Casting life, recasting experience: Bernard palissy's occupation between maker and nature

Configurations

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 1-40

  Shell, Hanna Rose ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33646408276     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.2005.0005     Document Type: Review

References (246)

1. William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, act 4, se. 3, lines 95-97.
2. Bernard Palissy, "On the Art of the Earth," in Discours admirables (1580);
3. except when otherwise noted, references to passages from Discours admirables (hereafter DA) refer to vol. 2 of the most recent edition of Palissy's complete works: Bernard Palissy, Œuvres Complètes, 2 vols., ed. Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, Keith Cameron, Jean Céard, Marie-Dominique Legrand, Frank Lestringant, and Gilbert Shrenck (Mont-de-Marsan, France: Éditions InterUniversitaires, 1996);
4. the epigraph is taken from p. 18. Translations throughout are my own after consultation with the 1957 translation by Aurèle La Rocque: Bernard Palissy, The Admirable Discourses of Bernard Palissy [1580], ed. and trans. Aurèle La Roque (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957).
5. Biographical information is drawn from a selection of the works devoted to Palissy that have appeared in France and England from the nineteenth century to the present. Notable among these sources are Pierre Gascar, Les secrets de Maître Bernard: Bernard Palissy et son temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1980);
6. Leonard N. Amico, Bernard Palissy: In Search of Earthly Paradise (New York: Flammarion, 1996);
7. Aurèle La Rocque, introduction to Admirable Discourses (above, n. 2), pp. 1-19.
8. Earlier biographical and poetic works include Cecelia Brighrwell, Palissy the Potter: Huguenot, Artist and Martyr (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1859);
9. Henry Morley, Palissy the Potter: In Two Volumes (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1853);
10. Désiré Leroux, La vie de Bernard Palissy (Paris: Champion, 1927);
11. Ernest Dupuy, Bernard Palissy: L'homme, l'artiste, le savant, l'écrivain (Paris: Société Française d'Imprimerie et de Librairie, 1902);
12. Philippe Burty, Bernard Palissy (Paris: Librairie de l'Art, 1888);
13. Louis Audiat, Bernard Palissy: Étude sur sa vie et ses travaux (Paris: Didier, 1868);
14. Alfred Dumesnil, Bernard Palissy: Le potier de terre (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1851);
15. Arsène Darmesteter and Adolphe Hatzfeld, Le seizième siècle en France (Paris: Delagrave, 1883).
16. On Palissy's two unfinished grottoes, see Louis Dimier, "Bernard Palissy rocailleur, fontainier et décorateur de Jardins," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 12 (1934): 8-29;
17. Anatole Montaiglon, Bernard Palissy, payements de la grotte de terre éntaillée des Tuileries (Paris: Archives de l'Art Français, 1857);
18. Audiat, Bernard Palissy (above, n. 3), pp. 115-135, 251-270.
19. On sixteenth-century French grottoes in general, see Naomi Miller, "Domain of Illusion: The Grotto in France," in Fons Sapientiae: Renaissance Garden Fountains, ed. Elizabeth Macdougall (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Press, 1978), pp. 175-205.
20. Notably, despite Palissy's prescient understanding of the organic nature of fossils and antidiluvian explanation for the presence of fossil fish in the French mountains, British and American geological historians have tended to discount his significance, generally on account of his practical and artisanal bias. In his classic history of fossils, Martin Rudwick skims over Palissy, dismissing his "anti-intellectual," self-consciously "practical" approach as merely a crude fortune-hunting materialism, rather than an alternate way of obtaining scientific knowledge. (Rudwick notes the "embarrassing clarity" with which Palissy himself reveals the "utilitarian foundation of his science" [Martin Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils (New York: American Elsevier, 1972), p. 17].)
21. Other prominent historians of geology, such as F. D. Adams, skip over Palissy's contributions almost entirely: see Frank Dawson Adams, The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences (New York: Dover, 1938). By contrast, eighteenth-century geologists and geologically inclined natural historians, including Cuvier, Buffon, and Reaumur, were quick to credit Palissy for his contributions to the development of geological thought;
22. see, for example, Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth, ed. and trans. Robert Jameson (1817; reprint New York: Arno Press, 1978), pp. 19-23.
23. Agricultural and chemical historians, who tend to focus on vernacular knowledge acquired for the sake of economic gain, have acknowledged the potter's contributions - see, e.g., Grace M. Ziegler, "Agricultural Observations of Bernard Palissy, the Huguenot Potter," Scientific Monthly 26:1 (1928): 28-33;
24. Robert Multhauf, "The Beginning of Mineralogical Chemistry," Isis 49 (1958): 50-53;
25. H. R. Thompson, "The Geographical and Geological Observations of Bernard Palissy the Potter," Annals of Science 10 (1954): 149-165.
26. Connoisseurial and art-historical work on Palissy's ceramics includes Marshall Katz, Portuguese Palissy Ware (New York: Hudson Hills, 1999);
27. Thierry Crépin-Leblond, Une orfèvrerie de terre: Bernard Palissy et la céramique de Saint-Porchaire (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997);
28. John Webster Keefe, Grotesqueries: Form, Fantasy, and Function in Nineteenth-Century European Ceramics (New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art, 1997);
29. Marshall P. Lehr, Palissy Ware: Nineteenth-Century French Ceramics from Avisseau to Renoleau (London: Athlone Press, 1996);
30. Frank Lestrignant, comp., Colloque Bernard Palissy: 1510-1590 (Mont-de-Marsan, France: Éditions InterUniversitaires, 1990);
31. Jean-Luc Massay, Bernard Palissy: Mythe et Réalité (Saintes, France: Musée d'Agen, 1990);
32. Alan Gibbon, Céramique de Bernard Palissy (Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1986);
33. Jerah Johnson, "Bernard Palissy: Prophet of Modern Ceramics," Sixteenth Century Journal 14 (1983): 399-410;
34. A. Tainturier, Les terres émaillées de Bernard Palissy (Paris: Didron, 1863);
35. Jules Salles, Étude sur Bernard Palissy: Précé dé de quelques recherches sur l'art céramique (Paris: Grassart, 1856).
