Long - Artisan Practitioners and The Rise of The New Sciences, 1400-1600 (2011) PDF

Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of
the New Sciences, 1400–1600

pa m e l a o. l ong
Oregon State University Press | corvallis

Cover art: Vitruvius, De architectura libri dece . . . da Cesare Caesariano [Como]:
G. da Ponte, [1521], fol. 165r. Courtesy Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library
Resources and the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Long, Pamela O.
Artisan/practitioners and the rise of the new sciences, 1400-1600 / Pamela O. Long.
p. cm. -- (Horning visiting scholar lecture series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-87071-609-6 (pbk.)
1. Science, Medieval. 2. Science--Europe--History. I. Title.
Q124.97.L66 2011
509’.40902--dc23
2011019529
© 2011 Pamela O. Long

All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by Oregon State University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Oregon State University Press

121 The Valley Library
Corvallis OR 97331-4501
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For Bob Korn
Allison Rachel Korn
Marco Yunga
and Lucas Samay Yunga Korn

Contents
Foreword x
Preface xii
Introduction: Artisanal Values and the Investigation

of Nature 1
chapter 1. Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History

of Science 10
chapter 2. Art, Nature, and the Culture of Empiricism 30
chapter 3. Artisans, Humanists, and the De architectura of

Vitruvius 62
chapter 4. Trading Zones: Arenas of Production and

Exchange 94
conclusion. Empirical Values in a Transitional Age 127
Notes 132
Bibliography 166
Index 190
I l l u s t r at i o n s
1.1. Painting of Edgar Zilsel 14
2.1. Robert Boyle’s air pump 36
2.2. Bernard Palissy or follower, earthenware dish with
decorations 36
2.3. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, fire allegory 38
2.4. Francesco Colonna, Hypnertomachia Poliphili. Poliphilo is lost in
a dark wood 40
2.5. Francesco di Giorgio, Trattato I. Mills 42
2.6. Francesco di Giorgio, Trattato I. Mills. Detail 43
2.7. Francesco di Giorgio, Trattato II. Overshot mill 45
2.8. Leonardo da Vinci, “Of Pinions and Wheels” 49
2.9. Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem.
Torso 51
2.10. The Belvedere Torso 51
2.11. Sebastiano Serlio, Regole generali di architectura.
Elements of the Doric order 54
Collection of bones 55
Portrait of author dissecting a hand 57
Humerus bone split lengthwise 58
3.1. Vitruvius, De architectura libri dece. Humans building the first
shelters 65
3.2. Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) 68
3.3. Matteo di Andrea de’ Pasti, medal with portrait of
Leon Battista Alberti 70
3.4. Lorenzo Ghiberti, panel from baptistery door, story of
Jacob and Esau 75
3.5. Lorenzo Ghiberti, self-portrait, from baptistery door 75
3.6. Antonio Averlino called Filarete, from Treatise on
Architecture 79
3.7. Giovanni Giocondo, ed., M. Vitruvius per Iocundum solito
castigatior factus cum figures et tabula ut iam legi et intelligi posit.
Illustration on building harbors and other structures in
water 86
3.8. Vitruvius, De architectura libri dece . Allegory of Cesare
Cesariano’s life 89
3.9. Vitruvius, De architectura libri dece . Machines for lifting 90
4.1. Innsbruck Zeughaus 97
4.2. Spanish galleon 99
4.3. Jacopo de’ Barbari, perspective plan of Venice 102
4.4. Venetian arsenal 102
4.5. Coat of arms of Michael of Rhodes 104
4.6. Diagrams for measuring out the bow and stern of a light
galley 105
4.7. Piston pumps for removing water from a mine driven by an
overshot waterwheel 109
4.8. Making the barrel and bore of a gun 112
4.9. Leonardo Bufalini and his surveying instruments 115
4.10. Portrait of Domenico Fontana holding an obelisk and
displaying a gold chain 117
4.11. Moving the Vatican obelisk 118
4.12. Daniele Barbaro, The Measurements of Architecture 122
4.13. Cipriano Piccolpasso, Li tre libri dell’arte del vasaio . . . del
Cipriano Piccolpassi. Preparing colors by pounding them in
mortars 123
foreword
The Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in the Humanities at
Oregon State University was established by a bequest from Benjamin Horning
(1890–1991) in memory of his parents, Mary Jones and Thomas Hart Horning,
members of pioneering families of Benton County and Corvallis, Oregon.
Benjamin Graham Horning graduated from what was then Oregon Agricultural
College in 1914, and went on to complete a medical degree at Harvard and a
degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Horning’s long
professional career included service in public health in Connecticut, work on
rural health as a staff member with the American Public Health Association,
and a position as medical director for the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, which led
to his spending many years in Latin America. Dr. Horning wanted his bequest
at Oregon State University to expand education in the humanities and to build
a bridge between the humanities and the sciences.
Since 1994, the endowment has supported an annual lecture series and
individual lectures, conferences, symposia, and colloquia, as well as teaching,
research, and program and collection development. The Horning professorships
are housed in the Department of History. The first Thomas Hart and Mary Jones
Horning Professors in the Humanities, Mary Jo Nye and Robert A. Nye, were
appointed in 1994. Anita Guerrini and David A. Luft succeeded them in 2008.
The Horning Visiting Scholar in the Humanities program was inaugurated in
2006 to allow a distinguished scholar to spend a week in residence at OSU
and deliver a series of lectures as well as participate in other activities in and
out of the classroom. Visiting Scholars since 2006 have included Ken Alder
(Northwestern University), Liba Taub (Cambridge University), Lawrence
Principe (Johns Hopkins University), and John Beatty (University of British
Columbia).
The OSU Press Horning Visiting Scholars Publication Series, under the
direction of the Press’s acquisitions editor, Mary Elizabeth Braun, publishes
the public lectures delivered by the Horning Visiting Scholar: one volume in
the series has appeared, Liba Taub’s Aetna and the Moon (2008). Other works
in the humanities outside the scope of this series that the series editors, Anita
Guerrini and David Luft, have found to be relevant to the aims of the Horning
Endowment may also be published by the Press in the future.
x | Foreword
Pamela O. Long was the Horning Visiting Scholar in April 2010. Dr. Long is
an independent scholar of late medieval and Renaissance science and technology
based in Washington, D.C. Her research and scholarship have focused
particularly on craft traditions, authorship, the intersections of architecture and
science, and the history of engineering. Dr. Long’s scholarship has ranged across
Europe, with a recent focus on the city of Rome. Her many publications include
Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from
Antiquity to the Renaissance (2001), which won the 2001 Morris D. Forkosch Prize
for the best book in intellectual history, awarded by the Journal of the History of
Ideas; Obelisk: A History (with Brian Curran, Anthony Grafton, and Benjamin
Weiss, 2009); and the three-volume Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-
Century Maritime Manuscript (2009), co-edited and co-authored with David
McGee and Alan M. Stahl. She co-edits, with Robert C. Post, the booklet series
Historical Perspectives on Technology, Society and Culture, co-sponsored by the
American Historical Association and the Society for the History of Technology.
In Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600, Pamela
Long offers a concise and compelling account of the roles of artisans and
practitioners in the development of the new sciences of the early modern era.
Most accounts of the “scientific revolution” have emphasized elite academic
natural philosophers, and the role played by craftspeople has been hotly contested
among historians. Intriguingly, Dr. Long begins her book with a reassessment
of earlier historiographical accounts of this issue, focusing particularly on the
Marxist philosopher Edgar Zilsel (1891–1944). Subsequent chapters draw on
Dr. Long’s deep knowledge of learned and craft traditions to argue that, in
fact, these traditions found increasingly common ground over the course of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to create the empirically based new sciences.
The humanist revival of the works of the ancient Roman architectural scholar
Vitruvius, for example, led engineers, craftsmen, and scholars to collaborate
in construction and engineering projects. Dr. Long effectively employs the
concept of “trading zones” (developed by the historian of science Peter Galison
to talk about modern physics) to talk about places ranging from mines to cities
where interchanges between scholars and artisans led to the creation of new
knowledge. Her book adds a substantial new dimension to ongoing debates on
the origins of modern science.
anita guerrini
Foreword | xi
preface
This book came out of the public lectures that I gave as the Horning Visiting
Scholar at Oregon State University in April 2010. Three of the essays in this book
are a direct result of the lectures, while a fourth, on the Vitruvian tradition, is
an addition. It was a great pleasure to spend the week at Oregon State to give
lectures to wonderful, inquisitive audiences, to talk extensively throughout
the week with faculty and graduate students in the history department and in
other departments of the university, and to participate in seminars and classes. I
especially thank Horning Professors Anita Guerrini and David Luft, who invited
me, warmly welcomed me, and made my stay a memorable one. I thank Lisa
Sarasohn and Jacob Hamblin for inviting me to participate in their classes and
seminars, Michael Osborne and Anita Guerrini for their welcoming hospitality,
and Elissa Curcio for making and facilitating numerous arrangements.
One might think that delivering a series of three lectures would be a simple
matter of organizing what one knows and delivering that knowledge in a
rhetorically effective way to a (hopefully) receptive audience. This was hardly
the case with these lectures on artisan/practitioners and their influence on
the new sciences. It is true that I have been thinking about and investigating
premodern artisans—people whose work life was centered on the skilled
manipulation of materials in order to fabricate objects, and those who engaged
in complex material practices such as agriculture or navigation—and artisanal
culture for most of my scholarly life. The intense months of preparation for the
lectures, however, involved new primary research and the assessment of much
recent scholarship on relevant topics. Preparing for the lectures also provided an
unexpected opportunity to step back and to reassess my own previous work and
thinking on the topic and to create a new synthesis that went beyond that work.
During the months of transforming the lectures into chapters of this book,
I was supported by National Science Foundation grant #0849158. The entire
manuscript was critically read by Horning Professor Emerita Mary Jo Nye; Anita
Guerrini; my sister, master writer and poet Priscilla Long; and astute reader Bob
Korn. Together they saved me from errors and greatly helped improve the work.
Finally, I thank Teresa Jesionowski for superb copyediting that saved me from
many errors, and I thank the acquisitions editor of Oregon State University
Press, Mary Elizabeth Braun, and managing editor, Jo Alexander, who brought
the book to press with efficiency and care.
xii | Preface
introduction
Artisanal Values and the Investigation of Nature
A long-standing issue in the history of science can be framed as a

question: Did artisan/practitioners influence the development of the new
sciences? By the expression “artisan/practitioners,” I refer to a broadly
diverse group of skilled artisans such as weavers and instrument makers;
architect/engineers involved in the design and construction of buildings,
bridges, and the like; and practitioners such as farmers and navigators.1
Through the lens of this one issue, which is a fundamentally important
one, this book treats a series of complex, multifaceted, and long-term
developments, traditionally referred to as the “scientific revolution.” The
people contributing to this development did not use the phrase “scientific
revolution” but often referred to their own work as a “new science.” For
example, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) called one of his most important
books Discourse on the Two New Sciences (referring to the strength of
materials and the motion of objects). It is this term, commonly used in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that I use throughout.
The new sciences are usually considered to have developed on the
European continent and in England from the mid-sixteenth century
through the seventeenth century. A key initial event was the publication
in 1543 of the De revolutionibus by Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543),
and a concluding highpoint is often considered to be the publication of
the Principia Mathematica (1687) by Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727). This
book begins earlier, around 1400, and ends around 1600. I argue that in
this two-hundred-year period, the empirical values that were intrinsic to
artisanal work came to be embedded within a broader European culture.
Near the end of this period, around the mid-sixteenth century, new ideas
about the cosmos and the natural world began to emerge. New kinds of
Introduction: Artisanal Values and the Investigation of Nature | 1

questions began to be asked, and new methods began to be utilized to
investigate nature.2
Changes brought by the new sciences must be understood against
a background of the Aristotelianism and scholasticism of the medieval
universities. The studium generale, as the medieval university was called,
emerged in the early thirteenth century. Professors in the universities
taught about the cosmos and the natural world, or “natural philosophy,”
by focusing on Aristotle and Aristotelian texts and commentaries.
Such texts formed a rich tradition to which there was no equivalent
in terms of depth, breadth, or sophistication. It included time-tested
views concerning the structure of an Earth-centered cosmos, as well
as a material and causal understanding of substances, and a coherent
explanation of motion and change. In addition, this tradition contained
within it a set of methodologies or ways of approaching the investigation
of the natural world.3
Substantial scholarship underscores the depth and richness of this
Aristotelian natural philosophy, as well as its ability to develop and
change. It was an important part of the educational system until at least
the end of the seventeenth century.4 At the same time, though, from
about the mid-sixteenth century, new ideas and approaches concerning
the structure of the cosmos and concerning phenomena such as motion
and substance began to be put forward. Innovative approaches and new
instruments encouraged the practice of observation—observation of
plants and animals, stars and planets. It is a distortion, however, to say
that Aristotelianism was replaced by the new sciences in this era; rather,
they coexisted, sometimes in fruitful dialogue and synchrony, sometimes
in polemical opposition.
Changing views about how the world was constructed and how it
should be investigated came in the wake of social, economic, and political
changes that had occurred in medieval and late medieval Europe. The
rise of the cities; the development of commercial capitalism and long-
distance trade; the development of large-scale industries such as textiles,
armaments, and mining; the immense expansion of overseas markets;5
oceanic explorations and the discovery of lands new to Europeans; new
2 | Introduction: Artisanal Values and the Investigation of Nature

knowledge about never-before-heard-of flora and fauna and unknown
peoples;6 the increasing political and social importance of princely
courts;7 the invention of movable type and printing and the subsequent
great expansion of books and pamphlets of all kinds;8 conspicuous
consumption among elites and the parallel expanding manufacture of
luxury goods; the construction of massive palaces and other buildings
and their ornamentation;9 the increased importance of visual culture
and the rising status of the visual arts aided by the invention of artists’
perspective10—all this brought with it a growing valuation of things, of
objects, and often, an appreciation of the skill and knowledge of the
people who made those objects. These closely interrelated complex
historical developments influenced the ways in which the world was
approached, investigated, and understood.
The new sciences put forth innovative ideas about the structure of the
cosmos and other aspects of the natural world. For example, in his De
revolutionibus, Copernicus rejected the geocentric model of the cosmos
and proposed a heliocentric model. Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) proposed a
third, compromise model, a geoheliocentric cosmos in which the moon
and the sun revolve around the earth, while Mercury, Venus, Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn revolve around the sun, and the fixed stars around
all.11 New approaches were also adopted in other areas such as anatomy,
physics, and natural history.
The new sciences entailed particular discoveries and new ideas, and,
in addition, changes in the kinds of questions asked and in the methods
used to answer those questions. Investigators increasingly adopted a
variety of empirical approaches and values as relevant to knowledge
about the world—an appreciation for the knowledge acquired by hands-
on manipulation and the use of instruments; the practices of direct
observation and experimentation; methods of precise measurement and
other forms of quantification; and a positive valuation of individual
experience. These values and practices closely resembled those held by
contemporary artisans and practitioners such as painters, sculptors,
carpenters, weavers, potters, architect/engineers, mariners, apothecaries,
and farmers.12

In the 1920s, as the modern discipline of the history of science
developed, this sixteenth-century overlap and coincidence of the values
and practices of artisans, on the one hand, and investigators of the natural
world, on the other, suggested to some that artisans had significantly
influenced the development of the scientific revolution. Other historians
vociferously disagreed. Since the 1980s, the issue has reemerged but
framed in a very different way. The history of this issue and the issue
itself are the twin subjects of this book.
“Artisan/practitioners” were men and women who worked with their

hands in craft production (for example, carpenters, weavers, and
instrument makers) or carried out complex practical tasks such as farming
or navigation. A characteristic of the medieval period in general is that the
world of crafts and the world of learning existed in quite separate realms.
The study of the natural world occurred in the universities and was called
natural philosophy. Craft practice involved a hands-on process in which
apprentices learned by doing and making, sometimes formally under an
apprenticeship contract regulated by a guild and sometimes informally
as part of a family unit. Crafts such as spinning, weaving, and painting
and practices such as agriculture and navigation were learned under the
guidance of a skilled practitioner, often an older family member. In some
cases writings surrounded craft activities, such as records and accounts
kept, regulations for the craft, and specifications created by patrons for
particular works, and there may have been other kinds of communicative
and mnemonic devices such as drawings on paper or models made out
of wood. The usual activity of craft practice, however, was carried out by
making something or carrying out some physical task. Any instruction
was usually oral and was provided in one of the vernacular languages,
whether Italian, French, German, English, or some other language.13
In contrast, reading, writing, and teaching at the universities in
the Middle Ages were conducted in Latin. University instruction in
natural philosophy as well as in other topics was based on two main
activities, the lecture (lectio) and the disputation (disputatio). In the
lectio, the professor lectured and commented on authoritative books

that were prescribed by regulations that governed the university. These
books included ancient texts such as those by Aristotle, sometimes with
additions and explications by medieval commentators. Edward Grant
describes the ways in which the lecture developed over several centuries—
it consisted of the summary of one or more texts, and a discussion or
commentary, sometimes including reference to previous commentaries.
The disputation, or disputatio, took several forms but always involved
one or more questions (the quaestio). Often students under examination
would be given opposite sides of a question to defend. The resolution
of the question, called the determination, or determinatio, would be
summarized by the presiding master.14
Impinging on this world of university scholasticism, a new intellectual
movement that came to be known as humanism arose in the fourteenth
century—most notably in the writings of Petrarch (1304–1374) and
then in those of Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406). Humanism became
highly influential by the early fifteenth century. Humanists wanted to
reform the Latin language by returning to the Latin usage of classical
antiquity, as exemplified in the writings of Cicero (106 bce–43 bce), and
by expunging what they considered to be crude medieval corruptions.
Humanists also turned from the scholastic interest in logic, philosophy,
and theology to rhetoric, moral philosophy, and history. The humanists
admired and investigated the ancient past. They searched for new texts
and studied and reedited them. They also investigated ancient artifacts
and ruins, searched for ancient sculptures, and collected ancient coins
and medals. Many humanists earned their livelihoods by serving as
secretaries to princes, popes, cardinals, and other elite men, using their
well-honed Latin skills in the process. They created an intellectual and
bookish world concerned with a variety of skilled practices and physical
objects. Humanism initially grew up outside of the universities, but
eventually, by the late fifteenth century, it began to influence the course
of studies within them.15
The new culture of humanism had important implications for the
artisanal crafts. Humanism emphasized practical life as opposed to
scholastic logic, and it encouraged an interest in material goods and in

the decorative arts that were part of daily life. It is notable that one of
the greatest humanists of the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti,
who was educated at a university and possessed highly developed Latin
literary skills, also wrote about sculpture, painting, and architecture, and
practiced painting and architecture. Some humanists like Alberti wrote
on the practical and technical arts. Practitioners themselves also began
to write books with increasing frequency about their own disciplines.
Writings about various practices and artisanal crafts found a readership
among patrons and others in the elite and learned classes as well as
among other practitioners.16 Although writings on technical arts and
practices had occurred since antiquity, such writings expanded rapidly
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This proliferation of writings
made the values of artisanal culture more readily available to be used as
components of methodologies for the investigation of nature.
This book is aimed at a nonspecialist readership, and it is hoped that

it may be of some use to historians of science and technology as well.
Chapter 1 treats the history of the idea of artisanal influence on the
new sciences as that idea emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. Such notions
developed for the most part (but not exclusively) within the context
of Marxism and Marxist notions concerning capitalist development.
A second important context was the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and
1930s and the logical empiricism or logical positivism with which it
was associated. Edgar Zilsel (1891–1944) developed the “Zilsel thesis” of
artisanal influence on the scientific revolution. Zilsel lived and worked
in Vienna and took part in the meetings of the Vienna Circle before
he emigrated to the United States in 1939, where he wrote his seminal
articles. In another context, the Russian physicist Boris Hessen (1893–
1936) read a famous paper relevant to the issue of artisanal influence in
London in 1931 at the Second International Conference for the History
of Science and Technology. Shortly thereafter, in Frankfurt, Germany,
a controversy broke out over the origins of the scientific revolution,
both sides of which invoked aspects of the artisanal world. The
protagonists were Henryk Grossmann (1881–1950) and Franz Borkenau

(1900–1957), both at the Institute for Social Research, known as the
Frankfurt School.
Chapter 1 also discusses the views of non-Marxist scholars who
address, in one way or another, the issue of artisanal influence on the
new sciences. One is the philologist Leonardo Olschki (1885–1962),
who in the 1920s wrote a three-volume work on technical writings in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and their importance for Galileo.
Another is the American sociologist Robert Merton (1910–2003). The
chapter also treats opposition to the view of artisanal influence—a
position that prevailed among Anglo-American historians of science after
the Second World War. It concludes with a discussion of the reemergence
of the issue in recent decades within frameworks quite different from the
original Marxist one.
In the remaining three chapters I explore the issue of the influence of
artisans on the new sciences in the two-hundred-year period from 1400
to 1600 on the basis of primary source materials and from my own point
of view. As will become apparent in these chapters, in general I think
that artisanal influence on the new sciences was significant, but I suggest
that the dichotomous categories with which the issue traditionally has
been discussed— artisan/scholar, handworker/theorist, practice/theory,
experimental/mathematical, art/nature—represent distorting lenses. It
was precisely the blurring of these traditionally separate categories that
provided the modality for the influence of artisanal values on the new
sciences. Some artisans took up pens and began to write books, while
some learned men began to take up artisanal practices such as surveying
and measurement. Further, the distinction between artifactual objects,
that is objects made by humans, and natural objects came to be blurred—
for example, the potter Bernard Palissy (ca 1510-1589) fabricated platters
embedded with lizards.
Chapter 2, on “art” (i.e., artisanal crafts) and “nature,” discusses the
historical interaction between these two changing concepts. This chapter
first centers on the Aristotelian view of art and nature. It then turns
to the question of the role played by experience and experiment in
medieval natural philosophy and in medieval alchemy. The degree to

which experiment and empirical manipulations (that is, art) could lead
to an understanding of nature depended on the assumed relationship
between art and nature. By the late fifteenth century, there was a growing
interchangeability of the two categories, and a growing tendency to use
machines and instruments to investigate and discuss natural phenomena
such as power and motion.
Chapter 3 treats the Roman architect Vitruvius (fl. 40s–20s bce) and
the Vitruvian tradition as an important common ground on which
practitioners and university-educated men came together to discuss
substantive issues. Vitruvius’s treatise, the De architectura, was the only
architectural treatise to survive intact from the ancient world. Beginning
in the fifteenth century, a rich tradition of architectural practices and
writings, including commentaries on the De architectura, picked up
and developed the Vitruvian dictum that architecture consists of both
fabrication and reason. Workshop-trained practitioners as well as
university-trained humanists contributed to this written tradition, as they
examined buildings and artifacts with the ancient text and measuring rods
in hand. I suggest that Vitruvianism served as a modality for empirical
investigation of issues involving building construction, hydraulics,
and machines. Problems in understanding the De architectura in view
of extant ancient buildings or ruins led to significant communication
between practitioners and the learned. The Vitruvian tradition became
a “trading zone” in which substantive communication occurred between
the two groups.
The final chapter focuses on other “trading zones”—arenas in which
the unskilled learned and skilled practitioners exchanged substantive
knowledge. In the late sixteenth century, numerous locales served this
purpose. These included arsenals, mines, workshops, and cities. Such
places became important sites for communication and exchange between
men trained as artisans and those schooled in Latin learning. Men from
these diverse backgrounds exchanged information concerning material
production and problems in engineering, but also concerning the nature
of materials and of natural phenomena—traditionally topics belonging
to natural philosophy.

This book shows not necessarily a direct influence of particular
artisans on specific individuals investigating the natural world, although
such influence did occur. Rather, it shows that the categories of “art” and
“nature” became less and less apropos as categories indicating separate
entities as the two came closer together and even became interchangeable.
At the same time, the categories “scholar” and “craftsman” as classifications
of types of individuals became an oversimplification when in some arenas
the two moved closer together, communicated, and adopted each other’s
practices. I suggest that empirical values, once held predominantly by
artisan/practitioners, came to be generally adopted by the society at
large, thereby making them readily available for use by investigators of
the natural world. I further suggest that this development came about, at
least in part, by the widespread development of “trading zones” in which
the learned and the skilled communicated, exchanging substantive
information. I suggest finally that this development cannot be attributed
to artisan-trained individuals alone but rather came about through the
interaction of artisanal and humanist culture.

chapter 1
Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the

History of Science
In the 1920s and 1930s, just as the history of science as a discipline was
taking shape, a new thesis emerged concerning the influence of artisans
and artisanal culture on what was termed the “scientific revolution” of
the seventeenth century. A group of scholars began to discuss the ways
in which the mechanical arts—that is, the arts and crafts carried out
by skilled artisans—influenced the development of the mechanical
world view that emerged in the seventeenth century. The “mechanical
world view” was shorthand for the idea that all motion and change was
mechanical and that the universe itself functioned as a machine. The
mechanical world view developed along with a complex of other ideas
about the natural world and how to study it that are often grouped
together under the term the “new sciences.”
Four of the scholars who debated the thesis of artisanal influence
adhered to one or another form of Marxism, and at least one, the
Viennese physicist and philosopher Edgar Zilsel, was associated with
the philosophical outlook known as logical empiricism. In addition
to Zilsel, the Marxist scholars who developed versions of the thesis of
artisanal influence were the Russian physicist Boris Hessen, the Viennese
sociologist Franz Borkenau, and the Polish political economist Henryk
Grossmann. All four were from Jewish backgrounds, and all suffered
from the virulent anti-Semitism of their day. All were leftists who
engaged extensively in both philosophical and political struggles. Their
differing views on artisanal influence were tied to their larger philosophic
and scientific outlook and to their political activities.1
Other scholars who were not Marxists also developed ideas about
artisanal culture and the new sciences. One was the German-Italian
10 | Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science

philologist Leonardo Olschki, whose three-volume study of fifteenth-
and sixteenth-century technical writings and their influence on Galileo,
published in the 1920s, seems to have influenced at least some of the
Marxists. A second, the American sociologist Robert Merton, wrote
a dissertation the second half of which was devoted to technical and
practical arts and their influence on the sciences. It was published in 1938
as Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England.2
This early work of scholars in the 1920s and 1930s focused on artisanal
influence on the new sciences is worth revisiting because these discussions
reflect significant interpretive issues in the discipline of the history of
science as a whole. In addition, the assumptions of those decades have
at times silently shaped current discussions in ways that would benefit
from explicit analysis.
The Marxist Tradition
Several key concepts in the writings of Karl Marx (1818–1885) are relevant
to this twentieth-century scholarship. Marx along with Friedrich Engels
(1820–1895) had developed the tenets of historical materialism in the 1840s
in opposition to the prevailing notions of idealism. Whereas idealists
argued that ideas and beliefs were the moving forces of history, Marx
suggested, instead, that history was driven by economic production.
“Productive forces” included both the means of production, such as
tools, machines, and factories, and labor power, which involved human
skill, knowledge, and experience. Marx argued that the foundation of
society was its economic structure, by which he meant the relations of
production. All the rest—law, politics, social consciousness, intellectual
life, and science—he considered to be superstructure determined
in perhaps complex ways by the underlying structure of economic
production.3
Individuals and political groups modified Marx’s influential ideas
in various ways during the first three decades of the twentieth century.
Max Adler (1873–1937), an Austrian politician and social philosopher,
Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science | 11

who was an important leader of the Austrian Social Democratic Party,
developed a strand of Marxism referred to, in Edgar Zilsel’s Vienna, as
Austro-Marxism. Adler conceived of Marxism as “a system of sociological
knowledge” and argued that the economic determinism of Marxism
should not be thought of as a materialist determinism; rather, economic
production was mediated by consciousness. So, in a sense Adler took
the materialism out of Marxism and suggested that even economic
phenomena possessed a mental character. He transformed Marx’s idea of
economic production, making it not the material production of goods
per se, but a category of knowledge, a concept that originated in reason
and was not derived from experience. Adler also analyzed changing
class structure and the process of differentiation within social classes.
For example, he divided the proletariat into subclasses, including a labor
aristocracy of skilled workers, an idea that may well have influenced
Zilsel.4
Edgar Zilsel, undoubtedly the most prominent proponent of the
thesis of artisanal influence, was a physicist and scholar who was born in
Vienna in 1891 and studied mathematics and physics at the University of
Vienna. Deeply influenced by Adler’s Marxism, he joined the Austrian
socialist party in 1918. He was active on the periphery of the Vienna
Circle in the 1920s.5
The circle began as an informal group of philosophers and scientists that
met regularly to discuss philosophical issues pertaining to science. Their
discussions and the writings that emerged from them form an important
grounding on which the philosophy of science as a discipline developed
over the twentieth century. Their beliefs and ideas, taken together, are
traditionally referred to as “logical positivism,” or “logical empiricism.”
Although the developments and strands of this philosophical movement
are outside the scope of this book, their views (which were by no means
always in agreement) can be summarized by two important ideas. The
first was that knowledge came only from experience. The second was that
the task of philosophy was to clarify this experience by logical analysis.
Vienna Circle philosophers were opposed to the idea that theory and
metaphysics could be useful for philosophic and scientific knowledge.6

