry M. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London: Sage, 1985).
85. Michael W. Cole, "Cellini's Blood," Art Bulletin, 1999, 81:215-235;
86. Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002);
87. Spike Bucklow, "Paradigms and Pigment Recipes: Vermilion, Synthetic Yellows, and the Nature of Egg," Zeitschrift für Kunsttechnologie und Konservierung, 1999, 13:140-149;
88. Bucklow, "Paradigms and Pigment Recipes: Natural Ultramarine," ibid., 2000, 14.5-14;
89. Bucklow, "Paradigms and Pigment Recipes: Silver and Mercury Blues," ibid., 2001, 15:25-33.
90. Roger Chartier, "Culture as Appropriation," in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), pp. 230-253.
91. Anne Secord's work on nineteenth-century artisans, including her forthcoming book, Artisan Naturalists (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, forthcoming), has done much to illuminate these issues. I thank her for allowing me to see her work in progress.