36. Some book-length examples of this recent attention to early modern artisanal and object-bound knowledge include Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: An and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004);
37. Michel Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance, from Da Vinci to Montaigne, trans. Nidra Poller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001);
38. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998);
39. Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
40. On "material culture" as an approach to art and cultural history, the classic introduction is Jules Prown, "Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method," Wintenhur Portfolio 17:1 (1982): 1-19.
41. "J'entray en dispute avec ma propre pensée" (DA, p. 294).
42. Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, "Introduction," in Palissy, Œuvres Complètes (above, n. 2), vol. 1, pp. xi-xlix, on p. xii.
43. "Je me mis à chercher les esmaux, comme un homme qui taste en tenebres" (DA, p. 294).
44. Palissy was periodically tried by the Catholic authorities - and saved by his noble patrons and patronesses - throughout the later decades of the sixteenth century. Catherine de Médicis and the Constable Anne de Montmorency, as patrons, both protected him against decades of religious persecution in exchange for basins and grotto designs: see Amico, Earthly Paradise (above, n. 3), pp. 65-71.
45. On the relationship between Palissy's artisanal works and his Calvinism, see Catharine Randall, "Structuring Protestant Scriptural Space in Sixteenth-Century Catholic France," Sixteenth Century Journal 25:2 (1994): 341-352;
46. Catharine Randall, idem, Building Codes: The Aesthetics of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 44-78.
47. Dimier, "Bernard Palissy" (above, n. 4), p. 17.
48. Palissy remained secretive about his working methods throughout his life, admitting as much in "De l'art de terre." In his words (mouthed by "Practice" at the dialogue's outset): "My art and its secrets are not like others.... The word of God must not be kept a secret. The sciences that serve the whole state must not be kept a secret. But with my art of the earth, and many other arts, that is not so; for many charming inventions are contaminated and despised because they are too common. ... Only if I thought you would keep tight the secret of my art as jealously as it deserves, would I not hesitate to teach it to you" (DA, pp. 286-290).
49. On the tradition of secrecy in craft traditions through the early modern era, see Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge, from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001);
50. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 234-267.
51. Ernst Kris, "Der Stil 'Rustique': Die Verwendung des Naturabgusses bei Wenzel Jamnitzer und Bernard Palissy," Jahrbuch der kunsthistorisches Sammlungen in Wien 22 (1926): 137-208;
52. Alan Powers, Nature in Design (London: Conran Octopus, 2001), pp. 100-101.
53. Amico, Earthly Paradise (above, n. 3), p. 17.
54. I use the somewhat archaic word "petrification," instead of its modern synonym "petrifaction," in order to distinguish it more clearly from the orthographically similar term "putrefaction." (Petrification, like petrifaction, refers to any one of a number of processes of turning to stone, including but not limited to lapidification.) The concept of petrification, particularly in relation to cave formations, was a subject of interest to Palissy's contemporaries as well as to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural historians. Whole treatises devoted to the subject had appeared by the late seventeenth century, including those by Agostino Scilla (La vana speculazione disingannata dal senso, 1670)
55. and Thomas Sherley (A Philosophical Essay Declaring the Probable Causes Whence Stones are Produced, 1672).
56. Late fifteenth-century Paduan sculptor Andrea Riccio, who cast amphibious animals in bronze, has been credited as the first practitioner of life-casting: Leo Planiscig, "Der Paduanische Naturalismus" and "Im Kreise der Naturalisten," in idem, Andrea Riccio (Vienna: Schroll, 1927), pp. 450-464.
57. German metalworkers and silversmiths had encountered Riccio's works by the mid-sixteenth century, by which point a small school of rustic silverware had developed around Wenzel Jamnitzer in Nuremberg: Klaus Pechstein, "Der Goldschmied Wenzel Jamnitzer," in idem, Wenzel Jamnitzer und die Nürnberger Goldschmiedekunst 1500-1700 (Nuremberg: GNM, 1985), pp. 57-58;
58. Elisabeth Scheicher, "The Collection of Archduke Ferdinand II at Schloss Ambras," in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur Macgregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 33.
59. Pamela H. Smith has analyzed the connections among a range of early modern European artisans, especially Albrecht Dürer and Wenzel Jamnitzer - their naturalistic craft productions and specific natural philosophies: Smith, Body of the Artisan (above, n. 7), pp. 59-95.
60. See also Martin Kemp, "Palissy's Philosophical Pots: Ceramics, Grottoes and the Matrice of the Earth," in Le origini della modernità (II), ed. Walter Tega (Milan: Olschki, 1999), pp. 72-78;
61. Daston and Park, Wonders (above, n. 7), p. 282.
62. Erik Forssman confirms the thematic and aesthetic connections between Renaissance life-casting and mannerism in "Renaissance, Manierismus und Nürnberger Gold-schmiedekunst," in Säule und Ornament: Studien zum Problem des Manierismus in den nordischen Säulenbüchem und Vorlageblättern des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1956), p. 13.