As a positivist, Zilsel believed that metaphysics should be abandoned,
that the laws of social sciences and history could be formulated according
to scientific principles. He also believed that the laws of history, like
the laws of physics, could be discovered by empirical investigation. In
the summer of 1923, he submitted his Habilitation-dissertation (the
postdoctoral requirement for teaching at the university level) to the
University of Vienna on the concept of genius; he was asked to withdraw
it on the grounds that the topic was not sufficiently philosophical.
When asked to submit a different work, he refused, saying that he did
not want his research to be determined by external considerations.
Without a Habilitation, he was unable to teach in the university, but he
became deeply involved in the Viennese Institutes of Adult Education
or Volkhochschulen—People’s High Schools (which were adult education
centers, rather than institutions similar to, for example, American high
schools). He taught mathematics, physics, and philosophy between 1921
and 1934, at which time the newly established fascist dictator, Engelbert
Dollfuss (1892–1934), abolished the institutes. In the following years,
Zilsel taught physics in a Viennese Gymnasium, or high school.7
Zilsel’s philosophy was shaped by his work in the Institutes of Adult
Education. Along with Otto Neurath (1882–1945), a sociologist and
a founder of the Vienna Circle, Zilsel believed that knowledge, life,
and education should be governed by a principle of unity. Education
should not alienate workers from their own cultural and social roots, but
should rather create an expanded sense of unity in which knowledge was
relevant to the concerns of daily life.8 The unity of knowledge was not
just a social ideal but a philosophical one, and here Zilsel disagreed with
Neurath and others concerning how the unification of science should be
reconstructed. For him the unity of the sciences was an empirical issue
to be investigated, not an unquestioned assumption.9
In the 1920s, Zilsel expanded the material of his failed Habilitation
into a book on the origin of the concept of genius. In it, he described
the rise of the idea of genius and of individualism as an aspect of early
capitalism and the competitive mentality associated with it. He also
noted the emergence of the idea of the inventor, the discoverer, and the

1.1. Edgar Zilsel by
unknown artist in
Austrian expressionist
style, painted during
World War I, when
Zilsel was in his early
twenties. Photograph
courtesy of Joanna
Zilsel.
artist in the early Renaissance. Zilsel concluded his book with a section
titled “Laws on the Concept of Genius.” These were hypotheses that
were meant to be tested by comparative studies with other cultures to
determine under what historical conditions the idea of genius might
arise. As Diederick Raven has shown, Zilsel’s historical study was an
aspect of his work on the unity of knowledge. He believed that history
and humanities possessed laws similar to natural laws. Such laws must be
discovered empirically, just as were the laws of nature. Zilsel’s empirically
oriented view of the unity of knowledge motivated his later work on the
social origins of the scientific revolution.10
The Vienna Circle dissolved in the late 1930s as its members fled
the Nazis. Edgar Zilsel and his family—his wife, Ella Zilsel, who had
taught English and German at the women’s Gymnasium in Vienna,
and their sixteen-year-old son, Paul—were forced into exile after the
Anschluss on March 13, 1938, that unified Germany and Austria under
the Nazis. The family moved to New York via London. In New York

City in the early 1940s, while struggling to gain a foothold, Zilsel wrote
several important articles on the contribution of what he called “superior
artisans” to the development of the empirical sciences. In August 1943
he was offered a position at Mills College, a small women’s college in
Oakland, California. He moved to take up his position without his wife,
who was mentally ill and chose to stay in New York, and without his
son, who was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin.11 He
had planned to continue his work on artisanal influence and to write a
book on the subject. Instead, he tragically committed suicide in his office
on March 11, 1944, six years after the Austrian Anschluss with Hitler’s
Germany. Zilsel was a logical positivist, but also a Marxist. He was one of
a number of Marxist historians who in the 1930s developed ideas about
the relationship of artisan/practitioners and the scientific revolution.12
In the early 1930s, other Marxist thinkers were developing ideas
about the ways that artisanal culture contributed to the development
of the scientific revolution. A key event for the expression of such a
view was a meeting that took place in London in July 1931—the Second
International Congress of the History of Science and Technology. This
congress was attended by a Russian delegation formally led by the
Marxist theoretician and Soviet politician Nicholai Bukharin (1888–
1938). The delegation, which created a great stir in London, included a
physicist, Boris Hessen, who was prominent in official Soviet scientific
circles. Loren Graham notes that Hessen had been censored at home
because he championed relativity theory, which the authorities took to
be a form of bourgeois physics. The delegation included ArnoŠt Kolman
(1892–1979), the party secretary, who had been instructed to report back
concerning the performance of Hessen and Bukharin (who was also
under suspicion).13
In his talk at the congress, titled “The Social and Economic Roots
of Newton’s Principia,” Hessen expounded Marxist ideology far
more effusively than he had in his talks in the Soviet Union. He also
connected Newton’s ideas in the Principia with the technical aspects
of material production in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Graham observes that everyone in the Soviet Union accepted Newtonian

physics. If Hessen could show that Newtonian physics could be valued
independently from the economic order from which it arose and from
Newton’s religious and philosophical conclusions, by extension, so
also could relativity theory be separated from its “bourgeois” context
of origin and surrounding philosophies. Whatever Hessen’s success in
London from the Soviet point of view, it was temporary. Both Bukharin
and Hessen would become victims of the Stalinist purges. Hessen was
arrested in Russia in August 1936, tortured seventeen times, tried for
terrorism on December 20, 1936, and that day executed by a firing squad.
Bukharin was executed in 1938.14
Before these grim events, in the paper presented at the congress,
Hessen had rejected the idea that Newton’s achievements were the
result of individual genius. Instead, he endorsed Karl Marx’s notion that
changes in the economic production of commodities in turn produced
changes in the superstructures of society. Hessen also adopted Marx’s
periodization. That is, he argued that a feudal economy existed in the
medieval period and that it disintegrated as merchant capitalism and
manufacturing arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This rise
brought about new demands for technology, especially in the areas of
transportation, communication, artillery and other aspects of war, and
mining. He viewed the development of natural science as a product of
the technical needs of the new bourgeois class. He insisted that the core of
Newton’s Principia consisted of technical problems and that the themes
of Newton’s work, although not overtly technical, were determined by
technical issues.15
Hessen suggested that classical mechanics—the Galilean and
Newtonian mechanics that emerged in the seventeenth century—
developed on the basis of the kinds of machines used in that century.
It was relevant that industrial machinery such as lifting machines
and waterwheels produced only mechanical motion. For him, the
kinds of machinery available determined the nature of physics. Thus,
thermodynamics could develop only after the eighteenth-century
invention of the steam engine, and electromagnetism as a branch of
physics could develop only after the nineteenth-century invention of

electromagnetic machines. It followed that the mechanical philosophy
that developed in the seventeenth century was a direct result of the
mechanical motion of seventeenth-century machines.16
Shortly after Hessen delivered his paper in London, the Viennese
sociologist Franz Borkenau published an article on the origins of the
empirical methodologies in the new sciences. Borkenau was born in
Vienna in 1900. In 1918 he attended the University of Leipzig and also
became involved in the German communist party (which he left in
1929). In the mid-to-late 1920s, he became associated with the Institute
for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) at Frankfurt, the well-
known institute that came to be known as the Frankfurt School. In 1932
Borkenau published a paper called “The Sociology of the Mechanistic
World Picture,” followed in 1934 by a book, The Transition from the
Feudal to the Bourgeois World-Picture, which delineated the relationship
of labor, particularly craft labor, to the scientific revolution. Borkenau’s
article and book were published under the auspices of the Institute for
Social Research.17
The institute originated in 1922 at the University of Frankfurt at the
behest of Felix Weil (1898–1975) with the help of his father, Hermann
Weil (1868–1927), a wealthy merchant who had founded a grain
company in Argentina. The company, Hermanos Weil, eventually
controlled the Argentine grain trade and maintained offices in all major
European cities with about three thousand employees and sixty ships
operating under the company flag. Following the death from diabetes
of the prospective first director of the institute, Kurt Gerlach (1886–
1922), the Viennese professor Carl Grünberg (1861–1940) agreed to be
the director. Grünberg, a Marxist who taught law and political science
at the University of Vienna, had been the publisher of the Archiv für
die Geschichte des Socialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (known as the
Grünberg Archives). As the director of the institute between 1924 and
1927, Grünberg oversaw the publication of the collected works of Marx
and Engels.18
An important influence on the institute as a whole and on Franz
Borkenau in particular was the Hungarian philosopher, literary critic,

and political leader Georg Lukács (1885–1971) and his book History and
Class Consciousness, first published in 1922. Lukács had rejected Karl
Marx’s view of the deterministic one-to-one relationship of modes of
production to superstructures such as philosophy and science. He also
opposed the fashioning of Marxism into a type of sociology à la Max
Adler. Central to his philosophy was the concept of reification, an idea
that originated in the writings of Marx. Reification occurs when human
activity becomes alienated from the person and is turned into a thing or a
commodity; it is objectified and thus becomes a nonhuman object. Thus
a person’s labor performed on a time clock to produce part of a product
on a factory line is reified labor, a commodity without real connection to
the working individual.19
Influenced by Lukács and the idea of reification, Borkenau provided
a detailed analysis of the economic and social forms of feudalism,
Renaissance early capitalism, and seventeenth-century manufacturing
capitalism. He believed that a revolution in thought had occurred
in the transition from feudalism to bourgeois capitalism. The result
of that revolution was the view of the world held by Descartes and
other philosophers of the seventeenth century—a world that could be
described mathematically and worked like a machine. Borkenau here
accepted Marx’s view of an economic transition in which the craft
production of the medieval workshop was transformed into other forms
of manufacture. As he described it, craft workers were now gathered into
one shop. Their labor had been reified into a commodity; they worked in
a group in which each produced only a piece of the whole product because
their jobs had been decomposed into parts. The worker was described
only in terms of quantitative labor and pure physical movement. As
labor became quantified and abstract, so also did the world—resulting
in the mathematical/mechanistic world picture. Human labor became a
commodity, an object, which was reinforced by a view of a world that
functions entirely in a mechanical way, like a machine.20
Borkenau’s thesis came under attack by another member of the
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Henryk Grossmann. Grossmann
was born in Krakow in 1881 to a family of well-to-do mineowners.

He studied jurisprudence, political economy, and economic history
at the University of Krakow, was active in a radical socialist student
organization, and worked intensely to revitalize the Jewish labor
movement. Subsequently, he studied at the University of Vienna. In 1926
he became associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt
as Carl Grünberg’s assistant. It was the new director of the institute as of
1930, Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), who urged him to write a critique
of Borkenau’s traditional Marxist analysis. Horkheimer led a group of
younger scholars who were disenchanted with the traditional Marxist
leadership of the institute. Grossmann’s critique of Borkenau can be seen
as part of this younger-generation critique against the traditionalists.21
Grossmann took up Horkheimer’s challenge and wrote an extensive
critique of Borkenau’s argument, which he took to be the notion that
the mechanistic world view came directly out of the manufacturing
process. He argued that his colleague had overgeneralized in his scheme
of a three-stage development that proceeded from a feudal regime to a
renaissance based on craft production to an early seventeenth-century
manufacturing culture based on a factory production. Borkenau’s view
of history provided an excessively linear scheme of development, based
as it was on a single world view for each period. Grossmann suggested,
alternatively, greater recognition of overlap, differentiation, diversity of
geographic area, and greater specificity of research into particulars. He
viewed Borkenau’s description of seventeenth-century manufacture as
simply incorrect. The development of capitalist manufacture was far
more complex, he thought, and it had begun much earlier than Borkenau
would have it and, among other points, involved the use of skilled craft
labor, not its abolition.22
Grossmann proposed an alternative to Borkenau’s thesis that the
mechanical world view developed out of the forms of manufacture.
Instead, he argued that this world view came from the direct observation
and use of machines and the changes in technological processes that
those uses signaled. For him, “in the turning of the water wheels of a
mill or of an iron mine, in the movement of the arms of a bellows, in the
lifting of the stamps of an iron works, we see the simplest mechanical

operations.” He believed that the basic concepts of modern mechanics
developed when men observed “the simple quantitative relations between
the homogenous power of water-driven machines and their output.”
His case in point was Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), whose mechanical
views and conceptions resulted from his experiences with the machine
technology of his time, and whom Grossmann described as the founder
of modern mechanics. He stressed that the technological developments
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in gunpowder, firearms, clocks,
lifting mechanisms, and waterworks were key to the development of the
mechanical philosophy that saw the world and everything in it operating
like a machine.23 Grossman’s critique of Borkenau included ideas similar
to those of Boris Hessen in his 1931 London paper, which had posited,
as we have seen, the development of the mechanical philosophy out of
mechanical machines. Grossmann was apparently unaware of Hessen’s
paper during his early dispute with Borkenau, although he later defended
the Russian physicist’s ideas.24
The years in which the Institute for Social Research published the
papers of Grossmann and Borkenau in their Zeitschrift saw the rise of
Nazi power. The institute, which possessed an endowment provided by
Hermann Weil, had the foresight to transfer its money to Holland in
1931. Thus it was able to move from Germany after the Nazi assumption
of power on January 30, 1933, to Geneva, Paris, London, and finally
New York, where in 1934 it found a home at Columbia University (and
remained there until its return to Frankfurt in 1950). After the institute
under the direction of Horkheimer had settled in New York, it helped
other refugees, particularly those from the Vienna Circle. Vienna Circle
refugees also found a base in New York at the New School for Social
Research, but unlike the members of the Frankfurt School, they were
economically destitute. Among the refugees helped by the Frankfurt
Institute in New York was Edgar Zilsel. During his traumatic exile, Zilsel
maintained his views, derived from Austro-Marxism, that one should
attempt to integrate theory and practice and to work for political and
social change while pursuing theoretical work. In contrast, the leaders of
the Frankfurt School in New York, such as Max Horkheimer, followed

a new policy of restraint from direct political involvement. Despite
this important difference, Zilsel wrote his first articles relating to the
sociological roots of science at the Frankfurt Institute in New York.
Henryk Grossmann was also affiliated with the Frankfurt School at
Columbia, although he had become an increasingly marginal figure.25
Zilsel was familiar with the work of both Grossmann and Borkenau
and seemingly dismissed the work of the latter in his article on the
origins of the concept of physical laws, published in 1942. His project on
the sociological origins of science, which occupied him from his arrival
in New York until his suicide in 1944, had its inception certainly in his
own scholarship and teaching of adults in Vienna in the 1920s but also
in Boris Hessen’s famous paper of 1931 and in the Borkenau-Grossmann
controversy that occurred within the Frankfurt Institute in the 1930s.26
In addition to work on the concept of physical laws, Zilsel wrote
two other influential articles in the early 1940s. The first, “Problems of
Empiricism,” was published in 1941, and the second, “The Sociological
Roots of Science,” in which he outlined his general approach, in 1942.
Zilsel viewed the emergence of the new sciences of the seventeenth century
as a sociological process. Crucial to that process was the transition from
feudalism to early capitalism, centered in the towns and characterized
by rapid technological progress and by the increased valuation of
quantitative approaches. During the sixteenth century, a new group of
superior artisans distinct from both university scholars and “humanist
literati” emerged as an influential class. The new group comprised artist/
engineers, surgeons, musical and scientific instrument makers, surveyors,
and navigators. This new group brought about the new experimental
methods of science when their values were accepted into academic
science around 1600. The approach of those in this group included an
appreciation of empirical methods and of precision measurement and
quantification. Zilsel argued that these superior artisans also advocated
the value of cooperation and believed that scientific progress would
result. In a further article, Zilsel showed that the artisan/practitioner
Robert Norman (fl. 1580s), a mariner and compass maker, exerted a
decisive influence on the thought of William Gilbert, whose treatise

on magnetism, De magnete, published in 1600, is considered one of the
important texts of the new sciences. Zilsel also wrote an article in which
he argued that the modern idea of progress originated in the writings of
sixteenth-century skilled artisans.27
Zilsel positioned himself on the Hessen/Grossmann side of the debate
in that he emphasized the importance of the influence of artisans,
rather than the production process itself, and he placed the significant
changes earlier than the seventeenth century. Yet he did not adopt the
view of Hessen and Grossmann that mechanical machines such as those
created by Leonardo da Vinci brought about a mechanical world view.
Zilsel emphasized instead a conceptual revolution involving the positive
valuation of practice, quantification, and the notions of cooperation
and progress. Here he appears to have adopted Max Adler’s sociological
reading of Marx in which mental categories are substituted for material
ones.
Leonardo Olschki and Robert Merton:

Non-Marxist Proponents of Artisanal Influence
Scholars working outside of the Marxist tradition also contributed to the

thesis of artisanal influence. One of the most significant, the philologist
Leonardo Olschki, was the son of a prominent Italian publisher. Olschki
was trained in French and Italian literature. He taught at the University
of Heidelberg from 1913 to 1933, at which time he was fired after the
enactment of the Nuremburg anti-Jewish laws. He then moved to
Rome, where he taught until 1938, and then to the United States, where
he secured a position at Johns Hopkins University and later at Berkeley.
Between 1919 and 1927, he published a three-volume work on technical
and practical writings in the centuries before Galileo and on the writings
of Galileo. He analyzed these writings in terms of their language. As
H. Floris Cohen has described it, he “examined such topics as the
emancipation of the vernacular from Latin; the reasons one or another
scientific author may have had for writing now in the one, then in the
other language; the place of all these writings in the literary prose of their

time; their stylistic, grammatical, semantic, and literary peculiarities; the
gradual adaptation of a language originally quite unsuited to scientific
terminology to the formal requirements of standardized scientific
reporting.” Olschki showed how language determined arguments. He
described technical and practical writings in detail, exposing how they
were based on the experience of artisans, practitioners, and travelers. This
tradition of writing, he argued, gave rise to the thought and writings of
figures such as Galileo.28 Although Olschki’s ideas about the significance
of language were not taken up, his detailed discussions of the writings of
men who engaged in technical practices—men such as the humanist and
architect Leon Battista Alberti, the goldsmith Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–
1455), the mathematics teacher Luca Pacioli (1446/7–1517), the painter
Piero della Francesca (c. 1415–1492), and the painter/engineer Leonardo
da Vinci—played an important role in disseminating the detailed
content of such writings, making them available for further utilization.
A very differently oriented non-Marxist scholar who contributed to
the thesis of artisanal influence was the American sociologist Robert K.
Merton, who developed his own version of the thesis in his Harvard
dissertation in the 1930s. Merton was awarded a Ph.D. in sociology in
1938 from Harvard University, where he was influenced by George Sarton
(1884–1956), a Belgian chemist and historian considered the founder
of the discipline of the history of science. Merton also absorbed the
thought of the sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) and of the American
sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979). He acknowledged and followed
up on the work of Boris Hessen and of Franz Borkenau. However, he
rejected grand schemes of history such as those promulgated by Marxism.
Rather, he was an empiricist who strove to establish middle-range theories
on the basis of empirical studies. In this he was influenced by two of
the founders of the discipline of sociology, Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)
and Max Weber. In the first part of his 1938 Science, Technology, and
Society in Seventeenth-Century England, Merton treats the relationship of
Protestantism to the scientific revolution, basically supporting Weber’s
thesis of the relationship of the two movements. But in the second half,
he discusses the importance of technical developments in mining, war,

and transportation to the development of empirical methodologies in
science.29
Alexandre Koyré and the Anti-Marxists
Opposing most of the scholars discussed above, many Anglo-American

scholars in the 1940s and 1950s, writing from their own political and
philosophical points of view, rejected the thesis of artisanal influence
outright. These scholars viewed the great landmarks of the new sciences
as theoretical developments, untouched by the surrounding society or
the artisanal cultures within it.
Most important was the work of Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964). Koyré
was born in Russia of Jewish parents, worked for a time in Paris, and
subsequently moved to the United States. In 1953 he delivered a series of
lectures at Johns Hopkins University that became his influential book,
From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Here as in earlier writings,
Koyré presented his views concerning how science had developed in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He rejected the idea that new
knowledge was discovered through scientific experiments. Rather, he
believed that theory and ideas guided scientific research. Thus he was
opposed to the positivistic view that scientific investigation should
restrict itself to discovering observable phenomena, the relations between
them, and the laws that directly affect them. For example, he disputed
the common view that Galileo’s experiments led to Galileo’s conclusions.
Indeed he questioned whether Galileo even did some of the experiments
that he claimed he did.30
Koyré’s work had a tremendous influence, but it also reflected the
trends of Anglo-American scholarship in the history of science in the
1950s through the 1970s. Historians of science during these decades
focused on great men of science, such as Copernicus, Galileo, and
Newton, and their ideas, which they viewed as constituting the origins
of modern science. They ignored historical facts that they did not view as
“scientific,” such as Newton’s alchemy. Many also vociferously opposed

any notion that either material culture or the artisanal world influenced
the development of early modern science. These idealist views were
profoundly influenced by the desire to defend the autonomy of science
(and therefore the history of science), on the one hand, and by anti-
Marxian views, on the other.31
In his 1957 paper titled “The Scholar and the Craftsman in the
Scientific Revolution,” the influential historian of early modern science,
A. Rupert Hall (1920–2009), began by emphasizing “the great diversity
of men in the forefront of [seventeenth-century] scientific achievement,”
including “instrument makers, opticians, apothecaries, surgeons, and
other tradesmen.” Yet the great period in science for these men, Hall
went on to say, was the eighteenth, rather than the seventeenth, century.
Hall cited Merton as the source for his statement about diversity, but
he did not elaborate the possible implications. Rather, he presented a
carefully reasoned argument that the scientific revolution was primarily
a revolution in theory and explanation led by scholars. For Hall, neither
technology nor craftsmen made a direct contribution to that revolution.
It was absurd to think, he argued, that the introduction of gunpowder
artillery was the cause of a revival in dynamics. After all, torsion
artillery had been available since antiquity. Scientific empiricism was a
philosophical artifact, the creation of learned men. It stood in the same
relation to craftsmanship as the theory of evolution to pigeon fanciers.
Hall did not deny that the processes of artisans constituted an important
part of the natural environment. An increasingly rich technological
experience offered ample problems for inquiry. Hall claimed that the
great works of craft description and invention published in the sixteenth
century, such as those by “Cellini, Agricola, Biringuccio, Palissy,
Ercker, and Ramelli,” were insignificant in terms of scientific content.
Nevertheless, they provided materials and methods for the use of others
“more philosophically equipped than themselves.”32

New Approaches from the 1970s
Hall’s view of the history of science as a history of ideas developed by

particular individuals insulated from the culture and society surrounding
them was accepted by most historians in the decades after the Second
World War. Beginning in the 1980s, such views changed dramatically
because of a new understanding of science that is generally referred to
as constructivism. This is the view that, to quote Jan Golinski, “regards
scientific knowledge primarily as a human product, made with locally
situated cultural and material resources.” This view of the history of
knowledge about the natural world has transformed the way in which
many historians of science practice their craft. Science is no longer
seen as a single entity that develops in steady upward progress. Many
historians now investigate what people of a given era took knowledge
to be, regardless of whether it would be considered true or “scientific”
in our own time. Because of its broad new range of subject matter,
which includes alchemy, collecting, and magic, as well as, for example,
astronomy, the history of science has become closer to other kinds of
historical studies.33
This change involved a complicated development, in which Thomas
S. Kuhn’s groundbreaking book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
first published in 1962, played an important role. Kuhn’s now famous
argument is that there exist two phases of scientific development, normal
and revolutionary. In normal science a broad consensus exists in the
scientific community as knowledge about a particular focus of research
grows cumulatively, and scientific research resembles puzzle solving. This
normal science leads to repeated anomalies, however, which compel, as
Paul Hoyningen-Huene puts it, “more or less thoroughgoing revisions of
its guiding regulations.” Changes occur in data about the natural world,
in the empirical concepts with which the world is described, and in
the knowledge implicitly contained in those concepts. Kuhn called the
change from one phase of normal science to the next a paradigm shift.
Kuhn’s book led to decades of discussion and debate. An important core
idea of his book was the view that scientific ideas were taken to be true as

a result of agreement among groups of scientists, and that this consensus
involved sociological circumstances rather than the relationship of a
hypothesis to evidence in the real world.34
Kuhn’s work was then taken further by David Bloor and Barry
Barnes’s “strong programme” at the University of Edinburgh in the
1970s, which proposed that “science should be studied like other aspects
of human culture, without regard to its supposed truth or falsity.” Their
work led to the burgeoning field of the sociology of scientific knowledge.
The Bloor and Barnes program was challenged by Bruno Latour and
Michel Callon and their “actor-network” approach to the sociology of
science. The complex developments of this sociological movement are
outside of the purview of this book, but are detailed and debated in a
large literature.35 What is important to note here is that the sociology
of knowledge influenced historians of science to develop sensitivity to
the social, political, and cultural context of the topics they investigated.
Particularly important for this trend was an enormously influential
book published in 1985 and authored jointly by Steven Shapin and
Simon Schaffer: The Leviathan and the Air-Pump. This book examined
the seventeenth-century debate between Robert Boyle and Thomas
Hobbes by trying to understand how arguments were legitimized as true
and experiments taken to demonstrate valid conclusions. Here, social
circumstances such as the social status of witnesses were investigated as
crucial issues in the development of new ideas within what was now
called experimental philosophy.36
These trends in the history of science brought about a reconsideration
of the thesis first articulated in the 1920s and ’30s that artisans and
artisanal culture influenced the development of empirical methodologies
within the new sciences of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A
group of writings has emerged dealing freshly with the subject in one
way or another. Among them is Paolo Rossi’s Philosophy, Technology, and
the Arts in Early Modern Europe; Jim Bennett’s work on mathematical
practitioners in late medieval and early modern England; William
Eamon’s Science and the Secrets of Nature; my own Openness, Secrecy,
Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity

to the Renaissance; and Pamela H. Smith’s The Body of the Artisan.37 In
addition, many recent studies investigate technical practices and material
culture: Paula Findlen’s study of collecting; studies of alchemy and the
practices of alchemy, such as those by William Newman, Lawrence
Principe, and Tara Nummedal;38 studies of natural history in early
modern Europe and the new world, such as those of Harold Cook on
the development of natural history in the Netherlands in the context
of Dutch colonialism and markets; and the work of Brian Ogilvie, Alix
Cooper, and Antonio Barrera-Osorio.39 Finally, studies based in particular
locales such as Deborah Harkness’s study of the empirical cultures of
London in the Elizabethan age reveal in detail flourishing practical and
empirical cultures in particular locales.40
The influence of artisanal culture on the development of the new sciences

has been an issue in the history of science since the 1920s. Although the
issue was often a contentious one in the early decades of the discipline,
the contenders on opposite poles of the issue actually shared significant
assumptions. Most viewed the “scientific revolution” as a true revolution
that occurred in the seventeenth century and that signified the origins
of modern science. Whatever their views about artisanal influence,
all assumed that the artifactual and the natural were separate entities,
that “artisans” and “scholars” were unchanging categories, and that the
individuals in question fell into one or the other category.
The following chapters explore the thesis of artisanal influence on
the basis of primary sources and relevant scholarship. If artisanal culture
did influence approaches to the investigation of the natural world, it is
necessary to investigate anew how and in what ways that influence was
exerted and to ask what conditions encouraged such an influence. As
will be seen, what emerges is that several categories that were central to
the issue—“art” and “nature,” and “artisan” and “scholar”—themselves
tended to destabilize in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. “Art”
and “nature” came to be seen as closer together, even interchangeable.
Meanwhile, certain workshop-trained artisans and certain humanist
scholars increasingly shared common interests and practices, while a few,

fully active in the practices of both, cannot be placed in one category
or the other. The increasing proximity of art and nature, and of artisan-
trained and university-trained individuals is crucially relevant, I argue, to
the issue of artisanal influence.