63. Others have considered Palissy's ceramics in the context of Italian mannerism, including artist and illustrator Leonard Baskin: Leonard Baskin, Nature's Mould (Rockport, Me.: Gehenna Press, 1997).
64. On mannerism more generally, see John K. G. Shearman's classic text Mannerism (London: Penguin, 1967);
65. Franklin W. Robinson and Stephen G. Nichols Jr., eds., The Meaning of Mannerism (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1972).
66. Palissy's secrecy, detailed in many of the biographies referenced above, was by no means unusual for his era - and indeed was quite a commonplace for Renaissance artisans, such as himself, working outside the guild system. See Long, Openness (above, n. 13);
67. Eamon, Science (above, n. 13), pp. 234-267.
68. George Huppert discusses early modern French guild formation and its implications for trade secrecy in The Style of Paris: Renaissance Origins of the French Enlightenment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
69. DA, pp. 285-312.
70. "How to Cast Little Lizards," "How to Cast a Shrimp," "Vipers and Serpents," "How to Cast Turtles," "Molding a Turtle," and "Frogs," Manuscrits Occidentaux de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS. Fr. 640/Microfilm 1965, fols. 122, 123, 124, 140, 141r,v. In such an extrapolation, I follow the example of previous scholars, including a Palissy collector and conservator from the early nineteenth century: André Portier, "Un texte historique et descriptif," in Monuments inédits pour servir à l'histoire des arts depuis le Vie siècle jusqu'au commencement du XVIIe (Paris: Willemin, 1839), pp. 67-71.
71. Pottier refers to the tract as a "curieux et rare volume" (p. 69). Also see Amico, Earthly Paradise (above, n. 3), pp. 86-96;
72. Baskin, Nature's Mould (above, n. 18);
73. Dumesnil, Bernard Palissy (above, n. 3), pp. 29-38.
74. Congelation and putrefaction are both recurring themes in Palissy's writing. "Putrefaction" referred then, as now, to the decomposition of animal and vegetable substances, generally accompanied by a putrid smell and appearance; it has consistently tended to evoke danger and corruption. In the sixteenth century, "congelation" referred to the solidification of liquified substance through a variety of processes, the application of heat usually among them; see Schnapper, Le géant (above, n. 16), p. 18.
75. According to Palissy, congelation was the seat of generation among the lower, and especially aquatic, animals. As he himself described life's relation to congelation: "le commencement et l'origine de toutes choses naturelles est eau" (Bernard Palissy, Les Œuvres de Maistre Bernard Palissy, ed. Benjamin Fillon, 2 vols. [Niort, France: Clouzot, 1888], vol. 2, p. 49).
76. And by way of explanation: "Congeler, se dit de toutes choses qui s'endurcissent apres la fonte: comme les eaux s'endurcissent au froit" (DA, p. 393).
77. Palissy distinguishes between "common" and " congelative" waters, drawing from medieval ideas inherited by Paracelsus among others. He refers to common water as "exhalative" or "evaporative." By contrast, "l'eau congelative" (also called "salsitive," "germinative," and "essencive") solidifies - and generally pools up in warmed marshes (Fragonard, "Introduction" [above, n. 9], p. xxxi). On the Paracelsian tradition, see Michael Giordano, "Reverse Transmutations: Bérolde de Verville's Parody of Paracelsus in Le Moyen de Parvenir. An Alchemical Language of Skepticism in the French Baroque," Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003): 88-137;
78. William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
79. Amico, Earthly Paradise (above, n. 3), p. 49.
80. Despite Palissy's claim to reject all of alchemist-physician Paracelsus's teachings, the Paracelsian idea of bodily fusion is evident throughout Palissy's descriptions of his own working process. See J. R. R. Christiem, "The Paracelsian Body," in Paracelsus: The Man and His Reputation, His Ideas and Their Transformation, ed. Öle Peter Grell (Leiden: Brill, 1998);
81. Allen G. Debus, The French Paracelsians: The Chemical Challenge to Medical and Scientific Tradition in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 30-38.
82. On Palissy's connections to alchemy, see Wallace Kirsop, "The Legend of Bernard Palissy," Ambix 9 (1961): 136-154;
83. Newman, Promethean Ambitions (above, n. 23), pp. 145-163.
84. Amico, Earthly Paradise, p. 87
85. Newman, Promethean Ambitions, Ibid., p. 86.
86. Kris, "Der Stil 'Rustique'" (above, n. 14), p. 151.
87. "How to Cast Little Lizards" (above, n. 21).
88. In the sixteenth century, "fossils" (fossiles) referred to any object dug out of the ground (coming from the Latin fodere, meaning "to dig up"). In this period, "figured stones" referred to the specific subset of fossils that resembled organic (animal and plant) bodies. Figured stones often beguiled insofar as they seemed to cross between ostensibly different realms of nature; thus they played a key role in the culture of resemblances and correspondences explored by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1971).
89. (See also Claudia Lazzaro, "Animals as Cultural Signs: A Medici Menagerie in the Grotto at Castello," in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450-1650, ed. Claire Farago [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], pp. 197-216.) In the remainder of this article, I use "fossil" in the modern sense - that is, to refer to mineral forms shaped by organic plant and animal bodies.
90. Paula Finalen, "Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe," Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 293-331.
91. Amico, Earthly Paradise (above, n. 3), p. 93.
92. Gaston Bachelard, "Shells," in idem, The Poetics of Space [1958], trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), pp. 105-136.
93. Amico, Earthly Paradise (above, n. 3), p. 81.
94. Powers, Nature in Design (above, n. 14), p. 99.
95. Historian of ceramic arts Arthur Lane dismisses Palissy's work as "uncouth" in French Faience, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 4.
96. "II est impossible d'imiter nature en quelque chose que ce soit, que premierement l'on ne contemple les effects d'icelle, la prenant pour patron et exemplaire" (DA, p. 53).
97. The term mare, relatively common in the sixteenth century, refers to a freshwater pool or a pond, either natural or man-made. According to Olivier de Serres, "La mare est une large fosse, cavée en douce pente de tous costés, afin que le bestial puisse descendre aisement; elle est enfoncé au milieu, toutefois modérément, ou l'eau des sources s'assemble avec celle de la pluie" (Olivier de Serres, Le théâtre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs [Paris: Imprimeur Ordinaire du Roy, 1600], p. 784).
98. "Aspic" is a sixteenth-century term for a venomous viper (Littré, Dictionnaire).
99. DA, pp. 29-30.
100. Throughout the Discours, Palissy venerates "l'élément humide." This is commented upon in the introduction to his complete works: Fragonard, "Introduction" (above, n. 9), p. xl.
101. Schnapper, Le géant (above, n. 16), pp. 69-71.
102. "Spontaneous generation" here refers to the development of living organisms without the agency of preexisting living matter. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, debates about spontaneous generation often centered around frogs, sea-snakes, and other water-dwellers: Henry Harris, Things Come to Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
103. Robert Hooke associates pond creatures with spontaneous generation, referring to the "generation of Serpents, which is Spontaneous sometimes" (Robert Hooke, Micrographie! [1665; reprint New York: Hafner, 1961], p. 141).
104. Pierre Belon, La nature et diversité des poissons (Paris: Estienne, 1555), p. 48.
105. Pierre Belon, La nature et diversité des poissons, Ibid., p. 49.
106. Such creatures are discussed in recent work on medieval and Renaissance concepts of monstrosity. See, for example, Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges: L'insolite au XVIe siècle en France (Geneva: Droz, 1977);
107. Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Réveils et prodiges: Le gothique fantastique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960).
108. Guillaume Rondelet, L'histoire entière des poissons, composè premierement en latin par maistre Guillaume Rondelet... Maintenant traduites en français sans auoir rien omis estant necessaire à l'intelligence d'icelle (Lyons: Bonhomme, 1558).
109. This volume was a translation of Rondelet's original Latin treatise on aquatic organisms, Libri depiscibus marinis in quibus verae piscium effigies expressae sunt (Lyons: Bonhomme, 1554-1555).
110. Kemp, "Palissy's Philosphical Pots" (above, n. 17), p. 76.
111. Rondelet, L'histoire entière, pp. 160-164.
112. Rondelet distinguishes between aquatic and terrestrial snakes and frogs. Water-dwelling creatures also tend to be much more colorful than the land-dwelling varieties: Rondelet, "the water snake is different from land snakes because it becomes very long and is of very diverse colors - marked at various points by green, yellow, and white" (L'histoire entière, ibid., p. 168).
113. "Les grenouilles naissent des eaux impures et parfois de la pluie: on crois toujours qu'un certain nombre d'animaux imparfaits naissent, sans semence, de la corruption" (Girolamo Cardano, "Des bestes nées de la putrefaction," section 9 of the French translation of De subtilitate, included in Les livres de Hierome Cardanv intitvlés De la subtilité, & subtiles inuentions, ensemble les causes occultes, & raisons d'icelles, traduis de latin en français, par Richard le Blanc [Paris: Le Noir, 1556], p. 196).
114. Palissy almost certainly read Cardano in French translation: see Fragonard, "Introduction" (above, n. 9), p. xxxiv.
115. Paré, like his contemporaries, was anxious about marshy creatures, referring to Rondelet's claim that many fish are "by nature half way between plants and animals" (Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels [1575], trans. Janis L. Pallister [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], p. 108).
116. Baltrusaitis, Réveils et prodiges (above, n. 45), pp. 323-327.
117. "Mais d'autant qu'elle est plus froide, elle ne peut produire aucun animal, d'autant qu'il ne se fait jamais de generation, tant de choses animees, que des vegetatives, sans qu'il y ait une humeur eschauffee" (DA, p. 30).
118. An archival court document records Palissy's purchase of a stove in the shape of a boulder: Document 25, dated July 9, 1575: "Bernard Palissy in Sedan: Contract for a Stove in the Shape of a Massive Rock." Reproduced in Amico, Earthly Paradise (above, n. 3), pp. 234-235.
119. On the significance of grottoes and artificial caves for the expression of Renaissance natural philosophies, see Phillippe Morel, "La théatralisation de l'alchemie de la nature: Les grottes artificielles et la culture scientifique à Florence à la fin du XVIe siècle," Symboles de la Renaissance 30 (1990): 155-181.1 thank Pamela H. Smith for this reference.
120. "A la verité telles eaux ne peuvent estre bonnes ny pour les hommes ny pour les bestes" (DA, p. 29-30).
121. "Parquoy je dis que lesdites eaux ainsi aërees et eschauffees ne peuvent estre bonnes; et bien souvent il meurt des beufs, vaches et autre bestail, qui peuvent avoir prins leurs maladies es abreuvoirs ainsi infectez" (DA, p. 30).
122. Morley, Palissy the Potter (above, n. 3), p. 61.
123. Rondelet, L'histoire entière (above, n. 46), pp. 160-163.
124. DA, p. 30.
125. "Peter et faire une baterie entr'eux comme un grand nombre d'harquebusades et coups de canon" (DA, p. 279).