chapter 2
Art, Nature, and the Culture of Empiricism
By the early fifteenth century fundamental cultural changes were under

way that gave fabricated objects and the people who made them greater
social and cultural significance. One result was that gradually the worlds
of artisanal practice and the worlds of learning moved closer together.
This growing proximity eventually allowed the values and practices of
artisans to influence the culture of learning, including investigations of
the natural world. Values intrinsic to artisanal work—entailing empirical
approaches, an appreciation for individual experience, hands-on practice,
instrumentation, observation, and measurement—became more readily
available for use as methodologies for the investigation of nature. As
part of this development, “art,” in the sense of the productive arts or
crafts, and “nature” came to be perceived as closer together, at times
interchangeable.
“Art” in the premodern world was not art in the modern sense,
referring to fine arts such as painting and sculpture that today are
perceived as different from practical skills such as carpentry and weaving.
In the premodern centuries, “art”—or ars as it would be called in Latin;
or technē, to use the equivalent Greek word; or artes mechanicae, the
mechanical arts, as they were often called after the ninth century—
referred to the crafts, handwork, and practices used, for example, in
the construction of buildings and in navigation. Painting and sculpture
were included among such activities in the medieval period and were
not distinguished from them. Gradually, in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, painting and sculpture rose in prestige. Often they came to be
considered mathematical arts due to the invention of one-point artist’s
perspective in the early fifteenth century and to the growing interest in
30 | Art, Nature, and the Culture of Empiricism

classical proportions in sculpture. By the end of the sixteenth century,
as Paul Kristeller pointed out in a famous article, painting and sculpture
had begun to transform into the modern system of the arts, or “fine
arts.”1
Art and Nature: Changing Concepts in History
As “art” changed, so also did “nature.” The changing nature of nature

and its changing relationships with art are the focus of new scholarly
attention since the 1990s. In an insightful essay, Lorraine Daston outlines
the shifting relationships among the supernatural, the preternatural, the
artificial, and the unnatural as “forms of the non-natural that bounded
and defined the natural.”2 Nature was not a single reified entity referring
to a stable “reality” over the centuries. Rather, it was a cultural construct
that shifted in meaning from one milieu to the next and from one era to
another. In a collection of essays edited by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
and William R. Newman, scholars discuss particular contexts that range
from antiquity to the modern world and that reveal varying meanings and
relationships of art and nature. In a masterly essay, Heinrich von Staden
discusses the changing meanings and relationships of physis (nature)
and technē (art) in ancient medical traditions from the Hippocratic
tradition in the fifth and fourth centuries bce to the third-century-bce
vivisectionist Erasistratus and beyond. Mark Schiefsky provides a study
of the issue within ancient mechanics. He shows that the traditional view
that Aristotelians believed that mechanics was contrary to nature and
thus could not be studied as a way of understanding nature is simply
incorrect. He provides a more complicated analysis, showing that often
Aristotelian mechanical writings portrayed nature and art as closely
analogous.3
Such recent studies suggest that the traditional generalization is no
longer sufficient—that Aristotle believed that art and nature were quite
separate and that art was inferior to nature, rendering it incapable of
being compared with or used to understand nature. Aristotle’s writings
Art, Nature, and the Culture of Empiricism | 31

do provide key texts, partly because they were so widely known in
the medieval era. In one well-known passage, he sharply distinguishes
natural things from those made by human hands—between nature and
art, or physis and technē.
Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other

causes. By nature the animals and their parts exist, and the
plants and the simple bodies (earth, air, fire, and water). . . .
All the things mentioned plainly differ from things which
are not constituted by nature. For each of them [i.e., each of
the things of nature] has within itself a principle of motion
and of stationariness (in respect of place, or of growth and
decrease, or by way of alteration). On the other hand, a bed
and a coat and anything else of that sort, qua receiving these
designations—i.e., in so far as they are products of art—have
no innate impulse to change.4
Thus, things of nature can move and change in and of themselves,

whereas products of art cannot. In addition, Aristotle posits two kinds
of art—one that can improve upon nature and another that “imitates”
nature: “generally art in some cases completes what nature cannot bring
to a finish, and in others [art] imitates nature.”5
This bifurcated view of fabricated things and their relation to natural
things—imitative and therefore inferior, on the one hand, or able to
actually improve upon nature’s own processes, on the other—fueled an
intense debate concerning alchemy in the medieval period. As Newman
points out, the Persian thinker Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, 980–1037) argued
that the alchemical transmutation of metals was not possible because
the artifice and art used to attempt such transmutation were inferior
to nature and thus not able to improve upon it. His anti-alchemical
stance was reiterated and elaborated by other Arabic writers. This led
to counterarguments by Roger Bacon (1214/1220–1292) and Thomas
Aquinas (1225–1274) in the late thirteenth century and to a full-scale
defense of alchemy in alchemical texts such as the Theorica et practica,

possibly by Paul of Taranto, a thirteenth-century Franciscan. The defense
of alchemy entailed the argument that human art in the form of alchemy
could create better and more plentiful things than could nature itself—
art could correct and improve upon nature.6
Scholarship in the history of alchemy, especially by Newman and
Lawrence Principe, investigates the relationship of alchemy to the
empirical practices of seventeenth-century figures such as Robert Boyle
(1627–1691). The view that alchemical art could have transformative
effects on the natural world became part of an influential tradition that
advocated and practiced empirical methodologies and trusted the efficacy
of art (i.e., artisanal skill) for both investigating and changing the natural
world. Newman and Principe have demonstrated the importance of the
alchemical tradition to the new sciences of the seventeenth century,
especially to such canonical figures as Boyle.7
Focusing on the German states, Tara Nummedal shows the extensive
overlap of alchemy and alchemical laboratory operations with practical
crafts and productive arts such as mining and metallurgy, including
minting, assaying, and goldsmithing. She also investigates the work
and lives of particular individual alchemists in the German states, their
patronage, laboratories, and connections to the economic ambitions
of princes.8 Earlier, the pioneering work of scholars such as Betty Jo
Teeter Dobbs helped restore the extensive alchemical writings of Isaac
Newton to the legitimate corpus of his serious work.9 Alchemy has thus
been reevaluated. No longer an “occult” subject that has nothing to
do with “science,” it is now understood as playing an important role
in the development of the empirical methodologies of the seventeenth
century.10
Experience and Experiment
Beyond the discipline of alchemy, to what extent did medieval people

engage in observation and experiment as methods of investigating the
natural world? First, it must be said that experiment and empiricism

were never entirely absent from medieval culture. Ancient empirical
traditions continued in medicine through Hippocrates (ca. 460–ca. 370
bce) and Galen (ca. 131–ca. 201 ce) and beyond; in astronomy through
the work of Ptolemy (ca. 100–ca. 170 ce) and then Arabic observational
traditions; and through optics and other fields in the work of such
figures as Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1168–1253), Ibn al-Haytham, known
as Alhacen (965–1040), and Roger Bacon. The extent and meaning of
empiricism and experimentalism within such traditions is still an issue.11
What was understood by experience and experiment in the medieval
centuries? How extensive and thoroughgoing were they as practices?
Such questions have provoked disagreement among historians of
science. Newman contends that Aristotle’s separation of art and nature
has led to what he calls the “noninterventionist fallacy,” that is, the
view among several prominent historians of science that Aristotle and
his followers were “fundamentally nonexperimental or even actively
opposed to experiment, because experimentation involved intervention
in natural processes.”12 Newman points to three historians of science
who he believes have erred in this way—Peter Dear in his Discipline and
Experience and Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park in their Wonders and
the Order of Nature.13
Newman points out that Aristotle himself did what could be called
experiments, for example, in his studies of chick embryos and in his study
of rainbows. Nevertheless, I would not go so far as to call Aristotle filling
“the role of an experimental scientist” as Newman does, in part because
the phrase “experimental scientist” is anachronistic.14 Beyond this quibble,
I would say that Aristotle’s experimental and observational approach,
especially in his zoological work, is not really a point of contention
among historians. Most historians of science agree that Aristotle did do
experimental or empirical work, especially in his study of animals. Nor
have I seen anywhere that Dear, Daston, or Park denies that Aristotle
himself did “experiments,” although their meaning and how they fit
into his philosophical system as a whole are rightly a focus of extended
discussion, as is their influence.15 But the question is this: To what extent
did medieval Aristotelians use experimental procedures in fundamental

ways as Aristotle did in some of his biological and meteorological works?
It is clear that the procedures of most of the Aristotelians working within
the scholastic frameworks of medieval universities usually were based on
the commentary and teaching of authoritative texts and grounded in the
analysis of causes, and that their work was not based on experiment or
observation in fundamental ways.
Dear argues in Discipline and Experience not so much about results of
the perceived separation of art and nature as about the difference between
how Aristotelians viewed experience and how experimental philosophers
of the seventeenth century viewed experiment. Dear suggests that ordinary
experience, that is, experience that always occurs in given circumstances
(if you drop a brick from a height it will always fall to the ground),
was for Aristotelians the basis of legitimate knowledge about the natural
world. This was in contrast to individual, constructed experiments that
draw conclusions from highly manipulated and idiosyncratic operations
conducted by specialists or experts, using, say, a complex apparatus such
as an air-pump. Robert Boyle had just such a complicated machine
constructed (by his assistant Robert Hooke, 1635–1703), which he used
for experiments on air. It was an apparatus that could be constructed and
operated only by experts. Only they could draw legitimate conclusions
from the experiments. Dear’s central argument is that Aristotelians in
late medieval Europe gave more credence to the first kind of experience,
that is, ordinary experience that everyone could agree on, than to the
second, experiment, which set up special circumstances and could be
evaluated only by individual experts.16
Park and Daston, in Wonders and the Order of Nature, instead trace a
complex and gradual collapse of the distinction between art and nature,
a distinction that had in general prevailed before the sixteenth century.
The proximity of the two categories of art and nature can be seen—to use
an example discussed by Pamela H. Smith in The Body of the Artisan—
in the platters made by the sixteenth-century potter Bernard Palissy in
which he embedded lizards and other once-living things into his ceramic
ware;17 in the human portraits painted by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, such as
the allegory of the element fire in which the head is constructed of metal

2.1. Robert Boyle’s air
pump constructed
by Robert Hooke.
From Robert Boyle,
New Experiments,
Physico-Mechanical
(London: Miles Flesher,
1682). Reproduced
by permission of The
Huntington Library, San
Marino, California.
2.2. Bernard
Palissy or follower,
earthenware dish
with decorations
in relief of reptiles,
plants, and shells.
© Victoria and
Albert Museum,
London.

weapon parts and natural materials; and in the intermingling of natural
and fabricated objects in numerous natural history collections that were
created in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This new proximity
of what had been perceived as two separate categories was a widespread
cultural phenomenon from the fifteenth century to the early seventeenth
century.18
In these centuries, interest in objects and things was fueled by the
rise of conspicuous consumption—an increasingly important social and
political necessity for Europe’s elite classes. Visible consumption required
the purchase of fine clothing, furs, and jewelry made of precious metal
and stones; the construction of sumptuous palaces and gardens; and the
acquisition of sculpture, painting, ceramics, and furniture to furnish
and ornament them. Worldly goods, as Lisa Jardine aptly described it,
proliferated as they also gained in cultural value.19
Along with this proliferation of objects came the expansion of writing
about the arts, from painting, sculpture, and architecture to guns and
fortification to pottery and silk-making. Within this literature, which
was created by artisan/practitioners and learned people alike, values
such as hands-on skill, personal observation, a belief in the efficacy
of instrumentation, the practice of using instruments and devices for
measurement and experiment, and the value of individual experience—
all implicitly or explicitly gained validation in the wider culture. These
writings conveyed values that make up what has been called the “maker’s
knowledge tradition”—a tradition that informed the new sciences of the
late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that was being articulated in
one form or another long before Francis Bacon’s writings in the 1620s.20
A closer look at several specific examples illustrates some of the ways
in which the relationships of art and nature were framed and understood
in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The examples differ one
from the other, but they each assume important relationships between
nature and art, and in some instances, the conviction that art or the
mechanical arts (in the form of machines) can be used to understand
aspects of the natural world, namely power and motion.

2.3. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, fire allegory. 1566. Portrait
head depicting a construction with metal weapon parts
and natural materials. Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art
Resource, NY.
Objects of Art/Objects of Nature in a Late Fifteenth-Century

Romance
The romance called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, written in the 1470s

and published in 1499, is one of the most famous books of Renaissance
Europe. Published by the pioneering humanist printer Aldus Manutius
(1449/50–1515), its striking woodcut illustrations and typography have
influenced typographers and publishers for centuries. The author
is usually assumed to be a Dominican monk, Francesco Colonna
(1433/1434–1527), who lived at the monastery of SS. Giovanni e Paolo
in Venice. Colonna’s romance encompasses a dream within a dream in

which one Poliphilo walks through a varied terrain filled with pyramids,
ruins, forests, meadows, streams, palaces, and gardens as he searches for
his lost love, Polia. It is written in a bizarre tangled Italian that uses
many Italianized Latin words taken from ancient texts such as Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, and most importantly, Apuleius’s Golden Ass.21
The Hypnerotomachia is interesting because of the author’s persistent
habit of describing objects of nature and objects of art in profuse
detail, including architectural fragments, and because of his habit of
interchanging constructed artifacts and natural things. For example,
Poliphilo comes to an enclosed valley where he encounters an enormous
half-ruined pyramid carved out of the surrounding mountains and
topped by an obelisk that is dedicated to the sun. The author provides a
detailed description of the monument, including structures, ornamental
details, fragments of sculpture and architecture, inscriptions, and the
names of many varieties of herbs and grasses growing among the ruins.
Poliphilo hears frightening groans and discovers that they are emitted
by the colossal statue of a man. The groans are caused by wind blowing
through the open mouth of the colossus. Using the hairs of the chest
and beard of the statue, Poliphilo pulls himself into the open mouth
and then climbs through the viscera. Each part of the body, “intestines,
nerves and bone, veins, muscles and flesh,” is present and each is labeled
in Chaldean, Greek, and Latin. The inscribed body parts describe what
sickness is generated in each part, the cause, the required care, and the
remedy.22
Poliphilo emerges from this polyglot body and looks at other ruins,
such as the colossal statue of a horse that “seemed almost to tremble in its
flesh, . . . more alive than fabricated.” He enters the pyramid through the
great portal, encounters a dragon and other amazing things, and emerges
from the bowels of the great structure into a lovely meadow. He describes
the meadow by providing an encyclopedic enumeration of the specific
varieties of plants and trees. As he continues on his journey he describes
an ancient bridge over a stream with overgrown banks populated with
many varieties of birds, and then a field filled with creatures, flowers, and
fruit trees, each of which he specifies by name.23

He meets the nymphs of the five senses and describes their clothing
minutely. He finally arrives at the palace of the Queen Eleuterilyda (Free
Thought), and describes the approach to the palace where the nymphs
take him first to the baths. As he draws near the palace and enters, he
describes the courtyard, the exterior, the ornamentation of the entrance,
the ornate tapestries of the successive rooms, the decorations, the throne
of the queen, her clothing and jewelry, and each item of the lavish
bejeweled service used at the sumptuous banquet. After the fabulous
banquet, which is described in detail, the nymphs lead Poliphilo into a
lower courtyard where they walk through an orange grove and a series
of extraordinary gardens, one made entirely of glass and gold, a second
that is an aquatic labyrinth, and a third made of silk and decorated with
pearls and vines of gold. The glass garden contains garden pots that
hold, instead of living plants, artificial ones. The author explains that in
place of greenery “every plant was of very pure glass, excellently [made]
beyond what one could imagine or believe, topiary box trees with the
roots and stems of gold.” Here is just one of many examples in which
natural things and things fabricated by humans are interchanged to the
delight and stupefaction of the wandering Poliphilo.24
The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is a literary work by an author who
is enthralled by architecture, antiquity, fabricated objects, and myriad
natural species. It contains numerous detailed lists and encyclopedic
2.4. Francesco
Colonna,
Hypnertomachia
Poliphili (Venice:
Aldus Manutius,
1599), fol. A3v.
Poliphilo is lost
in a dark wood.
Reproduced by
permission of
The Huntington
Library, San
Marino,
California.

descriptions of both natural and artifactual objects. Frequently, Poliphilo
expresses astonishment and amazement at both kinds of objects. The
examples mentioned here—the pyramid that is actually a carved-out
mountain, the colossal statue of a man that groans, the fabricated horse
that trembles as if alive, and the gardens made of beautifully fashioned
glass, gold, silk, and pearls—transgress the boundaries between the
artifactual and the natural. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili exhibits
interchangeability between natural and constructed things as it also
displays a kind of descriptive exuberance in which plants, birds, and
trees are described in great detail, as are architectural ruins, structures,
inscriptions, and crafted objects of all kinds.
Francesco di Giorgio and Humanist Engineering
A second example is a very different one, taken from the treatises of

Francesco di Giorgio (1439–1501), one of the most prominent and
successful architect/engineers of the late fifteenth century. Francesco
trained as a painter in a workshop in Siena. Eventually he became a
client of princely patrons such as Federico Montefeltre in Urbino—
patrons who headed courts that were influenced by humanism.25
Francesco’s ability to garner such patronage was due to his technical
abilities but undoubtedly also to his literary efforts. He was deeply
interested in Vitruvius’s De architectura, the only fully extant architectural
treatise from antiquity (which will be discussed in the next chapter).
Francesco’s writings include two major treatises on architecture, military
engineering, and machines.26 He wrote the first, Trattato I, while working
in Urbino between 1477 and 1480, and the second, Trattato II, later, in
the late 1480s or perhaps the 1490s.27
A comparison of the two treatises in their treatment of machines
shows how Francesco moved from the culture of practice to the culture
of learning. Trattato I is a detailed treatment that reflects the concerns of
a practicing engineer. Trattato II sets out the topics according to general
principles and follows some of the practices of humanist authorship.

2.5. Francesco di Giorgio, Trattato I. Mills. Turin, Biblioteca Reale, Codice
Saluzziano 148, fol. 34r. By kind permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le
Attività Culturali, Biblioteca Reale, Torino.

This development can be illustrated by comparing his treatment of mills
in Trattato I and Trattato II.28
Trattato I contains several sections that focus specifically on machines
—military machines, cranes and lifting devices, and mills of various
kinds. The section on mills takes up seven folios, or fourteen pages.
The text, written in carefully blocked-out columns, two columns per
sheet, was clearly written by a professional scribe. But scholars agree that
the detailed technical descriptions make it certain that Francesco was
closely involved in the creation of the manuscript. Interspersed with the
columns are box-shaped drawings of mills with their wheels and gears
carefully depicted. There are a total of fifty-eight such drawings of mills,
which, taken as a whole, explain many variations of this ubiquitous and
important machine. There are water-powered mills, including those
with horizontal, overshot, and undershot wheels, each in a variety of
configurations. There are dry mills powered by animals, mills turned by
cranks, and windmills.
In the text placed under the drawings, Francesco carefully explains
what type of mill it is and then goes on to describe the wheels and gearing,
giving what he considers to be the appropriate measurements, and other
details such as the best number of rods on lantern gears. In the case of
waterwheels, he specifies which kind of wheel is appropriate for specific
situations given the availability of water. If the water supply is somewhat
2.6. Francesco di Giorgio,

Trattato I. Mills. Turin,
Biblioteca Reale, Codice
Saluzziano 148, fol. 34r.
Photoshop enlargement
of mill E (lower right) of
figure 2.5.

sporadic, overshot wheels are better, whereas undershot wheels work well
for situations where a continuous, strong flow of water is available.29
Take, for example, mill E, the one on the bottom right of figure 2.5,
enlarged in figure 2.6. The mill is powered by an overshot waterwheel.
The water spills from a funnel on top of the wheel, turning the wheel.
On the shaft of the wheel is a lantern gear that rolls over the vertical
teeth placed around the top circumference of the horizontal crown gear
wheel. In the back, another lantern gear is attached to the shaft that
turns the millstone. This lantern gear is rolling on the horizontal teeth
of the same wheel. Francesco has also drawn the mill’s wooden frame
and the grain funnel into which the grain to be ground into flour is to
be poured, and the millstones. The latter two components are drawn in
disproportionately small sizes.30
In Trattato I Francesco provides a detailed written account, illustrated
by numerous drawings that display his engineering knowledge. Mills
were essential elements of many building projects from castles to forts,
and they were also essential to any town or city. Francesco provides
numerous examples of variations. Knowledge of such variations was
essential to any practicing architect/engineer of his time. Presented with
variations of geography, power supply, and potential use, the master must
devise or decide upon a mill with particular characteristics for specific
sites. Francesco’s careful detailing of numerous variations points to his
close identification with the concerns of practicing engineers. Trattato I
reflects the world of practical engineering and presents it to elite patrons.
Francesco’s later treatise, Trattato II, is organized differently. It contains
fewer chapters, and erudite introductions have been added. Also added
are numerous citations from ancient texts, such as Pliny’s Natural History
and the De architectura of Vitruvius. In addition, Francesco has moved
from detailing many particular mills to more general accounts of far
fewer mills.31 This approach is more suitable for a readership of patrons
and other nonpractitioners. They might be more interested in how a mill
works in general than in the myriad variations appropriate to different
mill uses and different locations.

2.7. Overshot mill. From Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattato II. Florence,
BNC, Codice Magliabechiano II.I.141, fol. 95r. By kind permission of the
Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali della Repubblica Italiana/Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.

In this later treatise, the material on machines that was scattered among
various sections of Trattato I has received a new treatment in one section
only. This section concerns lifting machines of various kinds and mills.
In all only eighteen machines are displayed in drawings and described,
a radical reduction from the numbers of machines found in Trattato I,
where there are fifty-eight drawings of mills alone. Offering a rationale
for this new approach, Francesco explains: “Thus again I will provide a
drawing [la figura] of some mills, so that through those, other similar
ones may be able to be discovered by readers.” He thereby suggests that
readers will be able to read about one kind of mill, seemingly understand
its principles, and then discover other types.32
Francesco discusses only one type of overshot waterwheel mill, which
he draws in a large size on a single page underneath the text describing
it (figure 2.7). This machine is similar to the overshot wheel discussed
above. His description of the mill in Trattato II is similar, but not the
same as that for the analogous machine in Trattato I. In Trattato II he
gives the dimensions of various parts such as the waterwheel and the
crown wheel. He explains that the wheel turns easily because the vertical
teeth on the top rim of the crown gear are larger than the horizontal
teeth on the lateral rim, and there are fewer of them. The smaller teeth
on the lateral rim of the crown wheel turn the smaller lantern wheel
attached to the axle that turns the millstone. The drawing clearly shows
the difference in size and number of the two rows of teeth on the crown
gear wheel. It also shows the different sizes of the two lantern gears, the
one on the axle of the waterwheel being larger than that on the millstone
axle.33
Francesco explains that these differences in the size of the teeth in the
crown wheel and the size of the lantern gears are what make the machine
turn easily.34 It is notable that in his earlier drawing of the analogous
machine such differences are not apparent in the drawing, nor does the
explanation concerning ease of motion appear in the earlier text. This
is an example, then, of using one machine to explain a more general
principle (that of the gear differential), instead of enumerating varieties
of mills suitable for diverse situations as he did in Trattato I.

The changes that are apparent between Trattato I and Trattato II
indicate Francesco’s efforts to write a more learned treatise, efforts that
were influenced by humanist practices of authorship. The differences
between Francesco’s two treatises can be explained by his increased interest
in and ability to address humanist learned culture. This development has
significance not only in terms of Francesco di Giorgio’s own career, but
because it is part of a larger development in which practical and technical
knowledge was becoming integrated into written and learned traditions.
Put in another way, Francesco at first used his art—that is, his knowledge
of engineering and mills—for the sake of that art, in order to elaborate in
detail the various kinds of mills that should be used in diverse situations
and sites. Subsequently in Trattato II, he deployed his knowledge for
very different purposes—first to provide a general understanding of
machines and mills to the unskilled, and second, to contribute to natural
knowledge as it pertained to the power and motion of machines.
Leonardo da Vinci: Elements of Machines

and the Study of Motions
Leonardo da Vinci, who was a contemporary of Francesco di Giorgio,

was trained in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (ca. 1435–1488) in
Florence both as a painter and sculptor. At this time in the late 1460s, the
towering double-shelled cupola of the Florentine cathedral Santa Maria
del Fiore, created by Filippo Brunelleschi, was completed except for the
heavy sphere of gilded copper that was to go on top of the lantern. The
placement of the sphere was given to Verrocchio’s workshop, and the
work was completed between 1468 and 1472. Brunelleschi’s innovative
lifting machinery and some of the scaffolding were still in place and
available for examination, and Leonardo studied them thoroughly.35
Leonardo’s fame as a painter and engineer was matched by his
“literary” production. He filled an estimated twelve thousand sheets
in notebooks in his lifetime, about half of which are extant. The two
notebooks referred to as the Madrid Codices had been miscatalogued in
the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid for centuries and were rediscovered

only in the winter of 1964/65. The first of the notebooks, called Madrid
I, consists of a coherent treatise about the elements of machines and
mechanics. It is filled with beautiful drawings of parts of machines and
other devices, as well as notes that discuss their motions and workings.36
Here I examine in greater detail just one of these pages, folio 15v, with
the heading “Of pinions and wheels.” On the page Leonardo has drawn
numerous variations on the topic of pinions and wheels (by which he
means gears). Both the drawings and the textual explication allow analysis
of individual mechanisms and motions as well as comparisons among
them. Leonardo begins with a statement that concerns the construction
of the devices. “If the pinion must move the wheel, the spacings of
the pinion’s teeth must be wider than those of the wheel’s teeth. And
if the wheel turns the pinion, the opposite should be made. However,
if both were well constructed, having equal teeth and spacing would
be satisfactory.” The text accompanying individual figures concerns the
relationship of the structure of the gears to the direction of the motion.37
On the top right (see figure 2.8), under the spur gears driven by
a weight, Leonardo writes that if you turn one of the wheels in one
direction, the other will turn in the opposite direction. The drawing
below (second figure in right column) depicts three interlocking spur
gears. Leonardo advises that “if you wish to have a wheel that turns in the
same direction as does the movement of the first wheel, this wheel, by
necessity, must have a motion of the third degree,” that is, it must have
an additional gear in the center, as he has shown.38 Other depictions show
other variations, for instance (third figure in right column), a weight-
driven rack turning a spur gear. At the bottom right he shows three
encased wheels and writes: “Regardless of the direction you turn wheel
d, a and b shall turn the same way. And wheel c will turn contrariwise.
The same will happen when turning a and b. But if you turn wheel c [the
center wheel], every other wheel will turn in the opposite direction.”39
Of the device that is fourth down in the left column, he says, “But
if one of the wheels turns the inside of the other wheel with its outside,
both wheels will then turn in the same direction regardless of which
wheel causes the motion.” He shows (and sometimes explains the