126. See Paul Hills, "Interpreting Renaissance Color," in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen J. Greico, Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Florence: Olschki, 1999), pp. 337-350.
127. Hills explores the complex association between coloration and notions of nature, focusing on Italian Renaissance painters; patterns of coloration are seen as expressions of both temporal and spatial experience. See also John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999).
128. "Et tout ainsi que tu vois que nulle de ces choses ne demeure en sa premiere couleur: Mais en la croissance d'iceux ils changent de couleur, et en une mesme chose y a plusieurs couleurs" (DA, p. 139).
129. "Regarde les semences quand l'on les jette en terre, elles n'ont qu'une seule couleur, et venant à leur croissance et maturité elles se forment plusieurs couleurs, les fleurs, les branches, les feulles et les boutons, ce seront toutes couleurs diverses, et mesme en une seule fleur il y aura diverses couleurs. Semblablement tu trouveras des serpens, des chenilles, et papillons, qui seront de plusieurs belles couleurs. . . . toutes ces choses prennent nourriture en la terre, que leur couleur procede aussi de la terre" (DA, p. 137).
130. "Merveilleuses couleurs, voire par un labeur tel que nul peintre ny brodeur ne sçauroit imiter leurs beaux ouvrages" (DA, p. 151).
131. "Comme les fruits de toutes especes changent de couleur en leur maturité, semblablement les pierres, metaux et autres mineraux, mesme les terres argileuses changent de couleur en leur decoction" (DA, p. 381).
132. "J'ay plusieurs fois admiré les couleurs qui sont esdittes coquilles, et n'ay peu comprendre la cause d'icelles" (DA, p. 127).
133. Notably, in Recepte véritable (1563) Palissy actually proposes that humans should try to build human domiciles based on the natural architecture of snail shells. See Kemp, "Palissy's Philosophical Pots" (above, n. 17), p. 75.
134. "Il y a grand nombre de matieres qui causent les couleurs des pierres, et plusieurs d'icelles sont inconnues aux hommes: Toutesfois l'experience, qui de tout temps est maistresse des ars, m'a fait connoistre que le fer, le plomb, l'argent et l'antimoine, ne peuvent faire autres couleurs que jaune" (DA, p. 253).
135. "Mes esmaux se trouvoyent les uns beaux et bien fonduz, autres mal fonduz, autres estoyent brulez, à cause qu'ils estoyent composez de diverses matieres qui estoyent fusibles à divers degrez, le verd des lezards estoit bruslé premier que la couleur des serpens fut fondue, aussi la couleur des serpens, escrevices, tortues et cancres, estoit fondue au paravant que le blanc eut reçeu aucune beauté" (DA, p. 305).
136. Amico, Earthly Paradise (above, n. 3), p. 94.
137. Piero Camporesi, "Decay and Rebirth," in idem, The Incorruptible Flesh, trans. Tanya Croft-Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 67-90.
138. The presence of figured stones that represented animals that no longer lived in the specific region was a cause of great concern in the period. (This was especially so since, according to biblical scripture, there could never have been a species that either appeared or disappeared at any point after the initial creation: Schnapper, Le géant [above, n. 16], pp. 19-20.)
139. Rudwick, Meaning of Fossils (above, n. 5), pp. 15-20.
140. Dupuy, Bernard Palissy (above, n. 3), p. 139.
141. Pierre Duhem, "Léonard De Vinci et les origines de la géologie," in idem, Études sur Léonard de Vinci: Second Série (Paris: Librairie Scientifique A. Herman et Fils, 1909), pp. 281-342, on pp. 281-282.
142. See also Jeannert, Perpetual Motion (above, n. 7), pp. 50-81.
143. Discussing a so-called come de belier, Palissy explains: "Des lors je cogneu que ladite Pierre avoit esté d'autre fois une coquille de poisson, duquel nous n'en voyons plus" Œuvres de Maistre Bernard Palissy [above, n. 22], vol 1, p. 49).
144. Palissy also rejected the belief, common well into the eighteenth century, in the charmed origin of so-called pierre d'aigle (geodes). The eagle's rock had been cited as a portent by the likes of Dioscorides as well as Renaissance natural historians such as Gessner. Palissy took a dissenting view, attributing the formation to the lapidification of tree fruits: "Des lors je cogneu que ladite Pierre avoit esté d'autre fois une coquille de poisson, duquel nous n'en voyons plus" Œuvres de Maistre Bernard Palissy, ibid., vol. 2, p. 174.
145. See Schnapper, Le géant (above, n. 16), p. 26.
146. "Quand j'ay eu de bien pres regardé aux formes de pierres, j'ay trouvé que nulle d'iscelles ne peut prendre forme de coquille, ny d'autre animal, si l'animal mesme n'a basti sa forme" (Œuvres de Maistre Bernard Palissy [above, n. 22], vol. 2, p. 166).
147. Cecil Schneer, "The Rise of Historical Geology in the Seventeenth Century," Isis 45 (1954): 256-268.
148. On premodern theories of stone generation, see Henry Faul, It Began with a Stone: A History of Geology from the Stone Age to Plate Techtonics (New York: Wiley, 1983), pp. 23-33.
149. Also see Adams, Birth and Development (above, n. 5), pp. 77-137;
150. Schnapper, Le géant (above, n. 16), pp. 16-17.
151. Earth scientists themselves, by marked contrast, have often drawn inspiration from Palissy's geological theories. In addition to Georges Cuvier, eighteenth-century naturalists including Buffon, Fontanelle, Reaumur, and Voltaire credited, and sometimes disputed, Palissy's work on fossils; see Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 93-94.