2.8. Leonardo da Vinci, “Of Pinions and Wheels.” Madrid Codex I, fol. 15v. ©
Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

motions of ) other devices as well, including crown and lantern gears,
and other kinds of gearing.40
Leonardo thus devises a number of variations, and he studies the
differences that these variations make in the direction of motion. He is
interested in both structural variations of different kinds of pinions and
gears and in the local motions that result from these variations. These
issues have practical manifestations for real machinery, but Leonardo
is also interested in the study of motion itself in all its small, local
manifestations. These drawings, of which there can be little doubt that
they were drawings of actual working gears that he had constructed, can
be thought of as observational tools.
Leonardo is here observing the motions of fabricated objects. He has
had gears of various forms constructed and has placed them in various
positions. Artisanal craftwork and the study of nature, that is, the study
of motion, go hand in hand. This is not to say that Leonardo’s studies in
Madrid I led directly to a new mechanics. In fact, Galileo’s achievements
of slightly more than a century later were possible because of Galileo’s
ability to abstract motion and think of it mathematically.41 In contrast,
Leonardo’s studies were highly specific and indeed the opposite of
abstract. They were tied to the observation of the behavior of particular
gears and gear arrangements. Leonardo pursued a kind of observational
mechanics that was thoroughly empirical, but would not lead to the
modern science of mechanics.
Serlio on Buildings and Vesalius on Bones
The growing proximity of the artificial and the natural was facilitated by
the increasing interaction of artisanal and learned cultures in the cities
and courts of Europe. An example of this can be seen in the activities of
two men, Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554), a man trained as a painter who
studied buildings and wrote architectural books,42 and Andreas Vesalius
(1514–1564) a university-trained physician who taught at the University
of Padua.43 Serlio wrote a series of treatises on architecture, the first

published in 1537. His writings may have influenced Vesalius in his
approach to the De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (On the Fabric of
the Human Body), his renowned treatise on human anatomy, published in
1543. In their respective topics of architecture and anatomy, these writings
pioneered new relationships between the use of visual images and their
integration with explanatory texts. Although specific contact between
the two men is undocumented, Vesalius was undoubtedly familiar
with Serlio’s treatise on architecture. Serlio was trained as a painter in
Bologna, spent some years in Rome, and moved to the Veneto in the
1530s, becoming associated with the circle of the renowned Venetian
painter Titian (ca. 1488–1576). Titian’s circle of friends included painters
as well as literary figures such as Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), a satirist,
poet, and playwright. Vesalius also lived in Padua and Venice in the late
1530s, and he taught anatomy at the University of Padua, where he also
wrote his treatise on anatomy that came out of his public dissections of
human corpses at the anatomy theater of the university. My comparison
of the two works takes up a suggestion by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks
that Serlio’s treatise bears notable similarities to Vesalius’s Fabrica.44
The identity of the illustrators of the Fabrica is unknown, but it is
certain that they were closely supervised by Vesalius himself—the
extremely detailed anatomical descriptions and numerous cross-
references between images and text make this indisputable. The Flemish
artist Jan Steven van Calcar (?1499–?1546), who created the illustrations
for Vesalius’s earlier work, the Tabula anatomicae sex (1538), also executed
at least some woodblocks for the Fabrica. Others also seemed to have
worked on Vesalius’s great masterwork, some of them apparently more
skilled than Calcar.45
More important than the specific authorship of the images are the
substantial ties that bound the Fabrica—and thus the developing
discipline of medical anatomy—to the worlds of painting and sculpture.
The remarkable images of the Fabrica not only were created by trained
painters but engaged the culture of painting in substantive ways. For
example, the illustrations of a series of visceral figures in book 5 are
based on the famous Belvedere Torso, an antique sculptural fragment

2.9. Andreas Vesalius,
De humani corporis
fabrica libri septem (1543),
372. Torso. Courtesy
Rosenwald Collection,
Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
2.10. The Belvedere Torso,

Apollonios of Athens,
first century BCE. Museo
Pio Clementino, Vatican
Museums, Vatican State.
Photo credit: Scala/Art
Resource, N.Y.

first reported in the collection of Cardinal Prospero Colonna in the
early 1540s; thus did Vesalius counter the messy and revolting reality of
abdominal dissection with the frame of a sculpted, ideal human form.
Similarly, Vesalius aimed, it has been argued, at “Polycletian bodies,”
those that conformed to the standards of the ancient Greek sculptor
Polycletus (fl. ca. 450 bce), who created a statue displaying a canon of
ideal human proportions.46
Serlio’s first publication, which appeared six years before the Fabrica
in 1537, treats the five architectural styles or orders. The architect meant
his didactic handbook for both designers of buildings and for others
who were interested in Vitruvius and in classical building styles. It is an
illustrated treatise with pictures on virtually every page depicting various
parts of buildings designed in a variety of ways. One example illustrates
and also describes three different gates. The first, called rustic work, is
suitable for a country villa; the second, suitable to the Tuscan style, was
seen in Trajan’s Forum for a long time, although it is now in ruins; and
the third is a door with “a segmental arch, which is the sixth part of a
circle, a work of great strength.” Serlio in this way depicts various kinds
of architectural styles pertinent to particular elements of the building,
many if not all from observation. He shows them to the architect, who
can then pick and choose various elements for his own designs. As Serlio
says about his drawing of the gate from Trajan’s Forum: “The two niches
on either side are out of place, but I have put them here in order to
demonstrate the different types of niches which would suit such work,
so that the judicious architect can make use of them and put them in the
right place.”47
Serlio often seems to work with Vitruvius’s De architectura in one hand
and ancient architectural fragments and ruins in the other. For him, the
discipline of architecture involves the detailed study of the ancient text,
careful observation of ancient structures and ruins, and depiction of
those observations in the form of carefully rendered illustrations. He
writes, “Because I find great discrepancy between the buildings in Rome
and other places in Italy and the writings of Vitruvius, I wanted to show
some elements which, to the great pleasure of architects, can still be seen

2.11. Sebastiano Serlio, Regole generali di architectura sopra le cinque maniere
de gliedifici . . . (Venice: F. Marcolini da Forli, 1537), fol. XXIv (mislabeled
IIIv). Elements of the Doric order. Courtesy Rosenwald Collection, Library
of Congress, Washington, D.C.

2.12. Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543), 5.
Collection of bones. Courtesy Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.

on buildings.” He provides pictorial representations of various elements
of different buildings that he has drawn from observation. He labels the
parts of buildings with letters and identifies them. R was found outside
Rome on a bridge over the Tiber. V is above a triumphal arch in Verona.
T is in Rome on a Doric temple in the Tullian Prison. “The capital P was
found in Pesaro with many other praiseworthy things: its projection,
although it may be large, is nevertheless very pleasing to viewers.” The
podium, base, and capital A are in the Forum Borarium in Rome.48 This
is a collection of architectural fragments, carefully drawn from actual
examples, for the use both of practicing architects and students of
Vitruvius and of ancient architecture.
It is probable that Vesalius saw Serlio’s book while he was working
on the Fabrica and took some ideas from it. Serlio’s architectural
representations with their softly shaded renderings resemble stylistically
some of Vesalius’s carefully depicted body parts. Vesalius himself strove
to integrate the artisanal practices of the surgeon and the apothecary into
the practice of medicine as a whole. He believed that he was restoring
anatomy to its ancient splendor. In his view, medicine was destroyed
when its various components such as surgery were broken off from it and
relegated “to laymen and people with no knowledge of the disciplines
that go to serve the healing art.” Similarly, the art of drugs and medicines
was handed over to apothecaries. Trained physicians only prescribed
medicines and regimes for hidden or internal ailments. As a result, “they
shamefully cast aside the foremost and most ancient limb of medicine,
the limb that above all is founded . . . on the study of nature.”49 Vesalius
beautifully illustrates his belief in the integration of learning and hands-
on practice and observation in anatomy in his portrait of himself, his
own hands holding the partially dissected arm of a male figure, pen, ink,
and paper on the table, the latter containing a sentence that replicates
the opening words of his chapter on the muscles of the hand. The
cadaver’s resemblance to the Christ figure and the classical Ionic column
in the background suggest that Christian and classical ideals informed
Vesalius’s interest in hands-on dissection and observation.50

2.13. Andreas Vesalius, De
humani corporis fabrica libri
septem (1543), frontispiece.
Portrait of author dissecting
a hand. Courtesy Rosenwald
Collection, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.
Vesalius emphasizes that the order of books in the Fabrica is the

same as the order that he has followed during his own dissections in
the company of the eminent men of the city. “This means,” he notes,
“that those who were present at my dissections will have notes of
what I demonstrated and will be able with greater ease to demonstrate
anatomy to others.” Nevertheless, Vesalius believes that his books will be
“particularly useful also for those who cannot see the real thing.” These
individuals will be able, from Vesalius’s treatise, to study each part of the
body, “its position, shape, size, substance, connection with other parts,
use, function and many similar matters.” In sum, from his illustrated
treatise, they will be able to learn all the things they could study during
a dissection. In a remarkable defense of virtual witnessing, Vesalius tells
his readers, “Pictures of all the parts are incorporated into the text of the
discourse, so as virtually to set a dissected body before the eyes of students
of the works of Nature.”51 Just as the architect can study the elements of
the building by perusing Serlio’s treatise, so the student of anatomy can

study human anatomical parts by scrutinizing the illustrations and text
of the Fabrica.
Vesalius is aware of the opinions of some “who strongly deny that
even the most exquisite delineations of plants and of parts of the human
body should be set before students of the natural world; they take the
view that these things should be learned, not from pictures but from
careful dissection and examination of actual objects.” He concedes
that he would never urge students to use the pictures alone without
dissecting cadavers: “Rather, I would, as Galen did, urge students of
medicine by every means at my command to undertake dissections with
their own hands.” Nevertheless, he defends visual representation as a
2.14. Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543), 2.

Humerus bone split lengthwise. Courtesy Rosenwald Collection, Library
of Congress, Washington, D.C.

way of learning anatomy. “In fact,” he says, “illustrations greatly assist
the understanding, for they place more clearly before the eyes what the
text, no matter how explicitly, describes.” In addition, Vesalius insists
that his “pictures of the parts of the body” will give particular pleasure to
those who do not have the opportunity to dissect real bodies or are too
squeamish to do so.52
As he gets into the subject of his first book, namely bones and
cartilage, Vesalius compares the function of bones to the function of
certain elements in constructed things. Bone, he writes, is “the hardest,
the driest, the earthiest, and the coldest” of all the constituents of the
human body. “God the great Creator of all things” formed its substance
to be this way for good reason, “intending it to be like a foundation to
the whole body; for in the fabric of the human body bones perform the
same function as do walls and beams in houses, poles in tents, and keels
and ribs in boats.” Vesalius later describes the cartilages that form the
larynx as resembling “the beams which form the framework of a country
cottage before the thatch, the facings, and the mud are applied. In fact,
when the human bones and cartilages are stripped of their flesh and then
assembled together there is no better analogy to describe them than that
of the framework of a hut which has been raised but not yet finished off
with branches or earth.”53
Vesalius’s many illustrations of particular bones are labeled with both
numbers and letters, which tie them tightly to his explanatory text.
Within a discussion of the substance of bone, for example, he shows an
illustration of a humerus bone split lengthwise. He uses letters and visual
indicators to show the nature of the bony substance: the little holes like
pumice in the capula are marked A; the scale over these holes is marked
B; C shows the outer surface of the bone; D the large hollow space along
the length surrounded by the hardest bone E and F. Underneath the
illustration of the humerus, Vesalius shows the navicular bone (a small
bone of the wrist), which is cut through the middle to show pumice-like
bony substance. Finally, at the bottom, N is a tiny bone at the end of
the toe, which is cut through the middle to show it has no pumice-like
holes at all. This illustration shows Vesalius’s extensive cross-referencing

as well: he refers the reader to the illustration where the navicular bone
can be seen in its entirety.54
The careful, beautiful drawings of the Fabrica and Vesalius’s assiduous
cataloging of the bones of each illustration by lists of descriptive
identifications marked by letters and numbers make this a treatise in
which visual representation and textual description are integrated in
a remarkably close fashion. This integration is furthered by the fact
that each time a bone or bone part is mentioned in the text, an italic
indication is given in the margin showing where the illustration of the
bone or part mentioned can be viewed—sometimes chapters away.
Vesalius and Serlio each created new uses for visual representation in
their respective disciplines. Both men understood the value of observing
the elements of real buildings or real bodies, and both provided detailed
illustrations that would allow such observation apart from actual objects
by means of detailed drawings. They lived in a world in which artisanal
and learned cultures were growing increasingly proximate.
This chapter’s focus on art and nature and their relationships with each
other underscores the ways in which both entities were cultural concepts
that changed from one context to another over the centuries. Ideas
concerning art or artisanal skill developed within particular cultural
and social contexts in which numerous artisans carried out skilled
crafts, from painting and weaving to smelting metals and cultivating
crops. Ideas about nature also developed within the context of social
and cultural practices, whether the practice of medicine, for example,
or that of teaching within the curriculum and scholastic practices of the
medieval universities. An important aspect of the changing context was
the medieval development of commercial capitalism and the subsequent
burgeoning of the production of material objects, including luxury
objects and their growing cultural importance. This development
entailed expanding urbanism, and the growth of merchant culture. One
result was that art and nature came to be thought of as closer together,
and even at times interchangeable.

As we have seen, the distinction adopted by many Aristotelian
scholars in the medieval period was reinforced by medieval social
and occupational practices. The learned Latin study of the natural
world (natural philosophy) in the universities was quite separate from
artisanal and practical occupations. Artisan/practitioners were trained
in apprenticeship arrangements and usually did not know Latin. They
produced a vast array of objects, and they carried out practical tasks
such as agriculture and navigation. Exceptions existed to this separation,
most strikingly within alchemy. To some extent, furthermore, medieval
empirical traditions were continued from ancient origins, within such
fields as optics and medicine.
On a far broader scale, however, the relationships between nature
and the study of nature, on the one hand, and the making of things
and productive practices, on the other, significantly changed during
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As a result of economic and social
developments, art and nature came to be seen as close together. Such
proximity increased when craft practitioners and university-educated
men—both influenced by humanism—wrote books on the practical
and technical arts. One tradition of writing and commentary—the
Vitruvian tradition—was particularly influential in bringing together
skilled practitioners and university-educated men. It is to this tradition
that we now turn.

chapter 3
Artisans, Humanists, and the

De architectura of Vitruvius
Just as the categories of art and nature came at times to be conflated or

almost interchangeable from the fifteenth century, the wide divisions
between workshop-trained artisans and university-educated scholar/
humanists narrowed and in some cases disappeared. Some learned men
undertook practices in which they became skilled, and some artisans
took up writing, tried to learn Latin, and in one way or another absorbed
humanist learning. A few individuals by happenstance were easily
able to cross the boundary between manual skill and Latin learning,
whereas others struggled to acquire the necessary skills. Substantive
communication between the skilled and the learned, both person-to-
person and through writing and reading, became increasingly common.
Humanist scholars in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries pursued
an avid interest in the texts and artifacts of antiquity. Workshop-trained
artisans joined them in this interest, especially in matters pertaining to
ancient buildings and other kinds of objects, such as coins, medals, and
sculptures. Skilled artisans studied and measured such artifacts to learn
classical modes of expression in order to glean ancient techniques and
incorporate them into their own work. Both learned humanists and
practitioners eagerly scrutinized ancient texts that shed light on antique
artifacts. Undoubtedly the most important of these was De architectura,
by the Roman architect/engineer Vitruvius. The only fully extant treatise
on architecture from the ancient world, it was probably written, or at
least completed, in the 20s bce. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
the De architectura was studied intensely, and came to be a text that
mediated the worlds of learning and practice.1
62 | Artisans, Humanists, and the De architectura of Vitruvius

Vitruvius and the De architectura
Vitruvius worked as a military engineer under Julius Caesar in the 40s

bce. He dedicated his Ten Books on Architecture to Caesar’s adopted son
and heir Octavian (the emperor Augustus after 27 bce), who had given
him a pension at the behest of his sister Octavia.2 The Roman architect
treated the forms of temples and other public and private buildings, and
the siting and layout of cities, but also topics relevant to construction
and to finishing the work, such as building materials, flooring, ceilings,
painting, colors, and plaster.3 Further, he included chapters on matters
that are now usually placed under the rubric of engineering—hydrology,
water supply (book 8),4 time-keeping (sundials and water clocks) (book
9),5 and machines, including cranes and military machines (book 10).6
Vitruvius complained about false and unskilled architects who pushed
themselves forward to obtain commissions, and he hoped that his own
lack of fame and reputation would be remedied by his treatise.7 In
addition to specific details concerning building design, materials, and
construction, the De architectura treated architecture as a discipline.
Architecture, Vitruvius urged, consists of both construction or practice
(fabrica) and reasoning (ratiocinatio). “Fabrica is the constant repeated
exercise of the hands by which the work is brought to completion in
whatever medium is required for the proposed design. Ratiocinatio,
however, is what can demonstrate and explain to what degree things
have been made with skill and reason.” Architects who possessed
manual skills but no education, he insisted, could not achieve authority
commensurate with their labors, while those who put their trust entirely
in reasoning and letters follow a shadow rather than reality. Those who
have mastered both are fully armed and have arrived more quickly and
with authority at their goal.8
Elsewhere in his treatise, Vitruvius advises that the architect be literate,
know how to draw, know geometry, history, arithmetic, philosophy, and
music, be acquainted with medicine, understand the rulings of legal
experts, and have a grasp of astronomy.9 In his emphasis on reasoning
as well as skill, Vitruvius undoubtedly was attempting to raise the
Artisans, Humanists, and the De architectura of Vitruvius | 63

status of architecture. He reveals that his own education involved both
technical and liberal arts. Describing an Athenian law that required
parents to educate their children in an art, he thanks his own parents
profusely because they had him trained in an art that could not be
mastered “without education in letters and comprehensive learning in
every field.” Crediting the solicitude of his parents as well as his erudite
teachers, Vitruvius underscores that he had benefited from both literary
(philologia) and technical (philotechnia) writings.10
Vitruvius also viewed architecture as intrinsic to the growth of
human civilization itself. Influenced by Lucretius and other accounts, he
described the original humans as beasts who lived in caves and forests.
The invention of fire prompted these early humans to gather around
fires, and this new proximity led them to begin to communicate and
acquire language. Then they began to build shelters of various kinds,
imitating the nests of swallows with mud and straw, and going on to
develop new forms, learning from each other, while also competing to
build better houses in a variety of styles.11
The De architectura transmitted not only many details concerning
ancient building design, time-keeping, hydrology, and machines, but
also ideals about how the discipline of architecture should be practiced
and its central role in advancing human civilization. But in late antiquity,
the purview of the discipline seems to have narrowed: Faventinus, a
third-century author, wrote a summary of the part of the treatise on
private houses and ignored the rest. Yet Vitruvius’s entire text seems to
have been quite well known in the medieval period. More than eighty
medieval copies of the treatise are extant, the earliest a Carolingian
exemplar (British Library, MS Harley 2767), written ca. 800. Despite
its important medieval presence, the De architectura exerted its most
profound influence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—not only
through its information about the classical canon and ancient building
types and forms but also through its ideals concerning the necessity of
both reason and fabrication or hands-on practice. Great excitement
accompanied Poggio Bracciolini’s “rediscovery” of the text in a Swiss
Benedictine monastery at St. Gall in 1416.12

3.1. Vitruvius, De architectura libri dece / tr. de latino in vulgare,
afficurati, commentate: . . . da Caesare Caesariano [Como]: G. da
Ponte, [1521] fol. 32r. Humans building the first shelters. Courtesy
Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
In the fifteenth century, interest in the De architectura brought together

men of learning and workshop-trained practitioners. The difficult Latin
text required Latin skills, but its technical detail and obscure references
sometimes could be better grasped by someone experienced in analogous
practices. The De architectura treated ancient building types that were
not necessarily familiar to fifteenth-century people. To understand it
required the study of ancient buildings, parts of those buildings such
as capitals, columns, and architraves, and their measurements. Learned
humanists interested in ancient artifacts and practices and builders and
engineers who possessed hands-on knowledge of building construction
and machines began to communicate and share their respective areas
of expertise as a way of understanding both the ancient text and the
buildings of antiquity.
Skilled practitioners often struggled to learn Latin, as they themselves
wrote treatises on the practices with which they were familiar, often
adding classical references and other marks of learning. Men from
university backgrounds engaged in reciprocally beneficial substantive

conversations with skilled artisans and joined with them to investigate
ancient ruins, especially in Rome. The migration of skilled practitioners
to learning and writing and of learned and highborn men to an interest
in material construction carried out in life the Vitruvian ideal of
combining ratiocinatio and fabrica, although not in a way that Vitruvius
could have foreseen. The articulated ideal was repeated again and again
in architectural treatises and Vitruvian commentaries throughout the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.13
Brunelleschi, Alberti, and the Rise of the Artisan in

Early Fifteenth-Century Florence
Any discussion of architecture and Vitruvianism in the fifteenth century

must begin with Filippo Brunelleschi, who first revived classical forms
of architecture in Florence. As a young man, Brunelleschi, a goldsmith
and architect/engineer, lost the competition for the contract to
fabricate relief panels for the doors of the Florentine Baptistery to the
goldsmith Lorenzo Ghiberti.14 Brunelleschi went on to invent artist’s
perspective and successfully to design and supervise the construction
of the immense, double-shelled dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, the
Florentine cathedral. Most of what is known about him derives from a
biography by Antonio Manetti (1423–1497), a younger contemporary,
who was a humanist scholar and the son of a silk merchant. As a young
man, Manetti met Brunelleschi near the end of the famed architect’s
life and wrote his biography in the 1480s, almost forty years after the
Florentine master’s death. He reports that Brunelleschi’s father was a
notary and that Brunelleschi himself learned how to read and write at an
early age, and that he also knew how to use an abacus and had learned
some Latin. Perhaps, Manetti speculates, he was taught Latin because
his father thought his son would follow in his footsteps and become a
notary. Instead, the son exhibited great interest in drawing and painting,
and eventually was apprenticed to a goldsmith.15 Brunelleschi’s dual
background may well have allowed him easily to traverse the boundaries
between artisanal skill and Latin culture.

Manetti provides a lengthy description of Brunelleschi’s trips to Rome,
in which he first looked at sculpture, but then began “to give no less
time to that order and method which is in the abutments and thrusts of
buildings, [their] masses, lines, and invenzioni according to and in relation
with their function, and to do the same for decorations.” He decided,
Manetti continues, “to rediscover the fine and highly skilled method of
building and the harmonious proportions of the ancients and how they
might, without defects, be employed with convenience and economy.”
Manetti reports that Brunelleschi studied vaults and considered methods
of centering them, that he was familiar with contrivances, having made
clocks, alarm bells, and devices with springs, and that he thought a great
deal about machines for carrying, lifting, and pulling, according to what
the exigencies of the situation might be.16 He, together with the sculptor
Donatello (ca. 1386–1466):
made rough drawings of almost all the buildings in Rome and

in many places beyond the walls, with measurements of the
widths and heights as far as they were able to ascertain [the
latter] by estimation, and also the lengths, etc. In many places
they had excavations made in order to see the junctures of the
membering of the buildings and their type—whether square,
polygonal, completely round, oval, or whatever. When possible
they estimated the heights [by measuring] from base to base
for the height and similarly [they estimated the heights of ] the
entablatures and roofs from the foundations. They drew the
elevations on strips of parchment graphs with numbers and
symbols which Filippo alone understood.17
Manetti continues that Brunelleschi spent many years at the work

of observing and measuring ancient buildings and that he found many
differences in the types of “columns, bases, capitals, architraves, friezes,
cornices, and pediments.” He also found differences “between the masses
of the temples and the diameters of the columns.” So, “by means of close
observation” he learned to recognize each of the column types—“Ionic,

Doric, Tuscan, Corinthian, and Attic.” And, Manetti adds, “He used
most of them at the time and place he considered best.”18
There is some question concerning the reliability of Manetti’s
account. It is at times highly polemical, especially concerning the
baptistery competition and the discussion of Brunelleschi’s work on the
dome of the cathedral. Manetti reports Brunelleschi’s numerous trips to
Rome, sometimes taken with Donatello, at times when one or both are
documented as having been in Florence. Howard Saalman in his cogent
discussion of the reliability of Manetti’s account emphasizes that while
the Roman trips are completely undocumented, they are not unlikely
and that the elderly Brunelleschi may well have discussed them with the
young Manetti. In any case, as Saalman notes, “The fact remains that
if there had not been any Roman journeys, Manetti would have had to
invent them, because they form a significant aspect of the larger scheme
3.2. Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo). A

view of the dome. Photo by author.

to which his hero had to conform.” That larger scheme was very much
influenced by the great Florentine humanist Leon Battista Alberti and by
Alberti’s treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria. In Saalman’s words,
by the 1480s, “Any architect worthy of the name simply had to have
spent some time in Rome, digging and sketching, before starting out on
a serious career of building all’antica.”19
Whether or not Brunelleschi actually went to Rome, Manetti’s
description of his activities there provides a view of approaches used
in the investigation of a group of material structures—approaches that
were prevalent at least by the 1480s and indeed (as we know from other
sources) well before. In Manetti’s account, Brunelleschi assiduously
examines building structures, noting how the building was constructed
and how its forms relate to its functions. He investigates the proportions
of structures and carefully measures them. He examines specific parts
of buildings such as vaults, and he is reported to be highly interested
in devices and machines, including those for lifting and pulling, as well
as springs and clocks. Brunelleschi’s interest in machines and devices is
well known from other sources. He invented unique lifting machinery
for the work of constructing the Florentine dome.20 Manetti’s biography
suggests, probably accurately, the empirical approaches and values used
by Brunelleschi in his investigation of ancient artifacts.
Brunelleschi’s younger contemporary Leon Battista Alberti was one
of the most prolific and influential humanists of the fifteenth century.
Alberti wrote fluently in Latin and Italian not only on literary and
ethical topics but also on practical mathematics, painting, sculpture, and
architecture. His mathematical works include Ludi matematici, a tract on
measuring weight, distances, and dimensions; Elementa picturae, which
describes geometric figures and transposes them onto foreshortened
planes; Descriptio urbis Romae, which describes a surveying disk that he
used to make a measured survey of the city of Rome; De statua, which
treats human proportions and a device for replicating those proportions
in sculptures of human figures; and Componendis cifris, which explains
his invention of a code wheel. Alberti also designed four churches—
Tempio Malatesta in Rimini, San Sebastiano and S. Andrea in Mantua,

3.3. Matteo di Andrea de’
Pasti, medal with portrait
of Leon Battista Alberti.
© Victoria and Albert
Museum, London.
and S. Maria Novella in Florence.21 Further, he designed the palace of the

noble Rucellai family, in Florence. He was undoubtedly involved (but in
unknown ways) in Pope Nicholas V’s urban planning of Rome around
145022 and in Pope Pius II’s redesign of the Tuscan town of Pienza.23
Alberti also painted pictures, although no paintings that are attributed
to him with certainty are extant. His immensely influential Treatise on
Painting explicated the new artist’s perspective by a form of projective
geometry. Brunelleschi had demonstrated the perspectival projection of
the Florentine Baptistery and the Palazzo de’ Signori (the present-day
Palazzo Vecchio) using a quite different method that involved panels and
reflective mirrors. Alberti wrote both an Italian and a Latin version of his
treatise on painting, a first draft completed in 1435. Although the Italian
version has long been considered a translation of the earlier Latin version,
Rocco Sinisgalli has cogently argued that what happened was the reverse,
that the Latin was a translation from the Italian. Alberti dedicated the
Italian version to Brunelleschi. Martin Kemp rightly notes that Alberti’s
object in making an Italian version was not merely to provide the
text to non-Latin-reading artisans—such as some of those mentioned
in the dedication to Brunelleschi: Donatello, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Luca
della Robbia (ca. 1399/1400–1482), the sculptor famous for his terra-

cotta glazed roundels, and the painter Masaccio (1401–?1428); but also
Alberti here and elsewhere aimed to make Italian as legitimate a learned
language as Latin. His dedication to Brunelleschi and his mention of
other sculptors and painters signal his great admiration for the visual
revolution—grounded in artist’s perspective and the adoption of classical
forms—that had greeted him when he entered Florence for the first
time, perhaps in 1434.24
It would be inaccurate to say that Alberti traversed the boundary
between Latin learning and artisan skill. Rather, throughout his varied
and prolific writings and in his constructive and practical activities, he
obliterated that boundary. This is evident particularly in his architectural
treatise De re aedificatoria, completed circa 1452 and first printed in 1486,
fourteen years after his death. The renowned Florentine humanist Angelo
Poliziano (1454–1494), in addressing the dedication letter of the printed
edition to Lorenzo de Medici (1449–1492), ruler of Florence, praised
Alberti’s varied and outstanding literary and practical achievements.
He wrote: “So thorough had been his examination of the remains of
antiquity that he was able to grasp every principle of ancient architecture
and renew it by example; his invention was not limited to machinery,
lifts, and automata, but also included the wonderful forms of buildings.
He had moreover the highest reputation as both painter and sculptor.”
Poliziano emphasized Alberti’s abilities in both literary and practical
realms.25
In the De re aedificatoria Alberti carefully distinguishes the architect
from the carpenter: “The carpenter is but an instrument in the hands
of the architect.” But this does not mean that he separated architectural
activity from actual building construction. The architect, he says, “by
sure and wonderful reason and method, knows how to devise through
his own mind and energy, and to realize by construction, whatever
can be most beautifully fitted out for the noble needs of men.”26 This
preliminary statement signals four central concerns evident throughout
the De re aedificatoria. First is the rational side of architecture, the use of
“wonderful reason and method” through the architect’s “own mind and
energy.” Second is the realization of these ideas in “actual construction.”