152. In an article written for the Academie Royale des Sciences, Reaumur argued that Palissy was the first to realize that the specific layering of fossils in the earth outside of Paris was caused by a prehistoric sea, rather than by a biblical flood; further, Buffon praises Palissy extensively in "Prévues de la théorie de la terre" (Amico, Earthly Paradise [above, n. 3], pp. 188-190).
153. Agricola published a book of engravings of tide pools and marshes in 1556: Fragonard, "Introduction" (above, n. 9), p. xxxvi.
154. Agricola laid out a classification in his treatise De ortu et causis subterraneorum. His categories in De natura fossilium were clearly defined, honing in on size, color, and consistency, as well as source and mode of preservation. He believed that, in general, fluids circulating in the earth would enact processes of petrification, leading to the formation of both minerals and fossils: see Adams, Birth and Development (above, n. 5), p. 93.
155. Konrad Gessner, De rerum fossilium lapidum etgemmarum (1565).
156. Gessner classified "fossil objects" (including geological as well as human artifacts) into fifteen groups based on what he saw as varying degrees of simplicity or complexity. His classification would be reproduced and revised on many occasions over the centuries. See Hugh Torrens, "Early Collecting in the Field of Geology," in Impey and Macgregor, Origins of Museums (above, n. 17), p. 205.
157. In this sense, Palissy's fossils blended "naturalia" with "artifactia"; see Daston and Park, Wonders (above, n. 7), pp. 255-303.
158. Rudwick, Meaning of Fossils (above, n. 5), p. 26.
159. Naturalists provided a host of explanations for figured stones-natural, preternatural, "jokes," astrological: see Findlen, "Jokes of Nature" (above, n. 31).
160. One early explanation was that "fossils" were unfinished attempts that God had made at creating living organisms, aborted attempts to create living things. A variant on this idea was the medieval explanation that fossils were in fact incomplete animals, in which spontaneous generation had not fully succeeded: Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan, 1923-58), p. 291.
161. Amico, Earthly Paradise (above, n. 3), p. 44.
162. Camporesi, Incorruptible Flesh (above, n. 71), pp. 67-90.
163. "Le sel est la tenue et mastiq generatif et conservatif, de toutes choses" (Bernard Palissy, Discours Admirables [Paris: Le Jeune, 1580], p. 178).
164. "C'est un corps inconneu et invisible, comme un esprit, et toutesfois tenant lieu, et soustenant la chose en laquelle il est enclos" (DA, p. 199).
165. "Si jamais il ne sentait d'humidité, plusieurs choses, où il est enclos, seroyent perpetuelles ... s'il ne recevoit aucune humidité, il ne s'engendreroit jamais de vers dens ledit bois. Car jamais ne se peut faire de generation sans qu'il y ait une humeur eschaufée par putrefaction" (ibid.).
166. The idea that petrification was responsible for fossil formation continued for centuries. See Torrens, "Early Collecting" (above, n. 83), pp. 208-210);
167. H. K. Butler, "The Study of Fossils in the Last Half of the Seventeenth Century" (Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1968).
168. DA, pp. 189-190.
169. "Se peuvent reduire en pierre . . . sans perdre leur forme" (DA, p. 354).
170. "Je maintiens que les poissons armez . . . ont esté engendrez sur le lieu mesme, pendant que les rochers n'estoyent que de l'eau et de la vase, lesquels despuis ont esté petrifiez avec lesdites poissons" (DA, pp. 239-240)
171. Palissy claimed that fossils resembling marine organisms found inland were born where they were found, in ancient lakes or ponds that had since congealed, along with their contents, into dry land: DA, pp. 239-240.
172. "Je t'ay cy dessus donné à entendre que lesdits poissons ont esté engendrez au lieu mesme où ils ont changé de nature, tenans la mesme forme qu'ils avoyent estans vivans" (DA, pp. 244-245).
173. "Je t'ay cy dessus donné à entendre que lesdits poissons ont esté engendrez au lieu mesme où ils ont changé de nature, tenans la mesme forme qu'ils avoyent estans vivans" (DA, Ibid., p. 361.)
174. Michel Jeannert points out a similar relationship between geological theory formation and artistic production in his analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's fossil sketchings: Jeannert, "Earth Changes: Leonardo Da Vinci," in Perpetual Motion (above, n. 7), pp. 50-81.
175. He argues that da Vinci's creative process - sketching rock outcroppings and cataclysmic rains - played a crucial role in the development of his complex geological theories. The connection between da Vinci's artistic and intellectual development is also discussed, though to a lesser extent, in Pierre Duhem, "Léonard de Vinci, Cardan et Bernard Palissy," Bulletin Italien 6:4 (1906): 289-320;
176. Alexander Perrig, "Leonardo: Die Anatomie der Erde," fahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen 25 (1980): 51-80.
177. Gaston Bachelard makes a similar point about Palissy's use of calcified seashells as metaphor and material for the generation of natural knowledge and Utopian architecture: Bachelard, Poetics of Space (above, n. 33), pp. 127-132.
178. In a provocative recent article, W. J. T. Mitchell considers epistemic and cultural connections between naturemade fossils and man-made totems in the eighteenth century: W. J. T. Mitchell, "Romanticism and the Life of Things: Fossils, Totems, and Images," Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 167-184, esp. pp. 174-180.
179. Among Palissy's regular listeners was the so-called Alençon group of alchemical physicians: Fragonard, "Introduction" (above, n. 9), p. xv.