Reasoning and construction are consonant with and indeed reflect the
ratiocinatio and fabrica of Vitruvius’s treatise. Third, Alberti’s interest
in aesthetics is evident—“what can be most beautifully fitted out.”
Also evident, finally, is his concern for the moral or ethical aspect of
architecture, its intrinsic relationship to the life of humans, its use in the
service of “the most noble needs of men.”
The modern discipline of architecture often looks on Alberti’s treatise
as an important originary text. Modern architects tend to be far more
interested in design than in actual construction; construction now
usually falls under the purview of building contractors, civil engineers,
and the skilled building trades. One result is that the De re aedificatoria
has often been misconstrued as conceiving architecture as an art mainly
concerned with design, with Alberti’s distinction between the architect
and the carpenter being taken to support this view. But Alberti in no
way disregards the material and constructive aspects of architecture. He
continues the discussion summarized above by itemizing the material
goods that architects contribute to human life: shelters of various kinds,
walks, pools, baths, vehicles, timepieces, shrines, temples, tunnels,
hydraulic works, drains, river dredging, the construction of harbors
and bridges, the building of ships, and the construction of ballistics
and the machines of war.27 He retains the full range of activities set
out by Vitruvius, that is, those concerned with what is now considered
engineering as well as the design and construction of buildings.
His treatise, divided into ten books, is very much concerned with the
material and constructive aspects of architecture. Book 2 treats materials
including timber, stone, bricks, lime, and sand. Book 3, which concerns
construction, treats foundations and walls, pavements and roofing,
arches and vaulting, including details about the preparation of materials.
His chapters on particular kinds of building construction such as public
works and private houses include much detail on how to prepare materials
and how to proceed with construction. In a chapter on ornamentation,
he discusses tools and machines such as cranes and lifting machines in
detail. Elsewhere he treats roads, highways, and canals.28 This detail on
materials and construction is interspersed with erudite discussions of

classical texts, of the role of architecture in civic life, and of aesthetic
issues. The fact is that Alberti was neither an architect nor an engineer in
the modern senses of those words. He was a learned humanist who had
acquired a deep knowledge and interest in the practical and technical
arts, who had studied Vitruvius and other ancient writers intensely and
had used and transformed the ideas that he found there for his own
original synthesis, and for use in his own technical practice.
Lorenzo Ghiberti and Antonio Averlino, called Filarete:

From Artisan to Author
The study of Vitruvius and the production of writings influenced by such

study were by no means limited to learned humanists such as Alberti.
Workshop-trained men soon took up their pens and produced writings
influenced by the ancient architect and by Alberti. One of these was
the goldsmith Lorenzo Ghiberti. Ghiberti was trained in his stepfather’s
goldsmith shop, matriculating in the goldsmith’s guild, the Arte della
Seta, as a goldsmith and metal sculptor in 1409. His success in the
1401 competition organized by the Arte di Calimala (the guild of cloth
finishers and merchants in foreign cloth) gave him the contract to make
the bronze relief panels for the north doors of the Florentine Baptistery,
beating out Brunelleschi and other competitors.29 This award laid the
foundations for Ghiberti’s life’s work and his growing reputation. He
established a large bronze-casting workshop in order to create and cast
the low-relief panels for the doors of the baptistery. He completed the
first set of doors in 1424, at which time they were set up in the main
portal of the baptistery, facing the cathedral façade, while the doors that
had been completed by Andrea Pisano (ca. 1290–1348/9) in 1336 were
moved to the west portal. The Arte di Calimala then commissioned the
Ghiberti workshop to make a third set of doors. They were completed
by August 1448, while the framing and gilding was completed by 1452.
The new doors were placed in the main portal while Ghiberti’s earlier
doors were reinstalled on the north side. The new doors contained
large almost square panels with scenes from the Old Testament set in

strikingly illusionistic perspectival settings—the first visible affirmation
of Albertian perspective. Remarkably beautiful and displaying virtuoso
skill, they must have seemed to fully justify Ghiberti’s proud self-portrait
bust on the same door—just as, across the square, a relief portrait of
Brunelleschi adorns a wall above his tomb in the cathedral that displayed
his spectacular dome.30
Yet Ghiberti augmented his virtuoso accomplishments as a sculptor
with a very different activity—the study of ancient texts and the
composition of his own treatise. In the late 1440s, he gradually retired
from his workshop and seems to have devoted himself increasingly
to his bookish studies. He is recorded as having borrowed as early as
1430 an ancient Greek illustrated text on machines by the first-century
author Athenaeus Mechanicus. Ghiberti’s treatise in three books—I
commentarii—was well under way by 1447 but remained unfinished at
the time of his death in 1455. As Manfred Wundram put it, Ghiberti’s
Commentarii “are outstanding among 15th-century writings on art, both
in their ambition to discuss the development of art from antiquity to
modern times and in their humanist belief in the supremacy of ancient
art.” Book 1 of the Commentaries focuses on ancient art, with many
paraphrases of the texts of Pliny and Vitruvius; book 2 provides a history
of art up through a detailed itemization of Ghiberti’s own works; and
book 3, clearly unfinished, consists of a group of notes on disciplines
necessary to the sculptor—optics, anatomy, and human proportions, the
latter based on Vitruvius. The optical section, which combines optics
and artist’s perspective, consists of a series of notes from such medieval
authors as Alhacen, Avicenna, Witelo, John Peckham, and Roger Bacon.31
The Commentarii focuses on Ghiberti’s own area of expertise—
sculpture—as well as painting. It is based on his study of ancient texts,
primarily Pliny’s De natura rerum (On the Nature of Things) and
Vitruvius’s De architectura, and it exists in only one, very imperfect
manuscript copy in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence. Ghiberti
manifestly struggled, sometimes unsuccessfully, to understand the Latin
texts of Pliny and Vitruvius. Despite misunderstanding numerous
details, he grasped much of the substance of these texts. His method

3.4. Lorenzo Ghiberti. Florence, Italy. Panel from baptistery door,
“Gates of Paradise.” Story of Jacob and Esau. Museo dell’Opera del
Duomo. Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, N.Y.
3.5. Lorenzo Ghiberti, self-portrait.

Florence, Italy. From baptistery door,
“Gates of Paradise,” Photo credit:
Timothy McCarthy, Archive/Art
Resource, N.Y.

was to extract sentences and phrases from the ancient texts and then
mold them to his own purposes. For example, following Vitruvius
(De arch. 1.1.1–10), he writes that “it is suitable that the sculptor, also
the painter, be instructed in all these liberal arts”—namely, grammar
(i.e., skill in reading and writing), geometry, philosophy, medicine,
astrology, prospectiva, history, notomia (i.e., anatomy), teorica disegno,
and arithmetic.32 Thus does Ghiberti follow Vitruvius’s list—with
important changes, adding prospectiva, anatomy, and teorica disegno, and
disregarding music and law.
He paraphrases the Vitruvian dictum concerning the necessity of
both fabrica and ratiocinatio, applying it to painting and sculpture
rather than to architecture. “[The art of ] sculpture and painting,” he
says, “consists of knowledge of many disciplines and is ornamented with
various teachings, which is the high invention of all the other arts; it is
fabrication with certain thoughtfulness which is accomplished through
material and reasoning.” Ghiberti insists that “sculptors and painters
who have contended without letters, although they have trained with
the hands, will not be able to complete their work with authority
commensurate with their labors, while those who proceed with reason
and letters only, have followed the shadow, but not the real thing.”
Following his restatement of these Vitruvian dictums, Ghiberti discusses
ancient bronze statuary and clay modeling at length. He expresses great
admiration for ancient naturalism, just as Pliny had.33
Ghiberti’s large workshop trained quite a number of skilled artisans
in bronze casting, probably including the sculptor and architect Antonio
Averlino (ca. 1400–ca. 1469), known as Filarete (lover of virtue),
although documentation is lacking. Averlino’s first known activity is his
work in Rome on the relief panels for the bronze doors of the basilica
of St. Peter’s, a work in progress between 1433 and 1442. After being
accused of attempting to steal the head of St. John the Baptist from
the monastery of San Silvester in 1447, he was imprisoned, tortured,
and after his release though the intervention of the pope, banned from
Rome.34 In 1451 he moved to the court of Francesco Sforza, duke of
Milan (1401–1466), where he began a new career as an architect. There

he supervised the construction of buildings (often over the protests of
local builders), and he composed his illustrated Trattato di Architettura
(1461–1464). He dedicated his original treatise to Francesco Sforza and
another copy (with additions praising the new dedicatee) to the ruler of
Florence, Piero de Medici (1472–1503). The first vernacular architectural
treatise of the fifteenth century, it centers on the planning and building
of an ideal city, Sforzinda. The narrative takes the form of a dialogue in
which the architect (Filarete, lover of virtue) acts as a near-equal to the
duke, a generous and approving patron. Filarete often discusses the plans
and progress of the new city with the duke as he also teaches architecture
to the duke’s son, Maria Galeazzo Sforza, an avid student who eagerly
absorbs his instruction.35
It has been shown that Filarete was influenced in the creation of
his ideal city by the dialogues of Plato—even though few of them had
been translated from the Greek when he wrote his treatise. Specifically,
Filarete was influenced by the Timaeus, which shows how the demiurge
(an artisan-like figure) designed the universe and made humans in the
image of that universe; the Critias, which discusses two cities, including
their planning and architecture; and the Laws, which describes the social,
political, and legal conditions of an ideal city. Filarete would have been
able to learn the relevant details of these dialogues through Francesco
da Tolentino, known as Filelfo (1398–1481), a famous humanist and
philologist, fluent in both Greek and Latin, who worked in the Sforza
court and was his good friend.36
Filarete’s friendship with a learned humanist shaped his vision of
Sforzinda, but he did not abandon the Vitruvian idea that both skill
and reason were necessary. He condemned those who possessed skill
alone. Those who, he said, “know how to put a stone in lime, daub
it with mortar, and think they are excellent masters of architecture”
commit errors, because they understand “neither the measures nor the
proportions” of things pertaining to architecture. Such men who have
blind faith in themselves and believe nothing can be done better are like
the blind leading the blind—all end in a ditch because of poor guidance.37
The architect must thus understand measures and proportions—how to

design buildings and correctly lay out a site—but he must also, Filarete
makes clear, be involved with all aspects of the construction. He should
personally choose the master masons and supervise them while they
work. He must be aware of every detail, cognizant of the finances of the
building, should pay for supplies and pay the workers judiciously without
overpaying. He must have a specially close relationship with an overseer,
who must be thoroughly informed of the orders and must daily be given
the architect’s “desires and measures” so that he can communicate them
to the others.38
Filarete emphasizes that to carry out these designing, measuring,
and supervising functions well, the architect should himself be a skilled
practitioner. He should know how to build and decorate various things,
that is, he should “understand many skills and be able to demonstrate
them with the work of his hand, with rules of measure, proportion,
quality, and suitability.” Without the skill of making things “with his
own hand, he will never know how to show them or to explain them so
they will turn out well.”39
Within Sforzinda, the crafts have a special place. The city includes a
school, primarily for the benefit of those from impoverished families,
but also for the well-to-do who wish to attend. Masters there would
teach letters, law, canon law, rhetoric, and poetry. Filarete also intended
(although it was “not so dignified”) that “some manual arts should be
taught here by their practitioners.” The faculty would include a master
of painting, a silversmith, masters of carving in both marble and wood,
a turner, a master of embroidery, a tailor, a pharmacist, a glassmaker,
and a master of clay, “that is of beautiful vases.”40 Filarete concludes that
“this will be a thing that will last for eternity and, moreover, a thing
that has never been done before.” Universities exist, he recognizes, where
boarding students pay a certain amount (and receive instruction), but
“this only applies to students of letters.” Yet, he concludes, “The other
crafts are also necessary and noble, for there are good masters in them.
Moreover, all intellects are not equal. Thus it will be possible for every
mind to be trained.”41

3.6. Antonio Averlino called Filarete. Page from Treatise on Architecture.
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. Codex Magliabechiano. II I 140, fol.
83v. Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, N.Y.

In addition to the school, Sforzinda contained what Filarete calls the
Houses of Vice and Virtue. The House of Vice accommodates those who
enjoy drinking, gambling, and the pleasures of Venus, while the House
of Virtue includes rooms for teaching and practicing all the liberal arts,
a practice area for military arts, and a theater. Further, “all the crafts
or trades that exist are in this place.” The House of Virtue includes a
temple, open to all, that serves artisans and those who lecture in the arts.
Anyone could receive training either in letters or in the arts. Those who
were found to be skilled and learned in all the disciplines “were honored
for the virtue that they acquired” in their studies. Filarete stresses that all
trades are practiced here and that those who are “judged good masters,
and if they are young and have been educated in this place, are given the
degree like doctors.” The House of Virtue was to be governed by three
equals—a man of letters, one skilled in arms, and an artisan.42
Editions and Translations of Vitruvius
Filarete’s attempt to integrate the liberal arts and artisanal craftwork

within his ideal city reflected a growing reality for some artisan-trained
authors in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Francesco di
Giorgio, a younger contemporary of Filarete, was well known for his
practical expertise in the design and construction of buildings, including
fortifications, and as we have seen, he also wrote treatises. Francesco
struggled to learn Latin over the years as he also worked on translating
Vitruvius. His translation, which exists in one autograph manuscript in
the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, is the first known translation of
the De architectura into a vernacular language. Marco Biffi convincingly
argues that Francesco prepared it for his own use. Biffi also notes that
Francesco’s language is typical of an artisan trained in a workshop, and
that his Latin, which improved over the years, is that of an autodidact.43
“Architecture,” Francesco says, “is only a subtle conjecture, conceived
in the mind, which is manifest in the work.” But, “reason cannot be
assigned to each and every thing, because ingenuity [ingegno] consists

more in the mind and intellect of the architect than in writing or design,
and many things happen in the doing [in fatto] which the architect
or worker never thought of.” It is necessary that the architect be both
practiced (practico) and knowing (sciente), that he have a good memory,
that he has read and seen many things, and that he be prepared. Thereby
he would not resemble “the arrogant and presumptuous” people who are
“instructed in errors” and, by demonstrating false things “through force
of language,” have “corrupted the world.” The architect, in contrast,
must possess both fabrica (frabica [sic]) and ratiocination (raciocinazio
[sic]). Following Vitruvius, Francesco itemizes the disciplines in which
the architect should be knowledgeable.44
Francesco’s growing reputation propelled him into a peripatetic
career throughout Italy. In the late 1470s he was working in the court of
Federico I Montefeltre in Urbino during the same time that the learned
philologist Giovanni Sulpizio (or Sulpicius) da Verola (fl. 1470s and 1480s)
also was there. Although I know of no documentation that confirms it, it
is hard to imagine that these two men would not have been acquainted,
and assuming that they were, they surely would have communicated
concerning their shared interest in Vitruvius. Sulpizio would edit the first
printed edition of the De architectura, a Latin edition published in Rome
some time between 1486 and 1492. Francesco’s decision to undertake a
new version of his own treatise (what would become Trattato II) was
undoubtedly influenced by this printed Vitruvian edition and also by
the publication of the first printed edition of Alberti’s De re aedificatoria
in 1486.45
Sulpizio taught grammar at the University of Perugia between 1470
and 1475, spent time in Urbino, as mentioned, and was in Rome by 1480.
There, he joined a circle of humanists and artists at the Roman academy
situated below the Quirinal Hill near the Trevi Fountain and headed
by the humanist antiquarian Pomponio Leto (1428–1498). Sulpizio, as
professor of grammar, and Leto, as professor of rhetoric, both taught
at the University of Rome (the studium urbis). Leto avidly instructed
his students in the new humanist fields of archaeology, epigraphy, and
numismatics, encouraging them to compare ancient texts with ancient
ruins and artifacts.46
While in Rome, Sulpizio worked on his Vitruvian edition, dedicating
it to Raffaele Riaro (1461–1521), a young and energetic cardinal who
participated in the circle of humanists around Pomponio Leto. Riaro
was engrossed in the planning stages of building his great palace near
the center of Rome, now called the Palazzo della Cancelleria. The young
cardinal also interested himself particularly in ancient drama and theater
design, including Vitruvius’s discussion of theaters. He underwrote the
first production of an ancient play in Renaissance Rome, Seneca’s tragedy
Hippolytus, or, as it is now called, Phaedra. It was directed by Sulpizio
and enacted by the professor’s students in a temporary theater that
the group had constructed in front of Cardinal Riaro’s pre-Cancelleria
residence, also near the Campo di Fiore. The show was a resounding
success, despite the collapse of the set midway through the production,
and its emergency repair by Sulpizio and his students.47
Sulpizio was intensely involved in a broadly based, collaborative
endeavor to study and rediscover Roman antiquity in all its aspects. As
Ingrid Rowland has noted, he thought of his Vitruvian edition as a work
in progress that would be added to and made more understandable by
others in the future. He also addressed a broad readership well beyond
elite cardinals such as Riaro. Although the pages of the new edition were
not illustrated, they did contain wide margins, the easier to write notes
and make drawings on. Sulpizio emphasizes that he undertook the work
of editing the difficult text when he observed that if the De architectura
were widely distributed, it could be very useful, “not only for the learned,
but to the rest of men.” Indeed, a printed edition was far less expensive
than any manuscript could be, and it gave architect/engineers and other
practitioners far greater access to the ancient text.48
Sulpizio’s wish that his edition be studied and improved was at least
partially fulfilled. One piece of evidence is a manuscript in the Biblioteca
Ariostea in Ferrara that includes a transcription of the De architectura,
taken from one or both of the slightly revised editions of Sulpizio’s
Vitruvius that were published in Florence in 1496 and in Venice in
1497. The Ferrara manuscript contains no attribution, but is thought to
have been transcribed (with occasional Latin corrections) by the learned

humanist Pellegrino Prisciani (ca. 1435–1518). Prisciani worked for Prince
Ercole I Este (1431–1505) and assisted the prince in his architectural
projects during a time of expanding urbanism and building construction
in Ferrara. The manuscript is richly illustrated with drawings—127 of
the 196 pages contain illustrations—that seem to have been executed
by different hands. The editor of the facsimile edition, Claudio Sgarbi,
cogently argues that the text was made for private study and that it and
the illustrations may have been used in both public and private lectures
and discussions on Vitruvius and ancient architecture. Although precise
information is lacking, the unique manuscript seems to have been a
collaborative effort of learned humanists and artisans within a princely
court led by a prince who was an enthusiastic builder.49
Another piece of evidence for the extended use of Sulpizio’s edition is a
copy of the printed book in the Corsini Library in Rome. It belonged to
a Florentine architect who was a member of a famous family of architects
active in Rome in the first half of the sixteenth century—the Sangallos.
The owner was Giovanni Battista da Sangallo (1496–1548), “il Gobbo”—
the hunchback. Rather than leaving the wide margins blank, he filled
them with corrections, annotations, translations into Italian, and more
than eighty pages of illustrations.50
The first illustrated edition of De architectura that was printed was
produced by a remarkable architect/engineer and learned humanist,
Giovanni Giocondo (1433–1515). Although we know nothing of
Giocondo’s early life or training, his life’s work reveals a man highly
accomplished both in practical engineering projects such as hydraulics,
and in humanist studies. Giocondo worked in the court of Alfonso, duke
of Calabria (later Alfonso II, king of Naples), between 1589 and 1591.
He was a diligent student of Vitruvius, and he extensively investigated
ancient ruins in Naples and in surrounding towns such as Capua and
Pozzuola. After 1590, at the death of the architect Giuliano da Maiano
(1432–1490), he was given a hand in supervising the construction of the
Poggio Reale, a villa with vast terraced gardens containing fountains and
extensive hydraulic works, overlooking the Bay of Naples. (The villa
was destroyed in the eighteenth century.) Giocondo met Francesco di

Giorgio in Naples—Francesco is first documented there in 1491, working
for Alfonso in charge of building a fortress. (Francesco contributed to
the invention of a new kind of bastion fortification that was effective
against gunpowder artillery, and during his lifetime he was involved in
numerous projects to build, reconstruct, and redesign forts in various
locations in Italy.) Contact between Francesco and Giocondo is certain,
because on 30 June 1492 Giocondo was paid by the Neapolitan treasury
for 126 drawings on paper to illustrate two treatises by Francesco
di Giorgio (treatises that are not extant).51 The two men had much
substantive knowledge to share. Giocondo’s later work on fortification
in the Veneto (after 1506) suggests the possibility that Francesco taught
him much about the topic, and Giocondo’s humanist instruction may
have helped Francesco on the more erudite second version of his treatise,
Trattato II.
Giocondo was born in Verona but seems to have spent a substantial
amount of time in Rome during his youth. Like Sulpizio, he was part
of the informal academy led by Pomponio Leto. Between 1478 and
1484 he was intensely engaged in an investigation of ancient Roman
inscriptions that he found on ruined buildings, walls, pavements,
bridges, and towers, and in public and private collections in Rome. He
created three collections of inscriptions, each somewhat different, the
first dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici of Florence. Giocondo, as described
by his biographer, had “a scientific and precise knowledge of antiquities
by means of true and exact campaigns of measurement, with drawings
taken from life and measurements quoted.” The first version of his
epigraph collection, dedicated to Lorenzo, contained only inscriptions
that he personally had seen, omitting those that he found reported in the
writings of others.52 His interest in practical mathematics, measurement,
and measuring instruments is evident in a significant number of extant
notes and drawings of measuring instruments—a dioptra similar to an
astrolabe, an astrolabe, useful for measuring distances, and a quadrant.53
Giocondo’s varied activities and travels involved him in both practical
and literary tasks. He was in France by 1495 (where he traveled in the
aftermath of the French king Charles VIII’s successful military campaign

against Naples). He remained in France about ten years, involved in the
reconstruction in Paris of the Pont Notre Dame (destroyed by fire in
1499) and in the construction of fountains at the Château of Blois. He
gave public lectures on Vitruvius. He moved to Venice and worked there
and in the surrounding Veneto from 1506, involved in the construction
of bridges and canals, and then he contributed to the construction of
fortifications in Padua and Treviso. Pope Leo X invited him to Rome,
where in 1514, despite his eighty-one years, he was appointed architect
of St. Peter’s, where he served along with Raphael and Giuliano da
Sangallo.54
Giocondo’s edition of Vitruvius, published in 1511, was illustrated
with 136 of his own woodcuts and dedicated to Pope Julius II. A reprint
edition in a smaller format, published in 1513 with the treatise on
aqueducts by the Roman author Frontinus, was dedicated to Giuliano
de Medici, brother of Pope Leo X. In this dedication, Giocondo assures
readers that there would now be “a sound, useful, and also delightful
text, which would provide knowledge of ancient building, clocks, and
machines.” Throughout the text, he had worked to make the edition
useful to practicing engineers and architects, and he included a useful
glossary of technical terms and a table of mathematical symbols. “May
the artisan prosper,” he enthused in his “Letter to the Reader,” “and may
he add as many liberal studies as correspondingly are as lively froth to
the substance.”55
Giovanni Giocondo was an individual who cannot be classified as
solely a skilled architect/engineer or solely a scholar. Although his
background training is unknown, his lifetime activity makes it clear that
he absolutely falls into both camps, making the distinction irrelevant.
His illustrated edition of 1511 influenced numerous further editions,
translations, commentaries, and freestanding treatises in the sixteenth
century, many of them de facto collaborative efforts between artisan/
practitioners and learned humanists (again with the qualification that
the two categories increasingly did not exclude each other).
Shortly after the 1513 Giocondo edition appeared, the painter Raphael,
who lived in an elegant palazzo in Via Julia in Rome, invited the learned

philologist Marco Fabio Calvo (ca. 1450–1527) to live in his house and
produce an Italian translation of De architectura. Calvo accomplished
this, using Giocondo’s edition, probably between 1512 and 1516. A copy
contains extensive notes and drawings by Raphael himself. In addition
to his work on Vitruvius, Calvo created an edition of the writings of
the ancient medical author Hippocrates, and he translated into Latin
the ancient physician Galen’s commentary on the Epidemiorum of
Hippocrates. Further, he and Raphael engaged in a collaborative project
of graphically reconstructing ancient Rome. Raphael was in the midst
of creating surveys of ancient monuments and topography for the
purpose of making maps. His method involved “plotting points on
paper from readings obtained from a surveying instrument kept at a
constant orientation by a magnetic compass.” At the same time, Calvo
studied ancient Roman topographical writings. The project was cut off
by Raphael’s premature death in 1520. Calvo himself perished in the
3.7. Giovanni Giocondo, ed., M. Vitruvius per Iocundum solito castigatior factus
cum figures et tabula ut iam legi et intelligi posit . . . (Venice: Ioannis de Tridino
alias Tacuino, 1511), fol. 55v. An illustration on building harbors and other
structures in water, illustrating Vitruvius’s De architectura, 5.12. Reproduced by
permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

terrible Sack of Rome of 1527. He was thrown into prison and died of
hunger because he was unable to pay the extortionate tribute money
demanded.56
Publication of the first printed translation (into Italian) and
commentary of the De architectura occurred in 1521, primarily the work of
Cesare Cesariano (1475–1543). Cesariano includes much autobiographical
material in his illustrated commentary, revealing his troubled life, but also
his valuation of both learning and artisanal skill and the ways that they
related one to the other. His father, he recalled, had “made him recite from
the little grammatical work of Donato” (a Latin grammar) when he was
four and a half years old. The father, who was in the service of the duke
Galeazo Sforza (1469–1494), died soon after (in 1480). When Cesariano
reached the age of fifteen, he was forced to flee from home because of
the “innate violence” of the man his “stepmother” (noverca—actually
his mother, Elisabetta de Grittis) had married. Cesariano was a student
of Bramante before the master left for Rome in 1499. He worked in
Ferrara at about the time that the Ferrara Vitruvius, discussed above, was
created (during the reign of Ercole I Este). There he became an assistant
to Antonio Visconti, an avid student of philosophy, mathematics, and
cosmography, for whom he traced diagrams and scientific drawings. In
1500 he married in the city of Reggio Emilia, where he is recorded as a
citizen in 1503 and where he worked on frescoes in the baptistery of St.
John the Evangelist and in the Palazzo del Podestà. After killing a man in
1507, he was forced to flee. He went to Parma, where he painted frescoes
in the sacristy of the monastery of St. John the Evangelist. These frescoes,
securely attributed to him, reveal “the geometric discipline derived from
Bramante.” He returned to Milan circa 1513, where he worked on frescoes
and on architectural projects, including the defenses of the ducal palace.
In 1518 he is documented as being in Asti in the Piedmont region of
northern Italy working on hydraulic engineering related to containing
the Tanaro River.57
During these itinerant years engaged in painting, architecture, and
engineering, Cesariano also worked on his Vitruvian translation and
commentary. With his daily earnings, he reports, he “conversed and

studied much in order to observe and understand diverse talents and
practices of men.” In view of his own experience, he took exception to
Aristotle’s view that the needy cannot devote themselves to good and
are lacking in zeal, and that “it is impossible that the poorly born can
do good.” Cesare detailed his own troubles and included an allegorical
illustration of his own life, asserting that he himself had been specially
created and educated so he could be “the explicator of this divine work”
[i.e., the Vitruvian edition] to the “great utility and necessity” of the
world.58 Pointing to Vitruvius’s lament that some unskilled artists were
rewarded greatly while the more skilled received little remuneration
(De architectura 3.pref.1–3), Cesariano added that we should be scouts
for the good works of others, “especially [works] of the educated and
wise learned” and “of those artisans who have labored a great deal,”
who should be rewarded “according to their good, useful, and necessary
profession.” Artisans should not be deprived of support, “although
sometimes fortune may have wearied and harassed them,” forcing them
into poverty.59
Commenting on the relevant Vitruvian passage, he reiterated that
“not only architecture, but every other art,” is made up “of the work or
fabrication and the reasoning.” Reasoning concerns the “well-calculated
and considered” rational aspects of each art, and involves general rules.
The work itself constitutes the particular application. It is necessary
both “to know how to say and how to do,” and the work—the doing—
is “almost of greater necessity” than the rational part, the saying. The
rational aspect is “the speaking with reason about the handmade thing”
and involves the demonstration of the object from section to section.
Further, Cesariano explained that the treatment of materials is the
“drawing out of the sense of the thing through explanation, as does the
skilled teacher of some technical skill, who demonstrates not only with
words, but with actions, in order to teach the uneducated workers.” The
ability to understand an object is associated with the ability to handle it
skillfully. Nothing arises “in this life except as a result of handling.” Those
people “who know how to work through handling things, themselves
give shape to elegance . . . in order to be recognized for their knowledge.”

3.8. Vitruvius, De architectura libri dece / tr. de latino in vulgare, afficurati,
commentate: . . . da Caesare Caesariano [Como]: G. da Ponte, [1521], fol. 92r.
Cesare Cesariano’s allegory of his own life. Cesariano depicts himself with his
back to the viewer and his hand extended to the wheel of fortune on the right.
The sign on his back can be translated as: “The learned man in the end is cast
forth from poverty.” Courtesy Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.

Thus does the architect derive his knowledge “not only somewhat from
teachers, but from nature.”60
For Cesariano, the actual construction of a material object entailed
the demonstration of its rational principles. Beginning a project, “it is
suitable to make order so that the things pertinent to whatever we intend
to make can be demonstrated.” The “conjectures of our thinking are
made manifest to us through the order of the subsequent instance or
effect. This demonstrates the art and preformation of things through
reason with experience.” Thus did the material construction of an object
demonstrate its rational principles.61
3.9. Vitruvius, De architectura libri dece / tr. de latino in vulgare, afficurati,

commentate: . . . da Caesare Caesariano [Como]: G. da Ponte, [1521], fol. 165r.
Machines for lifting. Courtesy Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.

Elsewhere, discussing machines, Cesariano wrote that one of the
meanings of the word “machination” is “the contriving, effecting,
and inventing of manual operations.” Further, he believed that “this
machination [is] intellective, since it is the cause of the formation of
crafted instruments, or of artists adept at explaining the effect of whatever
we want to complete.” So, he continued, “this ingenious mechanical
knowledge is necessary not only to the military arts, but to all liberal
demonstrations and operations, without which, almost no convenient
embellishment of the world would be possible for the use of ordinary life,
nor clothing and the countless number of other indispensable fabricated
things that are necessary for human use.”62 Cesariano praised the “noble
philosophers” who invented machines. They were to be admired for the
“understanding contemplation” that preceded their “great knowledge,”
and for “a burning desire to produce in sensible works with their own
hands, that which they have reasoned with the mind.”63 Thus did he
thoroughly integrate reason and knowledge with manual fabrication and
manipulation and the orderly demonstration of constructed things.
The publication of Cesariano’s translation and commentary did not go
smoothly. Two sponsors, Agostino Gallo and Aloisio Pirova, undertook
to print 1,300 copies, but disagreements soon arose between them and
Cesariano. The two men prevented Cesariano from completing his work.
When he attempted to leave Como (where the publication was to occur)
carrying his materials, he was intercepted, and his papers forcibly taken
from him. The editors engaged others to complete the commentary
for the last two chapters of book 9 and for all of book 10. Meanwhile,
Cesariano traveled to Milan to initiate a lawsuit. Despite these events,
he continued to work. A now-lost printed copy once in the Biblioteca
Melziana in Milan contained Cesariano’s own extensive marginal notes
and corrections. More surprising, modern scholars have discovered an
autograph manuscript in the National Library of Madrid, which contains
Cesariano’s commentaries to the end of book 9 and all of book 10, along
with thirty-six drawings. Cesariano worked in Milan as an engineer and
architect for many years after the publication. He won his lawsuit in 1528
and received a third of the value of the printed copies.64

From the early fifteenth century, humanist scholars and workshop-
trained artisans studied De architectura, copied and translated it,
produced editions and translations, discussed it in detail, made drawings
referring to its content, created independent treatises that derived
directly or indirectly from it, and studied it with reference to actual
artifacts in the material world. These men—Brunelleschi, Alberti,
Ghiberti, Filarete, Francesco di Giorgio, Sulpizio, Giocondo, and
Cesariano, among others—came from quite diverse backgrounds and
possessed very different skills. Yet workshop-trained, skilled artisans
became scholars and writers, and humanist scholars acquired skill. The
two groups had much to communicate with each other and drew closer
together. In the face of this development, the strict categories “craftsman”
and “scholar” become less and less apropos; such a distinction obscures
a more complicated reality. It should be noted that the Zilsel thesis, for
both its advocates and its detractors, depended on a strict identification
of the two separate categories, “craftsman” and “scholar.” This chapter
has shown that the terms, insofar as they present a strictly identifiable
dichotomy between two separate kinds of people, become distorting
lenses when viewed from the vantage point of the fifteenth century.
“Architecture” too can be a distorting lens if viewed strictly from a
modern point of view. Although the terms “architect” and “engineer”
and their cognates in Latin and various vernacular languages were very
much in use in the fifteenth and sixteenth century as they are today,
the terms in the earlier period refer to a different range of activity. An
“architect” today holds a professional degree involving an agreed-upon
course of study and practices with a license that guarantees certain types
of knowledge. An “engineer” likewise holds a degree and a license that
presupposes a different set of skills and knowledge. Today these terms refer
to professionals and a type of professionalization that was absent in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Not only were the terms “architect” and
“engineer” often interchangeable in these centuries (despite the growing
separate identity of military engineering), but architecture encompassed
a far broader range of activities than it does today. It possessed deep ties
to the investigation of artifacts, what today would be called archaeology.

It entailed investigative measurement and the study, design, use, and
invention of instrumentation, machines, and clocks. Further, architecture
tended to be anthropomorphic—the proportions of buildings reflected
human proportions that represented the macrocosm—the harmonies of
the cosmos itself. Thus was architecture firmly tied to the natural world,
including the entire cosmos. The Vitruvian man, appearing in numerous
treatises and in Vitruvian commentaries beyond Leonardo’s famous
exemplar, stands for just this connectedness of architecture to the world
in its human and cosmic dimensions.
The Vitruvian tradition, I suggest, served as a catalyst for comm-
unication and exchange between learning and skill. Especially in the
sixteenth century, the Vitruvian tradition itself continued to serve as a
locus of communication, study, and writing. In addition, in many other
arenas from arsenals to cities to mines and ore processing, substantive
communication developed among the skilled and the learned. Such
arenas, which I call “trading zones,” became extremely widespread and
culturally important in the sixteenth century, and it is to them that we
now turn.

chapter 4
Trading Zones
Arenas of Production and Exchange
The study of Vitruvius’s De architectura, the investigation of ancient

artifacts, and the creation of new forms in art and architecture, along with
the production of writings concerning these matters, created numerous
“trading zones.” The metaphor of the trading zone refers to arenas—
symbolic or actual places—where people from different backgrounds
who might hold quite different views and assumptions communicate in
substantive ways. Peter Galison, deriving the idea from anthropological
studies, developed the concept for the history of science and applied it to
studies of twentieth-century particle physics to explain how subspecialist
groups of physicists who took very different approaches to their subject
could communicate with each other and with engineers about how to
develop particle detectors and radar; and how experimenters, instrument
makers, and theorists could communicate without changing their diverse
theoretical orientations or practices, while maintaining different ideas
about what they were doing and what their results meant.1
“Trading zones” as I use the phrase here with reference to fifteenth-
and sixteenth-century Europe differs from Galison’s meaning in that he
deals with highly developed professional groups working within ever-
more-specialized subdisciplines. In contrast, the earlier period that is
my focus precedes the development of professionalization, especially
in areas such as architecture and engineering. There was a kind of
fluidity and openness to discussion concerning issues of design and
construction and problems in engineering in which a variety of people
from diverse backgrounds offered opinions, suggested alternatives,
conversed with one another, and produced relevant writings and
drawings. What passed for “expertise” could vary from one situation
to another and was far more diverse than has been the case since the
full development of professionalism (and its requisite educational and
licensing requirements) in modern times.2
94 | Trading Zones: Arenas of Production and Exchange

To demarcate “trading zones” more precisely, they must be
distinguished from patron/client relationships. In the latter, certainly
there is communication or exchange between two individuals, one with
greater power and resources than the other. The patron gives money,
employment, or some other benefit, while the client provides a service or
some kind of compensatory gift such as the dedication of a treatise.3 Yet
unlike in a trading zone, this type of communication does not involve
the reciprocal exchange of substantive knowledge or expertise. Likewise,
a trading zone is not identical to a gift exchange. In such exchanges, the
donor bestows a gift accompanied by the expectation (as Marcel Mauss
has shown) of something in return.4 Such gift items could involve a great
variety of objects, including books and natural history specimens. But,
in a trading zone, what is traded is substantive knowledge or expertise.
Early modern trading zones consisted of arenas in which the learned
taught the skilled, and the skilled taught the learned, and in which the
knowledge involved in each arena was valued by both kinds of “traders.”
(However, this statement must be qualified because increasingly the
boundaries between the two became less clear as the two types of peoples
acquired each other’s skills and practices.) This exchange often involved
direct one-to-one oral communication, but it could also involve indirect
forms of exchange such as writing a book, which is later read, or the
discussing, editing, translating, and commentating of the kind that
occurred in the Vitruvian tradition. What was required was that learned
individuals valued practical and technical knowledge, not only for what
it could achieve in the material world (such as palaces or fine jewelry)
but also as a form of knowledge. Similarly, artisan/practitioners valued
knowledge of classical texts, archaeology, and other kinds of knowledge
traditionally belonging to learned humanists who knew Latin and had
received a university education.
I suggest that the number and range of trading zones between the
learned and the skilled increased dramatically in fifteenth- and especially
sixteenth-century Europe. Within such trading zones, the people “trading”
tended to become more like one another and to lose the distinguishing
characteristics deriving from their particular backgrounds. Many
Trading Zones: Arenas of Production and Exchange | 95

activities and particular places became trading zones during these two
centuries. They include princely courts; print shops that saw extensive
collaboration among authors, printers, designers, engravers, woodcutters,
copy editors, patrons, and proofreaders; instrument makers’ shops; and
coffee shops.5 In such “trading zones,” both practitioners and learned
humanists moved closer together in terms of their empirical values, their
knowledge base, and their habitual practices having to do with reading
and writing, and with designing and fabricating or constructing physical
things. Trading zones became middle grounds where learned and skilled
individuals interacted and exchanged substantive knowledge as they
often also engaged in constructive and productive activities, created
innovative technologies, and wrote tracts, pamphlets, and books on the
topic at hand. In this chapter I focus on three trading zones—arsenals,
mines and metal-processing sites throughout Europe, and engineering
projects in late sixteenth-century Rome.
Arsenals: Sites of Innovation and Exchange
Arsenals proliferated throughout Europe in the fifteenth century and

expanded in the sixteenth. They became sites for carrying out multiple
tasks and for experimentation involving the manufacture of both guns
and gunpowder. Men at arsenals tested ballistics, trained gunners,
and designed and supervised the construction of fortifications. Some
arsenals, including the famed Venetian arsenal, functioned in addition
as dockyards in which ships were designed, constructed, and outfitted.
The varied activities at arsenals were complemented by a great expansion
of writings on artillery and ballistics, fortification, and shipbuilding and
other maritime activities.6
Testing, precision measurement, and experimentation became
necessary aspects of the wide-ranging development of artillery. A late
fourteenth-century record exists that shows that the city of Nuremberg
had test-fired guns for both the quality of the metal and accuracy before
delivering them to the duke of Bavaria. Such testing became standard

procedure in arsenals throughout the empire from the fifteenth century
through the seventeenth. Empirical practices of gun founding entailed
a performance evaluation that involved precision measurement with
regard to aim as well as a consideration of metallurgical materials and
work methods.7
The active experimentation that characterized the development of
artillery was evident in many parts of Europe. In the gun foundries
of Flanders and Brabant, for example, a series of experiments and
inventions brought about the improvement of gun carriages. Gun
founders developed a variety of devices that stabilized the gun on the
carriage, aided in handling the perennial problem of recoil, and facilitated
accurate aiming and firing. Ongoing experimentation also involved the
production of gunpowder. By the mid-fifteenth century, the process of
corning had been invented. Corned or granulated gunpowder replaced
powdered gunpowder, thereby reducing the risk of accidental firing.
Another innovation from the mid-fifteenth century created longer
cannon, which improved the trajectory of the shot. As the use of artillery
expanded, so also did the construction of arsenals. Along with these
developments, numerous writings on artillery and gunpowder appeared.8
One of the most important arsenals of Europe was created by the
Emperor Maximilian I (1459–1519) in Innsbruck in the Tyrol. Mines
in nearby Schwaz supplied copper to the gun foundries and silver to
pay for them. Large foundries in Innsbruck manufactured guns. Other
shops forged, rolled, and beat armor, and fabricated pikes and swords
for the infantry. Specialists in workshops in the nearby town of Absam
manufactured cannonballs. The great development of the Innsbruck
arsenal was in large part the work of the master founder Gregor Löffler
(ca. 1490–1564), the first master gunner to become an arms manufacturer.
Löffler transformed his foundry in Innsbruck from an artisanal craft
workshop to a large industrial plant, a change that met the needs of
increasing demand from the mid-sixteenth century.9
The Innsbruck arsenal actively experimented and pursued innovations
and improvements in the development of artillery, which included
ongoing efforts to standardize the caliber of guns. The arsenal also

4.1. Innsbruck Zeughaus, sixteenth century. Bildarchiv
der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna
(Cod 10816, fol. 2v–3r). Courtesy Bildarchiv der
Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek.
designed wheeled carriages for guns. Similar developments occurred in

the growing number of arsenals in other parts of Europe. The problem of
multiple calibers, which led to inefficiency and slowness of fire in battle,
was addressed in many arsenals, for example in England by Henry the
VIII (1491–1547) and in France. The French also worked successfully to
achieve greater gun mobility and, like the arsenal at Innsbruck, developed
a system in which different types of guns retained the same length barrel.
Spanish arsenals paid particular attention to light field artillery and small
arms. The Spaniards also developed their own unique gun barrels that
were widest in the center and double tapered toward the breach and
toward the muzzle.10
Georg Hartmann (1489–1564), a mathematician and instrument
maker, had studied theology and mathematics at the University of
Cologne. After a sojourn in Italy, he moved to Nuremberg in south
Germany and set up an instrument shop where he made globes,
astrolabes, sundials, and quadrants. In 1540 he invented a caliber scale,
a metal rule that showed the internal diameter of cannon and the
corresponding weights of stone, iron, and lead shot. This instrument

made it unnecessary to weigh the shot before loading guns, thus
simplifying their use in battle. In England in the same decade, the
gun founder Ralph Hogge of Buxted (fl. 1540s) succeeded in casting
guns in iron. During the sixteenth century, the kings of Spain were
offered and reviewed numerous military inventions—from rapid-firing
artillery to transportable bridges, to a portable mill for grinding grain in
a fortress under siege. Models, demonstrations, and tests of new devices
were commonplace. The crown often referred proposals to the Council
of War, which included military experts, for further consideration.
Monopolies were granted for devices deemed workable and useful,
the most important being an improved match for arquebuses (an early
muzzle-loaded firearm), and a new technique of careening, that is, the
cleaning and repairing of ship bottoms.11
Spanish ship construction in the late sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries centered on two basic types of ship. The galley, an oared ship
also powered by sails, had a shallow draft and was suitable for use in the
Mediterranean. The center for galley construction, especially during
the rule of Philip II (1527–1598), was the arsenal of Barcelona. Philip
II began the reform of Spanish naval power, and by 1574 had built
a fleet of 150 galleys. However, as Spain turned toward the Atlantic,
the high-velocity tidal currents, gales, and huge waves made the
galley unsuitable. A second type of ship, the galleon, came into use.
It was a large three-masted sailing ship suitable for Atlantic seafaring.
Either invented by the Venetians around 1520 or developed from the
Portuguese caravel (its precise origins are unclear), it was adopted
by Spain. Spain’s north coast became a center for building galleons.
Ongoing discussion, debate, and experiment focused on the best way
to build a galleon for stability, maneuverability, and ability to carry
sufficient cargo and guns.12
In England the ordnance office created during the reign of Henry
VIII was located in the Tower of London. Officers of the ordnance
included individuals responsible for technical matters. The surveyor
was a mathematical practitioner skilled in measurement and surveying,
who tested the quality and quantity of armaments and other goods

4.2. A Spanish galleon circa
1580, a type of three-masted ship
that came into use in the early
sixteenth century and was suitable
for Atlantic seafaring. From
Edward W. Hobbs, Sailing Ships
at a Glance: A Pictorial Record of
the Evolution of the Sailing Ship
(London: Architectural Press,
1925), 59.
when received. He also supervised the proof master’s testing of goods

and ammunition, and he surveyed the land and building work in the
construction of forts. The office also employed engineers who designed
and built forts, fire masters (in charge of gunpowder and explosives),
master gunners, and ordinary gunners. All needed some degree of
mathematical training. Some carried out skilled mathematical practices
in the ordnance office as they also disseminated their knowledge by
writing books on mathematical and mechanical topics. For example, in
the early seventeenth century, the surveyor of the ordnance, Jonas More
(1617–1679), pursued wide-ranging interests in practical mathematics
and wrote books on mathematics and fortification.13
The Venetian arsenal, key to the defense of the Venetian state and to
Venetian cultural pride, was famous throughout Europe. By the sixteenth
century it had become a vast, multifaceted enterprise. Occupying about
twenty hectares of land, the arsenal was surrounded by more than four
kilometers of walls and moats. It employed hundreds of artisans called
arsenalotti, skilled workers who received the only guaranteed wage in
Venice. The arsenal was organized to include three largely separate

spheres of production. The largest section was devoted to building,
repairing, and outfitting ships. Another department manufactured ropes
and cables, and a third was charged with the manufacture of arms and
gunpowder.14
From the early fifteenth century shipbuilders in the Venetian arsenal
experimented with a variety of ship designs, often in rivalry with one
another. Notable is a dynasty of Greek masters starting with Teodoro
Baxon or Bassanus (d. ca. 1407), who brought techniques to the arsenal
from the island of Rhodes. Baxon created a number of new designs,
including a light galley that he made wider and heavier than the
traditional vessel without sacrificing speed. The Venetian Senate, which
governed Venice and controlled the arsenal, encouraged Baxon as well
as native Venetian shipbuilders to produce innovative designs that were
seaworthy. After Baxon’s death the Venetian Senate attempted to lure
his nephew Nicolò Palopano from the island of Rhodes, and finally
succeeded in 1424. Palopano and Bernardo di Bernardo, the foreman of
the ship carpenters of the arsenal, began a long rivalry encouraged by the
Venetian Senate. It continued until Palopano’s death in 1437.15
It was within the ambience of the Venetian arsenal during the
time of Palopano that the earliest extant treatise on shipbuilding was
composed. Its author was Michael of Rhodes (d. 1445), a mariner who
created and illustrated his book for the most part in the 1430s. Although
he did not work directly for the arsenal, Michael wrote his book in its
shadow and was probably assisted, at least with information, by someone
inside. Presumably from the island of Rhodes, Michael hired on to a
Venetian galley in 1401 in the low position of oarsman, when he was
about sixteen years old. Thereafter, he worked his way up into various
officer positions in over forty voyages, which he carefully recorded in
the autobiographical service record that he wrote into his book. He gave
his position on board, as well as the names of the captain and noble
patrons of most of the ships on which he served.16 His book contains
an abacus or mathematical treatise of more than two hundred pages,
revealing that he was a good mathematician;17 a portolan (navigational
directions),18 a section on the zodiac with charming illustrations of the

4.3. Jacopo de’ Barbari (ca. 1460–ca. 1516), perspective plan of Venice. Museo
Correr, Venice, Italy. Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, N.Y.
4.4. Venetian arsenal. Detail of Jacopo de’ Barbari (ca. 1460–ca. 1516),
perspective plan of Venice. Museo Correr, Venice, Italy. Photo credit: Scala/Art
Resource, N.Y.

zodiacal signs;19 and much calendrical material concerning such matters
as the date of Easter and the dates of the full moon.20 He created his
own unique coat of arms (arrogating to himself a privilege allowed only
to nobles) with a mouse eating a cat perched on top, two turnips on the
side, and an M blazed in the middle.21 The shipbuilding section, which
treats the construction of three types of galley and two diverse round
ships, contains numerous drawings with measurements, such as those
related to the construction of the hull.22
Michael probably wrote his book as a way to impress the Venetian
nobles who hired officers for their ships for each yearly voyage. Although
he was a practitioner—a navigator and mariner—and although his book
concerned the practices with which he was involved, Michael’s book is
not a practical manual; rather it served different cultural uses within
wider social spheres within the culture of Venice and the Venetian
maritime enterprise. It is a book by a practitioner that, as Piero Falchetta
in particular has shown, is a step on the way to luxury navigational
books destined for the library shelves of elite merchants and oligarchs.
Indeed, Michael’s book is evidence of a trading zone. It shows his
learning of mathematics, astrology, calendrical matters, and shipbuilding
and that this knowledge went beyond the strictly practical aspects of
his occupation as a mariner. It seems to have been written with the
4.5. Coat of arms of Michael of Rhodes.

Pamela O. Long, David McGee, and
Alan M. Stahl, eds., The Book of Michael
of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Mariner’s
Manuscript, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2009), 1:329 (fol. 147b).
Courtesy MIT Press.

nonpractitioner in mind—elite Venetians who themselves would have
been impressed and interested in the practical and technical aspects of
shipbuilding and navigation.23
Michael in general was an autodidact whose great skill in mathematics
suggests that at some point he may have found instruction from one
of the many abacus masters who worked in Venice and elsewhere.
Probably a native Greek speaker, he wrote (or sometimes copied from
other texts) in Venetian. As he worked his way up from the very low
position of oarsman, he clearly labored to acquire graphic skill and
become knowledgeable in diverse areas. He eventually attained, for some
voyages, the highest officer position possible for nonnoble mariners;
officers in this position and in some of his other positions were permitted
to eat at the captain’s table. Whether he actually instructed the young
Venetian nobles and other travelers in mathematics, as David McGee has
speculated, is unknown.24
An intriguing coincidence puts Michael of Rhodes in the same convoy
as Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), perhaps the greatest philosopher of the
fifteenth century. Both men were in the same convoy of four ships sent
to fetch the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaiologos and his party of
seven hundred traveling from Constantinople to Venice in 1437. The
purpose of the trip was to bring the emperor to the Council of Ferrara-
4.6. Diagrams for measuring out the bow

and stern of a light galley. Pamela O. Long,
David McGee, and Alan M. Stahl, eds.,
The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-
Century Mariner’s Manuscript, 3 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 1:348
(fol. 158a). Courtesy MIT Press.

Florence, which many hoped would unite the Catholic and eastern
Orthodox churches.25 Whether the two men were on the same ship and,
if so, whether they conversed is unknown. Nevertheless, Cusanus later
wrote a treatise, Idiota: De sapientia, de mente, de staticis experimentis, in
which he advocated the knowledge of the “unlearned” (the Idiota, that
is, one without knowledge of Latin) and promoted the value of practical
mathematics. The first two of the four books take the form of a dialogue
between an unlearned man (the idiota) and an orator. The idiota shows
the way to wisdom by rejecting the learning of the orator based on the
authority of books. He suggests instead that wisdom can be found in
the streets and marketplaces where ordinary weighing and measuring
occur.26 An intriguing, but undocumented, possibility is that the idiota
in the dialogue could have been modeled on Michael of Rhodes.
Although Michael was an excellent mathematician, he was not a
shipbuilder and would not have been able to build a ship. He undoubtedly
obtained drawings and other information concerning ship construction
from someone, probably one of the Rhodians, working in the arsenal.
After the death of the Rhodian master shipbuilder Palopano in 1437,
shipbuilders in the Venetian arsenal through the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries continued to produce innovations with, as we have seen, the
active involvement of the Venetian Senate. Within this atmosphere of
self-conscious rivalry and experimentation, shipwrights created new
versions of great merchant galleys, an armed sailing ship called the barza
(a round ship designed for fighting pirates in the Mediterranean), and
light galleys. New ideas often required the presentation of models and
arguments in favor of the efficacy of the design over the objections of
detractors. This long tradition of naval construction and experimentation
at the arsenal provided the ideal setting for Vettor Fausto (after 1480–ca.
1546). Fausto was a humanist who won the position of public lecturer
of Greek eloquence in Venice and then embarked on a project to design
and then improve on the quinquereme, an oared ship with five rows of
oars that had been used by the Greeks in antiquity. Fausto had studied
both literature and mathematics and had produced a text and translation
of the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanics. The Venetian Senate reviewed his

model, and after much debate, provided him with the materials, space,
and personnel at the arsenal to build it. Launched in 1529 to great public
fanfare, Fausto’s quinquereme was taken to be a victory in the revival of
Greek science.27
Fausto eventually was given a permanent position in the arsenal, and
he continued to produce innovations as he directed the construction
of ships. Like Alberti, Fra Giocondo, Georg Hartmann, and many
others, he is a figure for whom it would not be possible to separate his
learning and his technical skill—he seems to have fully possessed both.
His influence was still in evidence at the end of the sixteenth century.
In 1593, one of his pupils, the shipwright Giovanni di Zaneto, applied
some of the principles of the quinquereme to the design of the galeazza,
a great galley adapted specifically for war. Zaneto’s goal was to make
this ship as mobile as light galleys. Among the individuals consulted
in this matter was the local professor of mathematics, Galileo Galilei
(1564–1642). Galileo concerned himself with other military matters as
well, such as his invention of a military compass, about which he also
wrote a small book. Jürgen Renn and Matteo Valleriani have argued
that early in his career Galileo was closely connected to the arsenal and
that the development of his thought was strongly influenced by the
practical problems, especially concerning the strength of materials, that
he confronted there.28
Although the book of Michael of Rhodes remained in manuscript form
until the twenty-first century, Venice in the sixteenth century functioned
as one of the great printing centers of Europe and produced large
numbers of practical and technical books, many on topics relevant to the
arsenal. They included books on artillery, fortification, and other aspects
of the military arts, such as the posthumously published Pirotechnia by
the metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480–ca. 1540), who headed the
armory at Rome in his last years. The Pirotechnia contained the first
detailed description of the casting of bronze cannon and also described
boring methods and explained how to produce standard calibers.29
Niccolò Tartaglia (1500–1557), a mathematics teacher from Brescia who
worked in Venice, produced two works on mechanics and mathematics

that investigated problems of ballistics: Nova scientia (1537) and Quesiti
et inventioni diverse (1546). Tartaglia uses the dialogue form in his tracts.
He depicts himself and others such as gunners discussing a variety of
questions with noble princes and dukes. The conversations between
gunners and nobles concern topics such as the mathematical trajectories
of cannonballs, the best angle for aiming the cannon barrel, and other
issues of ballistics. Tartaglia worked on both theoretical and practical
mathematical problems. He devised a gunner’s quadrant that could help
determine the correct position and angle for the efficacious firing of
cannon. He also made diagrams of ballistics and analyzed ways of aiming
accurately. He produced a table of calibers that mentions twenty-four
kinds of guns.30
Mines and Ore-Processing Sites
Mining in late medieval Europe was closely associated with arsenals

because guns, large and small, were made of metal—either iron or
bronze. Eventually cannonballs were made of iron rather than stone.
By the mid-fifteenth century the expanded manufacture of gunpowder
artillery and the proliferation of princely and noble mints for the
production of specie led to a scarcity of metals. Scarcity provided princely
and wealthy investors with motivation to take on the cost and technical
problems associated with digging deeper mines, and as a result, mining
changed radically in the mid-fifteenth century. Medieval mining had
usually constituted a local, often family-based, small-scale enterprise,
sometimes carried out seasonally as a supplement to agriculture, and it
was limited to shallow mines. The new capitalist mining enterprises, in
contrast, constituted large-scale operations that employed many workers
for wages. These operations profited in part by digging deeper mines and
solving the technical problems of ventilation, water removal, and ore
removal that accompanied greater depth. To support such endeavors,
princes and wealthy entrepreneurs invested money, buying shares in
mine operations. For about a hundred years, between 1450 and 1550,

they were richly rewarded by a central European mine boom with greatly
increased production of silver, copper, iron, tin, and lead.31
To solve the problem of removing water and extracting ore from
deep mines, miners employed large pumps and other machinery, often
powered by waterwheels. Types of water-removing machinery illustrated
in Georg Agricola’s famous De re metallica (1556) include piston pumps
made from hollowed-out tree trunks, endless bucket chains, and
reversible hydraulic wheels. The most productive mines were in central
Europe, in the Erzgebirge mountains, at Schwaz in the Tyrol, and in
Hungary. These locations were the sites of large-scale operations such
as excavation and processing of silver-bearing copper. Several thousand
workers, women as well as men, might work at a single mine; some
worked underground; some carried materials; some prepared charcoal;
and some were involved in separating, smelting, and refining ores.32
The largest ore-processing operations involved the production of silver
and copper after the discovery of new methods for processing silver-
bearing copper ores. Saigerhütten, as they were called in central Germany,
were constructed in Saxony, the Tyrol, and elsewhere. These large
plants included many hearths, furnaces, bellows, hammers, stamping
machinery (most driven by waterwheels), crucibles, and many kinds
of tools. Other metal-producing regions included Sweden and Alsace
for silver production and Italy for alum, discovered in Civita Vecchia in
1451 and essential in the textile industry for fixing dyes. Iron production
expanded rapidly in many areas of Europe in the sixteenth century. Iron
processing was transformed by the development of the blast furnace,
invented through a process of modifying the traditional bloomery
furnace. The bloomery furnace produced a spongy iron called a bloom
that was further worked by hammering at a forge. The blast furnace
achieved higher heats by means of larger bellows, higher chimneys, and
other modifications. Instead of the bloom, it produced molten iron that
poured into forms known as pigs. Blast furnaces required greater capital
investment and had to be operated continuously for effective production.
By the mid-sixteenth century, cast-iron production included products
such as cannonballs, pots and pans, and guns. Liège, France, became a