180. Alfonso Ingegno, "The New Philosophy of Nature," in Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 236-264;
181. Lorraine Daston, "The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe," Configurations 6 (1998): 149-172, on pp. 154-158.
182. Although the dialogue is itself a very ancient form, Palissy is anything but a throwback to the ancients. Instead, this is part and parcel of a Renaissance push to the interactive and the realm of drama. See Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 30-49;
183. Blair, Theater of Nature (above, n. 7), pp. 49-65, 153-166.
184. Eva Kushner, "Le dialogue de 1580-1630: Articulations et fonctions," in L'automne de la Renaissance, 1580-1630, ed. Jean Lafond and André Stegmann (Paris: Vrin, 1981), pp. 149-160, on pp. 149-151.
185. Céard has analyzed Palissy's employment of the dialogue form in terms of the larger literary culture of the Renaissance; these essays include Jean Céard, "Relire Bernard Palissy," Revue de l'Art 78 (1987): 77-84;
186. Jean Céard, idem, "Formes discursives," in Précis de littérature français du XVIe siècle: La renaissance, ed. Robert Aulotte (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), pp. 155-193.
187. Over a century ago, Ernest Dupuy alluded to a possible interpretation of Palissy's texts along these lines: Dupuy, Bernard Palissy (above, n. 3), pp. 212-217.
188. See also James Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine, vol. 1, Ficino to Descartes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).
189. "Je pilois en ces jours là de toutes les matieres que je pouvois penser qui pouroyent faire quelque chose, et les ayant pilées et broyées j'achetois une quantité de pots de terre, et apres les avoir mis en pieces je mettois des matieres, que j'avois broyées, dessus icelles. . . . Aucune fois la chose avoit trop chaufé & autre fois trop peu cuittes ou bruleés, je ne pouvois rien juger de la cause pourquoy je ne faisois rien de bon. . . . Or m'estant ainsi abuzé plusieurs fois avec grand frais et labeurs, j'estois tous les jours à piler et broyer nouvelles matieres et construire nouveaux fourneaux, avec grande despence d'argent et consommation de bois et de temps . . . avec tristesse & soupirs" (DA, pp. 294-295).
190. "Je receus des tristesses et labeurs tels que nul homme ne voudroit croire" (DA, p. 298).
191. "[J']estois comme un homme desesperé . . . j'avois double peine, piler, broyer et chaufer ledit fourneau, ... je fus contraint brusler les estapes qui soustenoyent les trailles de mon jardin, lesquelles estant bruslées je fus contraint brusler les tables et plancher de la maison" (DA, pp. 298-299).
192. For nineteenth- and twentieth-century romantics, Palissy epitomized the ideal artist (and/or scientist and/or spiritualist) painfully obsessed with his own craft. Honoré de Balzac modeled the protagonist of the 1834 novel The Quest of the Absolute (La recherche de l'absolu) on Palissy. In the same period, visual artists and playwrights exalted his memorable labor in the name of science and ceramics: see n. 114 below.
193. Smith, Body of the Artisan (above, n. 7), p. 155;
194. Debus, French Paracelsians (above, n. 25), p. 32.
195. Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences (above, n. 101), p. 51.
196. Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Basel: Karger, 1982), pp. 50-51.
197. Pamela H. Smith, "Giving Voice to Hands: The Articulation of Material Literacy in the Sixteenth Century," in Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics, ed. John Trimbur (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), pp. 74-93.
198. "J'estais en une telle angoisse que je ne sçavois dire: car j'estois tout tari et deseché à cause du labeur et de la chaleur du fourneau, il y avoit plus d'un mois que ma chemise n'a voit seché sur moy, encores pour me consoler on se moquoit de moi... par tel moyen l'on me faisoit perdre mon credit, et m'estimoit on estre fol" (DA, pp. 299-300).
199. "Bosse" has the sense of a bumpy protuberance or exterior convexity; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it referred generally to anatomical, mineral, and sculptural formations (Littré, Dictionnaire [above, n. 37], p. 377).
200. "Toutes ces fautes m'ont causé un tel labeur et tristesse d'esprit, qu'au paravant que j'aye eu rendu mes esmaux fusibles à un mesme degré de feu, j'ay cuidé entrer jusques à la porte du sepulchre; aussi en me travaillant à tels affaires je me suis trouvé l'espace de plus de dix ans si fort escoulé en ma personne qu'il n'y avoit aucune forme ny apparence de bosse aux bras ny aux jambes; ains estoyent mesdites jambes toutes d'une venue" (DA, p. 305).
201. These themes have also inspired several dramatic works devoted to Palissy's life and legendary working practices, including Louis Allard, Bernard Palissy, ou Le potier de saintes; pièce historique en 5 actes. Précédée d'un prologue en deux parties (Paris: Vanier, 1865);
202. Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, Bernardo de Palissy, o El heroismo del trabajo; biodrama original en dos partes y cuatro actos (San Juan, P.R.: Imprenta Venezuela, 1844);
203. Antoine Scudder, The Henchman of the Moon: A Poetic Drama in Five Acts (Chicago: Bookfellows, 1934).
204. Martin Kemp, Visualizations: The Nature Book of An and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 19.
205. Paula Findlen, "Inventing Nature: Commerce, Nature, and Art in Early Modern Cabinets of Curiosities," in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 297-324.
206. See also Martin Kemp, "Wrought by No Artist's Hand: The Natural, the Artificial, the Exotic, and the Scientific in the Renaissance," in Farago, Reframing the Renaissance (above, n. 30), pp. 177-196.
207. Antonio Pérez-Ramos, Francis Bacon's Idea of Science and the Maker's Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 3-31;
208. Thomas Clifford Allbutt, "Palissy, Bacon and the Revival of Natural Science," Proceedings of the British Academy (1913-14): 234-247.
209. "J'ay dressé un cabinet auquel j'ay mis plusieurs choses admirables et monstrueuses, que j'ay tirees de la matrice de la terre, lesquelles rendent tesmoignage certain de ce que je dis, et ne se trouvera homme qui ne soit contraint confesser iceux veritables, apres qu'il aura veu les choses que j'ay preparees en mon cabinet, pour rendre certains tous ceux qui ne voudroyent autrement adjouster foy à mes escrits" (DA, p. 12).
210. The seventeenth century produced a host of catalogues describing petrified things, including various people, animals, and household objects mysteriously turned to rock - or rather, "changés en Pierre"
211. Another, and only slightly earlier, documented sixteenth-century fossil collection was that of German physician Johann Kenntman (1518-1574), whose inventory appears to have included more than 1,600 specimens. In his 1565 treatise Nomenclaturae rerum fossilium, Kenntman included a woodcut illustration of his mineral cabinet: Torrens, "Early Collecting" (above, n. 83), p. 206.
212. See also K. P. Oakley, "Folklore of Fossils," Antiquity 39 (1965): 9-16, 117-125.
213. Scheicher, "Collection" (above, n. 17), p. 35.
214. On early modern collections, see Susan Pearce and Kenneth Arnold, eds., The Collector's Voice: Critical Readings in the History of Collecting - Early Voices, vol. 2 (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2000).
215. See also Andreas Grote, ed., Macroscosmos in Microcosmo - Die Welt in der Stube: Zur Geschichte des Sammeins 1450 bis 1800 (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1994);
216. Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500-1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990);
217. William B. Ashworth, "Emblematic Natural History," in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp. 17-38;
218. Paula Findlen, "Courting Nature," The Cultures of Collecting, ibid., pp. 57-75.
219. By the late seventeenth century, natural historians remained very puzzled about fossils - were they rocks "sui generis," "lusus naturae," or did they take their appearance from animals and plants from which they are derived? As the scholar Edward Lhuyd wrote to Ray in 1690, to answer such questions, "nothing would conduce more than a very copious collection of shells, of the skeletons of fish, of coral, pori, etc., and of those supposed petrifications" (Schnapper, Le géant [above, n. 16], p. 21).
220. Francis Bacon, "The New Atlantis," in A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 457-489, on p. 487.
221. Benjamin Farrington, Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science (New York: Octagon, 1979), p. 14.
222. See also Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences (above, n. 101), p. 63.
223. DA, p. 369.
224. DA, p. 370.
225. "Je luy feray un modeile, par lequel il pourra facilement entendre ce que dessus" (DA, p. 18).
226. "Coppie des Escrits, qui sont mis au desouz des choses merveilleuses, que l'auteur de ce livre a préparé, et mis par ordre en son cabinet, pour prouver toutes les choses contenues en ce livre" (DA, p. 361).
227. DA, pp. 365-367.
228. "J'ay mis ceste pierre devant tes yeux pour te faire entendre" (DA, p. 369).
229. "Considere ce grand nombre de poissons armez de coquilles, lesquelles j'ay mis devant tes yeux, qui sont à present tous reduis en pierre.... Regarde toutes ces espèces de poissons que j'ay mis devant tes yeux. ... ils ont esté autre fois animés" (DA, pp. 365-366).
230. "Tu vois evidemment que toutes ces formes de coquilles reduittes en pierres, ont esté autrefois poissons vivants" (DA, p. 369).
231. "Des choses merveilleuses qui sont mises pour tesmoignage et preuve de mes ecrits, attachez par ordre ou par estages, avec certains escriteaux au dessouz: afin qu'un chacun se puisse instruire soy-mesme" (DA, p. 16).
232. "En prouvant mes raisons escrittes, je contente la veüe, l'ouye et l'atouchement: à raison dequoy, les calomniateurs n'auront point de lieu en mon endroit: comme tu verras lors que tu me viendras voir en ma petite Academie" (DA, pp. 16-17).
233. Konrad Gessner is often lauded as the first natural historian to combine text and illustration in fossil study. See Torrens, "Early Collecting" (above, n. 83), p. 205;
234. Cynthia M. Pyle, "Art as Science: Scientific Illustration, 1490-1670, in Drawing, Woodcut and Copper Plate," Endeavour 24 (2000): 69-75.
235. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Viking, 1973), pp. 88-90;
236. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 96-136.
237. On painting and experience, see Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
238. On sculptural and three-dimensional representation in sixteenth-century Europe, seejeannert, Perpetual Motion (above, n. 7).
239. Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. Salvator Attanasio, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper Collins, 1970).
240. On experimental culture in the eighteenth century and the relationship between modern experimental science and experiential processes, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Airpump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
241. Pamela H. Smith, "Artisanal Epistemology," in idem, Body of the Artisan (above, n. 7), pp. 59-93.
242. Smith, "Giving Voice to Hands" (above, n. 110).
243. Rossi, Philosophy (above, n. 136), pp. ix-xii.
244. Ibid., pp. 1-11.
245. See also Alexander Bruno Hanschmann, Bernard Palissy der Kunstler, Naturforscher und Schriftsteller als Vater der induktiven Wissenschaftsmethode des Bacon von Verulam: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Philosophie (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1903).
246. Hanschmann discusses Bacon's indebtedness to Palissy in the chapter "Palissys Geist und Charakter und seine Bedeutung für die Geschichte der Pädagogischen Erkenntnis," pp. 131-156.