4.7. Piston pumps
for removing water
from a mine driven
by an overshot
waterwheel. Georg
Agricola, De re
metallica (Basel:
Froben, 1556), 147.
Reproduced by
permission of The
Huntington Library,
San Marino,
California.
site for a large-scale coal-mining operation. Tin was produced in large

quantities in the English counties of Cornwall and Devon.33
Technical innovation and mechanization were fundamental hallmarks
of early modern mining and ore processing. Mines were dug deeper;
galleries and shafts were improved; winches and hoists were installed for
ore removal; waterpower increasingly was employed to power pumps
and other water-removal equipment, with the more efficient overshot
wheel gradually replacing the undershot. Blast furnaces were improved
and increasingly used in iron production. Experiments in making alloys

and compound metals were ongoing and often entailed the modification
of existing techniques. In one innovation, lead was used to make
tinplate. Bismuth, discovered in the thirteenth century, was developed
commercially for the first time in the sixteenth when it was added to
lead and tin to make metal type. Printers’ type was later fabricated from
harder alloys of lead and antimony, which were also cheaper. Lead was
also used in a new technique to make tinplate.34
Perhaps the most important innovation came out of a series of
experiments that resulted in a technique of processing argentiferous
copper ores by alloying copper and lead to produce silver. The three-
stage process entailed the addition of lead. First the ore was melted at
high temperatures, creating an alloy of lead and argentiferous copper.
As the ore cooled, the different temperatures at which copper and lead
melt allowed separate crystallizations of copper and silver-bearing lead.
This product was then heated in a roasting oven, wherein the lead ore
gave off copper crystals. The copper was refined in a drying oven, and
the silver was separated from the lead in cupellation ovens. The elements
of this complex system developed from alchemical traditions and from
the expanding cumulative knowledge acquired from minting coins. It
is first documented in Nuremberg in the mid-fifteenth century. It is an
invention at the heart of the central European mine boom, producing
much higher yields of silver and thereby increasing the profitability of
silver and copper mining. It could not be adopted straightforwardly to
particular mining operations but often had to be modified to take into
account the specific qualities of various local ores. Such modifications
required ongoing experimentation. There is evidence that princes were
directly involved in initiating experiments by goldsmiths, metallurgists,
and others to adapt the process to local conditions in planning mines
and ore-processing operations.35
Mines constituted important early modern sites for technical
experimentation and innovation. Their cultural significance increased
with the proliferation of pamphlets and books on mining and metallurgy,
especially important from the early sixteenth century. Mine overseers,
assayers, and other practitioners, learned humanists, and occasionally

nobles wrote books ranging from small pamphlets to detailed and
lavishly illustrated treatises on mining, ore processing, assaying, mine
organization, and mine law. Of the printed books, an early Italian
treatise that became well known in German territories was Biringuccio’s
Pirotechnia, published posthumously in 1540. Far more extensive than
previous writings, the Pirotechnia treated ores and ore processing,
assaying, gold and silver refining, alloys, the art of casting, methods
of melting metals, small casting, procedures of working with fires,
gunpowder, and fireworks. Biringuccio’s extensive textual descriptions of
many of these processes were illustrated by woodcuts.36
Biringuccio was a practitioner and overseer, but other authors of
books on mining and metallurgy were university-trained humanists.
Calbus of Freiberg (d. 1523) wrote a small dialogue about mining and
ores (Bergbüchlein). The well-known humanist and physician Georg
Agricola (1494–1555) wrote a dialogue titled Bermanus (1530), in which
three interlocutors, two physicians, and a mine overseer (Bermanus)
discuss regional ores and those mentioned in ancient texts, as they
wander in the Erzegebirge. Agricola portrays Bermanus as combining
direct observation and experience with knowledge of ancient texts.
Agricola’s famous treatise on mining and metallurgy, De re metallica, was
published posthumously in 1556. The humanist Latin treatise contained a
defense of mining modeled after the ancient author Columella’s defense
of agriculture. It also contained rich detail concerning various mine and
metallurgical operations and spectacular illustrations of the machines,
furnaces, and various processes involved in mining and ore processing.
Lazarus Ercker (ca. 1530–1594), an assayer and overseer, wrote a number of
books on assaying and ore processing, the last of which was an expansive
treatise with illustrations in which the author emphasizes the importance
of his own practical experience. Most sixteenth-century mining and
metallurgical treatises were printed, but some, such as the Schwazer
Bergbuch, were written expressly as manuscript books. The copies of the
Schwazer Bergbuch are adorned with beautifully handpainted miniature
illustrations of various mine operations. It was written by Ludwig Lässl
(d. 1561), an official in the mine court of Schwaz in the Tyrol.37

4.8. Vannoccio Biringuccio, De la pirotechnia (Venice: Venurino Roffinello.
Ad instant a di Curtio Navo and Fratelli, 1540), fol. 83v. Making the barrel
and bore of a gun. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library,
San Marino, California.
Books on mining, ore processing, and metallurgy were written mostly

for princes and for a far-flung group of investors in mining, most of whom
did not possess mining skills or specialized expertise. The books set out
many technical processes in written form, rationalizing the disciplines
of mining and metallurgy, using and in part creating precise technical
vocabulary. Many of the treatises contained illustrations that provided
vivid visual detail of machines and operations. The books often described
with great clarity technical operations and equipment. Illustrations were
often essential for making complex machinery comprehensible, but they
also made the mechanical arts of mining and metallurgy dramatically
appealing to the unskilled.
The City—Rome in the Late Sixteenth Century
A very different kind of location that became a trading zone was the city.
Cities were expanding in the late sixteenth century, becoming sites of
building construction, hydraulic engineering projects, and other projects
of urbanization, such as the construction and paving of streets. Here I
discuss Rome in the late sixteenth century. As a capital city headed by

the pope, Rome cannot be called typical, although it did share some
characteristics with other expanding cities of the same period.
Rome in this period became a particularly important center of
communication between the skilled and the learned. The urban space
was in the process of being transformed by intense activity involving
building construction and urban projects—the construction and
renovation of churches and palaces; the repair and reconstruction of two
great aqueducts, the Acqua Vergine and the newly named Acqua Felice;
the creation of new fountains made possible by the greatly augmented
water supply; the widening and paving of streets; the redesign of squares;
the transport of obelisks from their ancient sites to new locations; and
numerous projects aimed at preventing the periodic disastrous flooding
of the Tiber River. The goal of such activities was the renewal and
transformation of the city.38
Especially after the reform of the Catholic Church undertaken after
the conclusion of the Council of Trent in the early 1560s, the popes
renewed their efforts to create a splendid city consonant with its role as
the capital of the Christian world. The intense activity of construction
and engineering, combined with the complex patronage situation
characteristic of Rome, not only transformed the urban landscape but
also brought about the production of numerous writings and images,
including cartographical images, related to the practical and engineering
concerns of the city. In many urban projects learned individuals
interacted with engineers and artisans in significant ways.39 This
extensive interchange between learned and technical cultures could have
happened only before the advent of professional engineering and outside
of the context of powerful guild control, in a city that was expending
construction and engineering efforts in many directions. Here I give two
examples of this interchange, in the area of flood control of the Tiber
River and in the transport of obelisks as part of the redesign of the streets
and plazas.
First, flood control. The Tiber River, which flowed through the center
of Rome and provided essential water and other resources to the city, was
prone to flooding. The disastrous flood of 1557 resulted in widespread

destruction to the city and to its infrastructures such as sewers and
bridges. It was neither the first nor the last flood of the unruly Tiber
River, but it was a particularly severe one. Because of its severity and also
perhaps because of the particular era in which it occurred, one result was
an unusual number of writings by both practitioners and learned men
that treated the problem of flooding from a variety of points of view and
suggested diverse solutions.40
The physician Andrea Bacci spent the years from 1558 to his death in
1600 concerned with the flooding of the Tiber. He wrote his first treatise
on the subject in 1558, and then continued to expand and revise it. There
is an enlarged revision of 1576; a manuscript tract dedicated to Clement
VIII, who became pope in 1592, written in the flyleaves of a copy of
the 1576 edition in the Vatican library; and there is another expanded
revision of 1599. Bacci had an ongoing interest in natural philosophical
issues such as the nature of water and the causes of flooding, which
included reflections on Aristotelian texts such as the Meteorology. He also
provides recommendations for flood prevention in Rome that amount
to what he considers a return to ancient Roman river management
practices—fortify and augment the banks of the river, lower the riverbed
to its ancient level, clean the drains and sewers, and appoint a caretaker
of the rivers.41
The military engineer Antonio Trevisi arrived in Rome in 1559, and
he soon brought out two publications that pertained to flooding. The
first, in 1560, treated the flooding of the Tiber River. Trevisi dedicated
it to Federico Borromeo (1535–1562), the nephew of Pope Pius IV (r.
1559–1565). He begins his treatise not with the issue at hand, but with a
description of the Aristotelian cosmos, the kinds of waters on earth, and
the nature of water itself. In these discussions he follows Aristotle and is
probably relying on Bacci’s treatise published two years before. Trevisi
does offer his plan to prevent flooding in one chapter of the treatise but
ends with a chapter that consists of a dialogue between a master and an
apprentice. Their topic of conversation is not flood control, but how to
raise ships from the bottom of a lake. From the mid-fifteenth century the
subject had been the focus of intense interest on the part of humanists

and engineers, especially because two ancient ships had been discovered
at the bottom of Lake Nemi to the south of Rome.42 Thus did Trevisi
present his engineering proposal surrounded by natural philosophical
learning, on the one hand, and a dialogue on a topic of humanist and
engineering interest, on the other.
Trevisi’s second publication was the republication of a map of Rome
originally created by a military engineer, Leonardo Bufalini (d. 1552),
and first published in 1551. Trevisi’s version, published in 1560, seems
to have been the same as Bufalini’s except that he added letters to the
bottom addressed to the Conservators of Rome (the three men who led
the communal government), to virtuous architects, to Carlo Borromeo
(1538–1584), brother of Federico and nephew to the pope, and to readers.
In the letters Trevisi urged his plan for flood control, which involved
construction of a huge trench starting below Ponte Milvio and running
through Prati (which was then relatively uninhabited) to a low-lying
area between the Vatican and Trastevere called the Valle Inferno. Some
aspects of Trevisi’s proposal were carried out by Pius IV in the early 1560s,
including the construction of large trenches around Castel San Angelo,
which in part remain.43
Other writings on Tiber River flooding included a small tract by the
magistrate Luca Peto (1512–1581). Peto was a jurist who wrote the revised
law code of Rome, published in 1580. He was also a magistrate who
aided the completion of the repair of an ancient aqueduct, the Acqua
Vergine, and he wrote a treatise on the weights and measures of the
4.9. Detail from Leonardo Bufalini, Roma (Rome: Antonio Blado, 1551 [1560]),
showing Leonardo Bufalini and (on the left) his surveying instruments. British
Library, Maps S.T.R. [1] © The British Library Board.

ancient Greeks and Romans. Concerning Tiber River flooding, he urged
that the number of arches on the bridges be reduced and that the mills
on the river be removed.44
As the examples of Trevisi, Bacci, and Peto show, writers on flooding
of the Tiber dealt with the history of flooding, the natural philosophical
issues of the nature of water, and the nature of flooding in diverse areas
and offered practical engineering solutions. Whether the authors were
practitioners like Trevisi or university-educated men like Bacci and Peto,
their writings reveal an interest in both technical and practical issues and
in history, natural philosophy, and other aspects of learned culture.
Now I turn to obelisks. The ancient Romans had transported num-
erous Egyptian obelisks to Rome after the Roman conquest of Egypt
following the Battle of Actium in the year 31 bce. In the sixteenth
century, these obelisks stood, or more often lay, in various locations
around the city. The most famous was the Vatican obelisk, which had
once stood in Nero’s circus and now stood in an obscure corner at the
side of St. Peter’s. Talk had gone on for decades about how to move
the giant monolith to the front of the basilica. The difficulty was that
the obelisk was immensely heavy at 361 tons and was also extremely
fragile. Numerous men put forward technical proposals for the project,
accompanied by extensive public discussion. These technical discussions
were accompanied by learned discussions of the history of obelisks and
the ancient Egyptians and the meaning of the hieroglyphs.45
One proposal was written by a fencing master from Milan, Camillo
Agrippa. Agrippa had worked on several engineering projects in Rome
and also wrote a tract on fencing, another on the generation of the winds
and other natural phenomena, a tract on new aids to navigation, and yet
another on the way to order troops in battle. These writings point to his
broad range of interests, both technical and philosophical. Agrippa also
wrote a tract suggesting a method of moving the Vatican obelisk. He was
granted an interview with Pope Gregory XIII (r. 1572–1585), which took
place in 1582 at the Vatican palace in the presence of the pope’s physician
Michele Mercati. Agrippa failed to convince the pope that his plan
would work. He then wrote a booklet to argue that it was a good plan.

His proposal had the obelisk encased in a protective armature made of
thick boards. A high tower would be constructed around the monument
consisting of forty timbers leaning toward the top and a platform would
be built on the base with rollers underneath. Levers made of oak beams
would be suspended half way up and the levers would lift the obelisk.
It would be moved on the platform upright and could be lowered onto
its new site. At the end of his proposal for moving the obelisk, Agrippa
placed a dialogue between two interlocutors on weight and the nature
of motion.46 That is, he moves from technical description to issues of
natural philosophy. A very different scheme published in a small booklet
4.10. Portrait
of Domenico
Fontana holding
an obelisk and
displaying a gold
chain indicating
that he had been
made Knight of
the Golden Spur.
Dominico Fontana,
Della trasportatione
dell’Obelisco Vatican
et delle fabriche
di nostro signore
Papa Sisto V . . .
libro primo (Rome:
Domenico Basa,
1590), frontispiece.
Reproduced by
permission of
The Huntington
Library, San
Marino, California.

4.11. Moving the Vatican obelisk. Dominico Fontana, Della
trasportatione dell’Obelisco Vatican et delle fabriche di nostro signore Papa
Sisto V . . . libro primo (Rome: Domenico Basa, 1590), 18r. Reproduced
by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

by one Francesco Masini proposed that canals be built from the site of
the obelisk to the new site and that the monument be floated from one
to the other.47
The architect who actually accomplished the move, Domenico
Fontana, wrote a book about the relocation of the obelisk (including
spectacular illustrations of the move) and his other architectural and
engineering projects. Fontana reports that there were five hundred
different proposals for the project. Whether or not this figure is accurate,
there must have been numerous proposals, which is an indication of the
huge public interest. We know the precise nature only of the final seven
proposals, including, in great detail, Fontana’s successful one. Fontana’s
method involved the creation of a “castello,” which combined the
function of scaffolding, protective armature, and crane. The obelisk was
encased in reed mats surrounded by protective planking held together by
iron chains. The whole was supported by huge timbers and maneuvered
by thick ropes arranged on pulley blocks and pulled by forty capstans,
each turned by three or four horses assisted by a number of men and two
supervisors. Precise coordination of the capstans was crucial. The obelisk
was first lowered, then rolled on a platform, and then raised. The castello
was taken apart after the lowering operation and reassembled for raising
it on its new pedestal in front of St. Peter’s.48
Before Fontana wrote his own account, Filippo Pigafetta wrote a
learned treatise on obelisks, which included their history, a discussion
about how to calculate their weight, and a plan for moving the Vatican
obelisk (which happened to be Fontana’s plan).49 In 1589 the pope’s
physician and author of a treatise on mineralogy and metals, Michele
Mercati, wrote a learned treatise on obelisks, their history, and the nature
of the hieroglyphs, which he believed to be a code for knowledge of the
entire natural world transmitted to the Egyptians by Moses. Mercati had
been in attendance when Agrippa had described his ideas to Pope Gregory
XIII. His own learned treatise also contained a detailed treatment of the
engineering project of moving the obelisk that had been carried out by
Domenico Fontana.50

When Fontana’s plan was actually carried out, all of Rome reportedly
came to watch. It was a great engineering spectacle that took place in
a solemn religious atmosphere. This successful engineering project was
executed by one engineer, Domenico Fontana, and one pope, Sixtus V,
but also by hundreds of workers laboring in a variety of capacities. It was
also tied to numerous writings, public discussions, and treatises written
by both practitioners and learned men.51
Trading Zones, Elite Individuals, and the Power of the State
Trading zones, as can be seen in the examples discussed here, were

closely tied to powerful states. Arsenals were essential to the military
defense (and often offensives) of virtually all European states; mining
and metallurgy fueled the economies of numerous German states and
underlay the political power of the German princes, especially, as well
as rulers of other states such as England and Sweden; urbanization in
the city of Rome specifically served to enhance the power of the popes.
Rulers and powerful elites often exerted strong influence over trading
zones and sometimes participated in them personally. Three examples
of individuals serve to illustrate this connection. The first is that of the
architect Palladio and his wealthy, elite patrons, who eventually became
friends and collaborators. The second is Alphonso d’Este of Ferrara
and his interest in pottery, and the third, Julius, duke of Braunschweig-
Wolfenbüttel (1528–1589) and his attention to mining.
Andrea di Pietro della Gondola (1508–1580), the son of a mason who
prepared and installed millstones, was apprenticed to a stonemason in his
hometown of Padua at the age of thirteen. He had broken his contract
by 1524, and traveled to the small, nearby city of Vicenza, where he
joined the guild of masons and stone carvers. Initially he was associated
with the workshop of Giovanni da Porlezza, an architect/builder, and
Girolamo Pittoni, a sculptor, who together owned the workshop that
produced most of the decorative sculpture of the city. About 1537 he met

Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550), a learned humanist, poet, and scholar
from a patrician Vicenzan family. They may have met on the worksite in
Cricoli outside Vicenza, where Trissino was rebuilding his villa. At the
reconstructed villa Trissino established a learned academy for the young
noblemen of Vicenza, also asking Andrea, whom he renamed Palladio,
to join. Palladio and Trissino developed a long and close friendship, and
they traveled to Rome and elsewhere together, studying and measuring
ancient buildings.52
Palladio’s friendship with Trissino would become paradigmatic for
other friendships that he made among noble patricians as well as others
in the Veneto, as he designed and built many villas in the countryside.
He met and became friends with the Paduan humanist and patron Alvise
Cornaro (1484–1566), who built a classical-style villa with gardens and
wrote on hydraulics, agriculture, and healthy living. Palladio may well
have been part of the intellectual circle that met at Sebastiano Serlio’s
house in Venice before 1541 when Serlio departed for Paris, and he
certainly studied and used Serlio’s writings. Most important was his
friendship with the learned humanist from a patrician family, Daniele
Barbaro (1514–1570), patriarch-elect of Aquileia, the Venetian ambassador
to England (1549–1550), and superintendent of the University of Padua’s
new botanical gardens. Barbaro’s writings include a treatise on perspective
for architects and artists. It is notable that he owned a collection of
astronomical instruments.53
The collaboration between Palladio and Barbaro began in the early
1550s. They went to Rome in 1554, and worked together on Barbaro’s
famous Vitruvian commentary of 1556 (with a second edition of 1567),
which was illustrated by Palladio. Palladio produced a body of written
work as well, most famously the Four Books of Architecture, published
in 1570, but also other writings, including books on the antiquities and
churches of Rome, and an edition of the commentaries of Julius Caesar.
Palladio was the one of the designers of the Villa Maser, built for Daniele
and his younger brother Marc’Antonio Barbaro (1518–1595), a Venetian
senator and ambassador to Constantinople. Marc’Antonio also was an
amateur sculptor and especially attended to the fountains and other

4.12. Daniele Barbaro, I dieci libri dell’architettura, tr. et commentate da
monsignor Barbaro (Venice: F. Marcolini, 1556), frontispiece, The Measurements
of Architecture. Courtesy Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.

hydraulic features of the garden at the Villa Maser. The other designer of
the villa was probably Daniele Barbaro himself.54
Palladio’s circle of friends and patrons, including Trissino and
Barbaro, was interested in fundamental ways in architecture and
building construction, as well as other technical practices. They were
also fascinated by Roman antiquities and ruins. Palladio gave friends like
Trissino and Barbaro skilled practical knowledge of building design and
construction. They gave him access to humanist learning and classical
studies.
Interest in hands-on practice on the part of nobles and patrician
elites can be found in many arenas beyond architecture and building
construction. A striking example—the duke of Ferrara’s work at
throwing pots—is reported by Cipriano Piccolpasso (1523/24–1579) in
his illustrated treatise on pottery. Piccolpasso was one of those midlevel
individuals who traversed the boundaries of practice and learning. He
was from a poor but noble family originally from Bologna. He was born
in Castel Durante (a town famous for its majolica ware) and acquired
a humanist education. He followed a varied career, most importantly
as proveditore in charge of supplies, building materials, and military
equipment at the fortress in Perugia, and he wrote a tract on the
towns and lands of Umbria, that contained accurately drawn maps of
numerous towns in the region. His younger brother Fabio worked as a
master in a majolica shop. In his treatise, Piccolpasso provides numerous
details on the kiln, potter’s wheel, clays, glazes, and pigments, and he
gives instructions on how to make majolica ware and pots of all kinds.
Piccolpasso reports that the duke of Ferrara, Alfonso d’Este, “took it as
his relaxation to have a pottery kiln made for himself in a place near his
palace; and thus that wise lord set out of his own accord to experiment
concerning these matters, through which he discovered the greatest
excellence of the potter’s art, yet without laying aside his royal thoughts
and his care for his people.” Piccolpasso assures us that the making of
earthen pots “will not diminish the greatness and worth of so excellent
a prince, nor will it obscure the brightness of this White [i.e., the white
glaze about to be described].”55

4.13. Cipriano Piccolpasso, Li tre libri dell’arte del vasaio . . . del Cipriano
Piccolpassi, fol. 38v. Preparing colors by pounding them in mortars. National
Art Library (Great Britain). Manuscript MSL/1861/7446. © Victoria and
Albert Museum, London.
Another territorial ruler, Julius, duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel,
aggressively encouraged the exploitation of mining and ore processing in
his territories. Most important were the iron mines and accompanying
manufacturing industries, especially those devoted to artillery. Julius
experimented extensively on issues concerning artillery and contributed
his own inventions. He also opened new mines, expanded old ones, and
made administrative reforms to prevent corruption. He sponsored and
in part personally wrote and illustrated a book on machines and on ships,
Instrumentenbuch, an illustrated treatise that exists in one manuscript
copy. It depicts machines for removing ores from mines and transporting

them. A second section treats ships, locks, water-lifting machines, and
other nautical apparatus.56
The ties of powerful elites to trading zones were extensive because
such zones promoted the economic interests of their states and territories
and were important for their personal political and social authority and
standing. Arsenals manufactured and maintained the equipment needed
for military operations; mines supplied metal for the guns made at the
arsenals and produced wealth and economic security; great villas and
palaces underscored the political and social authority and legitimation of
elite rulers and wealthy oligarchs. Alphonso d’Este, the duke of Ferrara,
may have loved the craft of pottery, but it is also true that his territories
produced a great quantity of the fine-painted majolica. His interest
was tied to the economic well-being of his state. The participation of
powerful elites in trading zones had the effect of helping legitimate
artisanal, hands-on methodologies and empirical knowledge in general.
The proliferation of trading zones between skilled artisans and learned

men (mostly learned humanists) in the sixteenth century helped influence
an approach to the investigation of the natural world that valued hands-
on experience, accurate measurement, and empirical approaches. This
chapter has treated several examples of arenas that became important
trading zones—arsenals, mines and ore-processing sites, and a capital
city. Such trading zones developed because guns and fortification, mines
and metals, and magnificent cities and palaces came to be central to the
economic power and political authority of princes and oligarchs.
The development of such trading zones was facilitated by the
proliferation of books on technological subjects, books written both by
those trained in workshops and those trained in universities. It was in
the context both of face-to-face conversations and investigations, and of
writing and reading such books, that the skilled acquired learning and
the learned acquired skill.
Galison has described trading zones as characterized by the development
of pidgin languages and, at times, full-scale Creole languages as a means
of communication between people from two different cultures.57 In the

sixteenth century, I suggest, issues of language were mediated by print
culture. Books facilitated the entrance of technical vocabulary, utilized
heretofore in the oral culture of artisans, into a literate culture of books.
Further, as scholastic Latin gave way to humanist forms, some artisans
struggled to learn Latin, and at the same time vernacular languages came
to be accepted as suitable for learned topics. Much translation occurred
as well, from Latin to vernacular and vice versa.
In the sixteenth century, the skilled unlearned acquired some learning,
and the unskilled learned acquired some skill. The two groups came
closer together. It is inaccurate to call individuals such as Michael of
Rhodes, Antonio Averlino called Filarete, Francesco di Giorgo, Leonardo
da Vinci, and Palladio only trained artisans. They were also writers,
readers, students—indeed scholars. Some learned men such as Giovanni
Giocondo and Camillo Agrippa were also highly skilled. These men
participated in trading zones as the world of learning adopted empirical
values and began to apply them to the investigation of nature.

conclusion
Empirical Values in a Transitional Age
This book has focused on the thesis that artisans influenced the
methodology of the new sciences that developed from the mid-sixteenth
century. Marxist scholars such as Hessen, Borkenau, Grossmann, and
Zilsel, as well as non-Marxists such as Robert Merton, argued that
artisans, or modes of production, or machines used by artisans exerted
such influence. The opponents of the thesis, some of them influential
figures in the early history of science such as Koyré and A. R. Hall,
articulated their opposition in terms of their belief that science was a
theoretical enterprise that progressed by advances in theory untouched
by the surrounding context. Often left unspoken was the anti-Marxism
that also influenced their positions.
Both those who argued for artisanal influence on the new sciences
and their opponents accepted without question the rigorously separate
categories of “craftsman” and “scholar” that divided makers from thinkers,
and in this acceptance both sides joined a long tradition. An important
source was Aristotle and Aristotelian traditions that distinguished
between epistemē (theoretical knowledge of the unchanging); praxis
(knowledge of contingent things requiring judgment); and technē
(making and thinking about making things). From the time of Aristotle,
such categories were hierarchically ranked: epistemē was at the highest
level and technē at the lowest. In the medieval period, the liberal arts—the
trivium (rhetoric, grammar, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic,
geometry, music, and astronomy)—were considered separate from and
superior to the lower mechanical arts.1 This separation was reinforced in
the medieval period by the circumstance that by virtue of background,
Conclusion: Empirical Values in a Transitional Age | 127

training, social status, languages used, and place of work, artisans and
learned people lived and worked in quite separate arenas.
This book has shown that through the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries practitioners acquired humanist learning and university-
educated humanists acquired skill. The two categories overlapped,
and the distinction became blurred in certain spheres and arenas. This
blurring of two separate realms did not occur universally through all
ranks of society, nor did it change the hierarchical social and political
structure of that society. Shoemakers and university professors still lived
and worked worlds apart in the late sixteenth century, as they had in
the twelfth.
The spheres of overlap and interchange between the skilled and the
learned did not occur everywhere, but the “trading zones” where they
did occur were many and often were situated close to elite individuals
and the essential interests of powerful rulers and states. This proximity
to centers of power meant that the empirical values promoted in these
trading zones gained general currency. In addition, in the two centuries
that are the focus of this book, these powerful rulers, princes, and
oligarchs caused the built landscape to be visibly transformed with
magnificent palaces, churches, public buildings, and redesigned cities.
Elites were increasingly surrounded by luxurious goods, ornaments
including painting and sculpture in the new style, and lavish apparel.
Trading zones framed many of the activities that brought about these
changes. As a result, the empirical values characteristic of artisanal culture
came to be disseminated widely, making them more readily available as
methodological resources for the investigation of the natural world.
My conclusions concerning the development of trading zones are
consonant with the interpretive framework of a recent collection of
studies, The Mindful Hand, in which two of the editors, Lissa Roberts
and Simon Schaffer, suggest that employing dichotomous categories such
as handwork/intellectual work, craftsman/scholar, and theory/practice
distorts the complicated mix of “knowledge, know-how, and technique”
(xvii) that characterized early modern European investigations of the
natural world.2 Studies in the volume pertaining to the late sixteenth
128 | Conclusion: Empirical Values in a Transitional Age

and seventeenth centuries indeed show in rich detail the complex
interrelationships of practical, technical, intellectual, and theoretical
practices as they pertain to comets and cannonballs, goldsmithing, and
seventeenth-century dioptrics.3 What I argue is that these close, complex
interrelationships were characteristic of the historical period of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Far from being ubiquitous through all
time (as Roberts and Schaffer seem to suggest), they are the result of the
specific historical developments described here.
By the late sixteenth century, a sharp category distinction between the
“scholar” and the “craftsman,” the separation of “theory” and “practice,”
and the distinct categories of “art” and “nature” became anachronistic
within certain contexts, despite the continued distinction between
the Latin universities and the apprenticeship system of craft training.
Developments that brought about the interchange and overlapping
of the cultures of learning and of practice include humanist studies
outside of the universities, the increasing use of vernacular literatures,
the interchange of learning and practice that went on in the courts, the
emergence of practitioners who wrote treatises explicating their expertise,
and of learned men and highborn rulers who acquired skill in practice;
the adoption of values of observation, fabrication, measurement, hands-
on practice by university-educated men; and the increased importance
and use of instruments, including measuring instruments.
These developments, taken together, point to a long-range cultural
change in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that led to transformative
changes in the ways in which people asked questions about and
investigated the natural world. It was not that only “superior artisans”
or their products, such as machines, or the organization of their labor
influenced the methodologies of the new sciences, as Zilsel and the
other Marxists would have it. Rather, it was the interaction of artisans
and humanists in trading zones bound by common interests and goals
(and the blurring of the differences between them) that brought about
profound changes in outlook, changes that favored empirical approaches
to investigating buildings, other artifacts, and eventually, the natural
world.4

The new sciences developed by the efforts of individuals such as
Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton emerged from the changing
culture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. This evolving culture
brought together the world of manufacture and construction and
the world of discourse about the cosmos and the natural world. Such
cultural change is evident in many different arenas and locales. It slowly
worked to break down and alter a discourse based on a discussion of
Aristotelian causes and text-based commentary. Questions beginning
with “why,” directed at answers involving Aristotelian causation, changed
to questions directed at investigations of individual events and objects
and their quantitative assessment.
The embrace of empirical values in the late sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries made particularly germane those medieval traditions that
possessed empirical characteristics. One of these was alchemy. Others
included practical mathematics, or “mixed mathematics,” such as
surveying or observational time-keeping. Medieval alchemical and other
empirical traditions may have become a focus of intense interest in the
seventeenth century (on the part of Robert Boyle, among others) because
they promulgated practices consonant with the empirical values that had
gained acceptance in the wider society. It is a distortion to set up an
“either/or” distinction—either regarding medieval traditions or changes
in the late sixteenth century—in discussing the development of the
new sciences. The positive reception of medieval empirical traditions in
the seventeenth century undoubtedly reflected the ethos of empiricism
that had become a widespread cultural characteristic of late sixteenth-
century Europe. What was new about the “new sciences” was not the
empirical values of precise measurement, careful observation, the use of
instruments, the value of personal experience, and experimentation per
se. Such values held wide currency in society at large by the late sixteenth
century. What was new was their thoroughgoing application to myriad
investigations of the natural world.
The cultural acceptance of empirical values was one of the important
foundations upon which the new sciences developed. Such changes by
no means brought about an egalitarian society in which craft workers and
130 | Conclusion: Empirical Values in a Transitional Age

learned people gained parity. In one sense, the adoption by experimental
philosophers of empirical values represents an appropriation.5
Nevertheless, it is also true that the kinds of practitioners who most
intensely participated in trading zones—architect/engineers, painters,
and sculptors, for example—saw their own practical disciplines develop
new institutional forms, such as the art academies in the seventeenth
century, and eventually the professionalization of architecture and
engineering in the eighteenth century. The transformation of painting and
sculpture into “fine arts” (that have nothing to do with the investigation
of the natural world) and the professionalization of architecture and
engineering and of “science” itself and its various subspecialties—all are
developments of the modern age. This is to underscore that the historical
period in which trading zones between workshop-trained artisans and
learned humanists flourished was a transitory period encompassing the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This particular type of trading zone
was distinctly a late medieval or “early modern” phenomenon, not a
modern one. Although transitory, it was highly significant as a key to
the development of new empirical and mathematical methodologies for
investigating the natural world.

Notes
Introduction
1 Thus I use the expression “artisan/practitioners” in a general way to include
all skilled workers and practitioners who learned through formal or informal
apprenticeships and oral instruction. Although this includes a vast array of
diverse skills and disciplines, it points perhaps to a common culture that values
handwork and hands-on skill and the practices that accompany them. This is
not to suggest that all types of artisan/practitioners exerted influence equally.
On the level of particular disciplines or crafts, some practitioners, such as
architect/engineers or navigators, as a group, were much more influential than,
say, shoemakers or bakers. The influence of artisanal culture as a whole and the
influence of particular groups are both important. To complicate matters, as I
suggest in this book, the distinctions and separations between certain groups
of “artisan/practitioners” and learned men lessened considerably or sometimes
disappeared during the two centuries treated here.
2 For a comprehensive introduction to numerous facets of this development,
see Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, eds., The Cambridge History of Science,
vol. 3: Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Shorter synthetic introductions include Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences:
European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2001); John Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins
of Modern Science, 3d ed. (Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and
Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996). For a comprehensive historiographic treatment, see H. Floris Cohen,
The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994); and I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985).
3 For a succinct, cogent discussion of the medieval universities and the
pedagogical techniques employed therein, see Edward Grant, The Foundations of
Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual
Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33–53.
4 A foundational study is Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). For Aristotelianism in the
medieval universities, see Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, 33–53, and see
Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002). See also Ann Blair, “Natural Philosophy,” in
The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Park and
Daston, 365–406, esp. 372–379, which emphasizes innovations in Aristotelian
natural philosophy during the Renaissance.
5 Although focusing on one city, Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of
Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), serves
as a comprehensive introduction. For the background, see the classic Robert
132 | Notes to Introduction

S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), and a recent synthesis, Steven A. Epstein,
An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000–1500 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also S. R. Epstein, Freedom and Growth:
The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300–1750 (New York: Routledge,
2000); and another classic, Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life:
Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, trans. Siân Reynolds, 3 vols.
(New York: Harper and Row, 1981).
6 See esp. Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish
American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2006); Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and
Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
2007); and Marìa M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the
New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
7 See the classic Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). In the history of science, a groundbreaking
work on the European courts was Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice
of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993).
8 See esp. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries
in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G.
Cochrane (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); Elizabeth
Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and
Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979); and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and
Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
9 See Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art,
Architecture, and the Family (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004);
and Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic
and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
10 See esp. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear
Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Martin Kemp, The Science of Art:
Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1990); and Kim H. Veltman and Kenneth D. Keele, Linear
Perspective and the Visual Dimensions of Science and Art (Munich: Deutscher
Kunstverlag, [?1986]). And see also the important study by Stuart Clark, Vanities
of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007).
11 William Donahue, “Astronomy,” in The Cambridge History of Science,
vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Park and Daston, 562–595. For Copernicus,
see especially Robert S. Westman, The Copernican Question: Prognostication,
Skepticism, and the Celestial Order (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2011). For Brahe, see esp. Victor E. Thoren, The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography
of Tycho Brahe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Notes to Introduction | 133

12 For a study that delineates the attitudes of numerous artisans, see Pamela
H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). See also James A. Bennett, “The
Mechanical Arts,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern
Science, ed. Park and Daston, 673–695.
13 See esp. Steven A. Epstein, Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
14 Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, 33-53. See also Grendler, Universities
of the Italian Renaissance, 267–313, for natural philosophy, and Pearl Kibre and
Nancy G. Siraisi, “The Institutional Setting: The Universities,” in Science in
the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978), 120–144.
15 For in-depth discussions and an introduction to the large literature on
humanism and the issues surrounding it, see esp. Christopher S. Celenza, The
Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Jill Kraye, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996); Albert Rabil, Jr., ed., Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms,
and Legacy, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); and
Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from
Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000). For humanism in the universities, see esp.
Grendler, Universities of the Italian Renaissance, 199–248.
16 For writings concerning the crafts by both skilled artisans and learned
men, 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). For Alberti, see Chapter 3 below.
Chapter 1
1 For a useful overview of the historiography of the scientific revolution as a
whole, see H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
2 Ibid., esp. 200–204 and 322–327.
3 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes
(London: Penguin Books, 1976), 1:452–453, 455–467. I am indebted to Gideon
Freudenthal, “Introductory Note,” Science in Context 1 (1987): 105–108, who
discusses Marx’s notion of manufacture.
4 My account is indebted to Tom Bottomore, “Austro-Marxism,” in A Dictionary
of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1983), 36–39. See also Bottomore and Patrick Goode, eds. and trans., Austro-
Marxism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), which includes a selection of texts by
Max Adler and others, translated into English, and an extensive introduction
by Bottomore. And see Christoph Butterwegge, Austromarxismus und Staat:
Politiktheorie und Praxis der österreichischen Sozialdemokratie zwischen den beiden
134 | Notes to Introduction

Weltkriegen (Marburg: Verlag Arbeit und Gesellschaft GmbH, 1991); Peter
Heintel, System und Ideologie: Der Austromarxismus im Spiegel der Philosophie
Max Adlers (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1967); Norbert Leser, Zwischen Reformismus
und Bolschewismus: Der Austromarxismus als Theorie und Praxis (Vienna: Europa
Verlag, 1968), esp. 511–561; Alfred Pfabigan, Max Adler: Eine politische Biographie
(Frankfurt: Campus, 1982); and Anson Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism:
From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927–1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983).
5 See Diederick Raven and Wolfgang Krohn, “Edgar Zilsel: His Life and
Work (1891–1944),” in Edgar Zilsel, The Social Origins of Modern Science, ed.
Diederick Raven, Wolfgang Krohn, and Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic, 2000), xix–lix, esp. xx–xxvi.
6 A concise summary of the Vienna Circle and its importance to the
present day is Thomas Uebel, “Vienna Circle,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/Vienna-circle/ 28 June 2006, rev.
18 September 2006 (accessed 15 April 2010). See also Friedrich Stadler, “What
Is the Vienna Circle? Some Methodological and Historiographical Answers,” in
The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism: Re-evaluation and Future Perspectives,
ed. Friedrich Stadler (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003), xi–xxiii; Friedrich
Stadler, “Aspects of the Social Background and Position of the Vienna Circle at
the University of Vienna,” in Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle: Austrian
Studies on Otto Neurath and the Vienna Circle, ed. Thomas E. Uebel (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic, 1991), 51–77. For the ties between the philosophy of science
developed in Vienna at this time (logical positivism, or logical empiricism) and
Marxist and socialist political thought and activism, see the astute analysis of
Don Howard, “Two Left Turns Make a Right: On the Curious Political Career
of North American Philosophy of Science at Midcentury,” in Logical Empiricism
in North America, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 18, ed. Gary
L. Hardcastle and Alan W. Richardson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003), 25–93, esp. 28–46.
7 For a history of Vienna during these years, see Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna:
Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991). For Zilsel’s life and thought, see esp. Johann Dvořak, Edgar Zilsel und
die Einheit der Erkenntnis (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1981), 33–40 (on education and
school reform), 51–63 (on Zilsel and the Vienna Circle), and 63–78 (on the unity
of knowledge); and see Raven and Krohn, “Edgar Zilsel: His Life and Work,”
xix–lix.
8 Believing that knowledge should be unified on the basis of scientific
principles, Zilsel was allied with Neurath’s campaign to create one unified
science through encyclopedism, although he was also critical of Neurath’s
approach. See also Stadler, “Aspects of the Social Background,” and Johann
Dvořak, “Otto Neurath and Adult Education: Unity of Science, Materialism
and Comprehensive Enlightenment,” both in Rediscovering the Forgotten
Vienna Circle, ed. Uebel, 51–77 and 265–274. And see Christian M. Götz and
Thomas Pankratz, “Edgar Zilsels Wirken im Rahmen der wiener Volksbildung
Notes to Chapter One | 135

und Lehrerfortbildung,” in Wien-Berlin-Prag: Der Aufstieg der wissenschaftlichen
Philosophie: Zentenarien: Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Edgar Zilsel, ed.
Rudolf Haller and Friedrich Stadler (Vienna: Verlag Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky,
1993), 467–473. For an introduction to the life and work of Neurath, see Nancy
Cartwright, Jordi Cat, Lola Fleck, and Thomas E. Uebel, Otto Neurath: Philosophy
between Science and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and
Otto Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, ed. Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen,
trans. Paul Foulkes and Marie Neurath (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1973); and Danilo
Zolo, Reflexive Epistemology: The Philosophical Legacy of Otto Neurath, trans. David
McKie (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989).
9 See Nicholas Jardine, “Essay Review: Zilsel’s Dilemma,” Annals of Science
60, no. 1 (2003): 85–94, who cogently explicates some of Zilsel’s intellectual
conflicts with other Viennese thinkers; and Monica Wulz, “Collective Cognitive
Processes around 1930: Edgar Zilsel’s Epistemology of Mass Phenomena,” http://
philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00004740/ (accessed 15 July 2010).
10 Edgar Zilsel, Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffes: Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte
der Antike und des Frühkapitalismus, preface by H. Maus (1926; Hildesheim: Olms
Verlag, 1972) . On Zilsel’s ideas concerning the “laws of history,” see Zilsel, “Physics
and the Problem of Historico-sociological Laws,” and “Appendix II: Laws of
Nature and Historical Laws,” both in Zilsel, Social Origins, 200–213 and 233–234.
See also Wolfgang Krohn and Diederick Raven, “The ‘Zilsel Thesis’ in the Context
of Edgar Zilsel’s Research Programme,” Social Studies of Science 30 (December
2000): 925–933; Diederick Raven, “Edgar Zilsel’s Research Programme: Unity of
Science as an Empirical Problem,” in Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism, ed.
Stadler, 225–234; and Wulz, “Collective Cognitive,” 6–8.
11 See Raven and Krohn, “Edgar Zilsel: His Life and Work,” xix–lix, esp.
xx–xxvi; Diederick Raven, “Edgar Zilsel in America,” in Logical Empiricism in
North America, ed. Hardcastle and Richardson, 129–148; and a moving personal
memoir by Paul Zilsel, “Portrait of My Father,” Shmate 1 (April/May 1982):
12–13.
12 See Dvořak, Edgar Zilsel; and Zilsel, Social Origins of Modern Science, which
includes reprints of his papers on the social origins of the scientific revolution as
well as a detailed biographical essay.
13 For Kolman’s life and thought, see Pavel Kovaly, “Arnošt Kolman: Portrait
of a Marxist-Leninist Philosopher,” Studies in Soviet Thought 12 (December
1972): 337–366; and see Loren R. Graham, “The Socio-political Roots of Boris
Hessen: Soviet Marxism and the History of Science,” Social Studies of Science
15 (November 1985): 705–722. Graham’s view of Hessen has been criticized by
Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin, “Classical Marxist Historiography
of Science: The Hessen-Grossmann Thesis,” in The Social and Economic Roots
of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann, ed.
Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin ([Dordrecht]: Springer, 2009),
1–38, esp. 32–33. For biographical information on Hessen, see Freudenthal and
McLaughlin, “Boris Hessen: In Lieu of a Biography,” in Social and Economic
Roots, 253–256. For an early translation of Hessen’s 1931 paper, and valuable
136 | Notes to Chapter One

introductory material, see Boris Hessen, “The Social and Economic Roots of
Newton’s ‘Principia,’” in Science at the Crossroads, 2d ed., introduction by P. G.
Werskey (London: Frank Cass, 1971), 149–212.
14 For further elaboration of the situation in the Soviet Union and for
communication between Russian scientists and the British, see C. A. J. Chilvers,
“The Dilemmas of Seditious Men: The Crowther-Hessen Correspondence in
the 1930s,” British Journal for the History of Science 36 (December 2003): 417–
435; and for the great influence of the Russian delegation on a group of British
scientists, see Mary Jo Nye, “Re-Reading Bernal: History of Science at the
Crossroads in 20th-Century Britain,” in Aurora Torealis: Studies in the History of
Science and Ideas in Honor of Tore Fränsmyr, ed. Marco Beretta, Karl Grandin,
and Svante Lindquist (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications,
2008), 235–258; and Jonathan Rée, Proletarian Philosophers: Problems in Socialist
Culture in Britain, 1900–1940 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). See also A. K.
Mayer, “Fatal Mutilations: Educationism and the British Background to the
1931 International Congress for the History of Science and Technology,” History
of Science 40 (December 2002): 445–472, which reconstructs the British context
of the meeting as influenced by “educationism,” referring to the importance of
pedagogical concerns and moral education as central to the developing history
of science discipline; and see Vidar Enebakk, “Lilley Revisited: Or Science and
Society in the Twentieth Century,” British Journal for the History of Science 42
(December 2009): 563–593.
15 Boris Hessen, “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” in
Social and Economic Roots, ed. Freudenthal and McLaughlin, 41–101, esp. 41–61.
16 Ibid., esp. 73–82. See also Freudenthal, “Introductory Note,” 106–107.
17 See Franz Borkenau, “Zur Soziologie des mechanistischen Weltbildes,”
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1, no. 3 (1932): 311–355, translated by Richard W.
Hadden as “The Sociology of the Mechanistic World-Picture,” Science in Context
1 (March 1987): 109–127; and Franz Borkenau, Der Übergang vom feudalen zum
bürgerlichen Weltbild: Studien zur Geschichte der Philosophie der Manufakturperiode
(1934; New York: Arno Press, 1975). For Borkenau’s life, see esp. Richard Lowenthal,
“In Memoriam Franz Borkenau,” Der Monat 9 (July 1957): 57–60; Valeria E.
Russo, “Profilo di Franz Borkenau,” Rivista di Filosofia 72 (June 1981): 291–316;
John E. Tashjean, “Borkenau: The Rediscovery of a Thinker,” Partisan Review 51,
no. 2 (1984): 289–300; and Tashjean, “Franz Borkenau: A Study of His Social
and Political Ideas” (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1962). For Borkenau’s
position in the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, see Martin Jay, The
Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social
Research, 1923–1950 (London: Heinemann, 1973), 16–18. A study of another aspect
of Borkenau’s wide-ranging work is William David Jones, “Toward a Theory of
Totalitarianism: Franz Borkenau’s Pareto,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (July–
September 1992): 455–466.
18 For the institute in the 1920s, see esp. Jay, Dialectical Imagination, esp. 3–40;
Paul Kluke, Die Stiftungsuniversität Frankfurt am Main, 1914–1932 (Frankfurt
am Main: Verlag von Waldemar Kramer, 1972), 486–513; Russo, “Profilo di

Franz Borkenau,” esp. 294–299; and Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its
History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge:,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 9–126. For the intellectual changes of the institute as it
transferred to New York, see Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual
Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986),
esp. 28–61.
19 For Lukács’s influence on Borkenau, see especially Tashjean, “Borkenau,”
294–295. For Lukács’s concept of reification, see Georg Lukács, History and Class
Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, [1971]), 83–211. See also Gajo Petrović, “Reification,” in
Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Bottomore, 411–413.
20 Yet as John Tashjean and others have pointed out, Borkenau did not
posit a simple one-to-one relationship between the labor of manufacture and
the scientific world view. Rather, using Lukács’s notion of reification, Borkenau
elaborated how the forms of labor and the view of the world as a machine, or the
mechanistic world picture, developed and reciprocally reinforced one another in
the seventeenth century, mediated by the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie. See
Borkenau, “Sociology of the Mechanistic World-Picture”; Tashjean, “Borkenau,”
294–297; and Jay, Dialectical Imagination, 16.
21 Note that Grossmann was spelled Grossman in Poland and North America.
See Rick Kuhn, Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2007), 1–72 (early years) and 164–167 (for his work
on a critique of Borkenau instigated by Horkheimer); Valeria E. Russo, “Henryk
Grossmann and Franz Borkenau: A Bio-Bibliography,” Science in Context 1
(March 1987): 181–191; Jay, Dialectical Imagination, 16–19; Jay, Permanent Exiles,
29–30; and Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from
Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 196–219,
for the disenchantment of the younger scholars led by Horkheimer and the
institute’s changed direction. For a detailed overview of these early years of the
institute, see Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, 9–126, and 41–52 for Horkheimer’s
background.
22 Henryk Grossmann, “Die gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen der mechanistischen
Philosophie und die Manufaktur,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 4, no. 2 (1935):
161–231; translated by Gabriella Shalit, ed. Gideon Freudenthal, as “The Social
Foundations of Mechanistic Philosophy and Manufacture,” Science in Context 1
(March 1987): 109–180. The essay is reprinted along with other pertinent writings
by Grossmann in Freudenthal and McLaughlin, eds., Social and Economic Roots,
103–156.
23 Grossmann, “Social Foundations,” esp. 153–156 and 159–170, citation on
154–155.
24 Gideon Freudenthal has pointed out that Grossmann emphasized
this aspect of Hessen’s paper in a review published in 1938. Freudenthal,
“Introductory Note,” 105–107. See also Gideon Freudenthal, “Towards a Social
History of Newtonian Mechanics: Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann
Revisited,” in Scientific Knowledge Socialized, ed. Imre Hronszky, Márta Fehér,

and Balázs Dajka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1988), 193–212. Freudenthal
and McLaughlin, “Classical Marxist Historiography,” esp. 1–20, emphasize the
similarity of Grossmann’s and Hessen’s ideas.
25 For the institute’s trajectory from Frankfurt to New York, see especially
Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, 127–148; and see Russo, “Henryk Grossmann and
Franz Borkenau,” 184; Jay, Dialectical Imagination, esp. 29–40; and Jay, Permanent
Exiles, 28–61.
26 In an article on the genesis of the concept of physical law, Zilsel notes
that the work of the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) and
especially that of Franz Borkenau is “not quite reliable.” Edgar Zilsel, “The
Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law,” Philosophical Review 51 (May 1942):
246 n. 2. For Zilsel’s relationship to the Frankfurt School and the influence of
the Borkenau/Grossmann controversy, see Hans-Joachim Dahms, “Edgar Zilsels
Projekt ‘The Social Roots of Science’ und seine Beziehungen zur Frankfurter
Schule,” in Wien-Berlin-Prag, 474–500.
27 Edgar Zilsel, “Problems of Empiricism,” in The Development of Rationalism
and Empiricism, vol. 2, no. 8, International Encyclopedia of United Science, ed.
Otto Neurath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 53–94; Edgar Zilsel,
“The Sociological Roots of Science,” American Journal of Sociology 47 (January
1942): 544–562; his “The Origins of Gilbert’s Scientific Method,” Journal of the
History of Ideas 2 (January 1941): 1–32; and “The Genesis of the Concept of
Scientific Progress,” Journal of the History of Ideas 6 (June 1945): 325–349. The
above essays are reprinted in Zilsel, Social Origins of Modern Science, 171–199,
7–21, and 128–168 (the latter, the original essay, of which the published “Genesis
of the Concept of Scientific Progress” was a highly edited version). Zilsel’s
English-language articles have been collected in a German translation that
includes a useful introduction and biographical notes. Edgar Zilsel, Die sozialen
Ursprünge der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft, ed. and trans. Wolfgang Krohn,
biobibliographical notes by Jörn Behrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1976).
28 See Leonardo Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen
Literatur, vol. 1: Die Literatur der Technik und der angewandten Wissenschaften
von Mittelalter bis zur Renaissance (Heidelberg: Winter, 1919), vol. 2: Bildung und
Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Renaissance in Italien (Leipzig: Olschki, 1922), and
vol. 3: Galilei und seine Zeit (Halle: Niemeyer, 1927); and see Cohen, Scientific
Revolution, esp. 322–326 (citation on 322).
29 Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-
Century England (1938; [Atlantic Highlands], N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978).
See also I. Bernard Cohen, “The Publication of Science, Technology and
Society: Circumstances and Consequences”; Thomas F. Gieryn, “Distancing
Science from Religion in Seventeenth-Century England”; and Steven Shapin,
“Understanding the Merton Thesis”—all in “Symposium on the Fiftieth
Anniversary of Science, Technology and Society,” Isis 79 (December 1988): 571–
604. For an insightful discussion of Sarton and the shaping of the history of
science in the United States, see Michael Aaron Dennis, “Historiography of

Science: An American Perspective,” in Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. John
Krige and Dominique Pestre (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1997), 1–26.
30 Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957); and esp. Alexandre Koyré, Études
galiléennes (Paris: Hermann, 1966). For a recent discussion of Koyré’s influence,
see esp. Anna-K. Mayer, “Setting Up a Discipline, II: British History of Science
and ‘The End of Ideology,’ 1931–1948,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of
Science 35 (March 2004): 41–72, esp. 61–62.
31 Mayer, “Setting Up a Discipline,” shows the explicit anti-Marxian context
of these ideas and the ways that they shaped the discipline of the history of
science in Britain in the postwar years.
32 A. Rupert Hall, “The Scholar and the Craftsman in the Scientific
Revolution,” in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 3–23, citations on 3 and 18; and
Hall, “Merton Revisited, or Science and Society in the Seventeenth Century,”
History of Science: An Annual Review of Literature, Reseach and Teaching, vol. 2,
edited by A.C. Crombie and M. A. Hoskin (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons,
1963), 1–16. See also Mayer, “Setting Up a Discipline,” 55–65, who discusses
Koyré’s influence on Hall and shows that Hall’s separation of science from the
crafts was decisive in his being hired for the position in the history of science
offered for the first time at Cambridge. And see Enebakk, “Lilley Revisited,”who
discusses Hall’s opposition, not only to Merton in the United States, but also to
the ideas of the Marxist mathematician and historian of science, Samuel Lilley
(1914–1987).
33 Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History
of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), citation on ix. See
also Peter Dear, “What Is the History of Science the History Of? Early Modern
Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science,” Isis 96 (September 2005): 390–406.
34 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1970). See also Paul Hoyningen-Huene,
Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science, trans.
Alexander T. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 265; and see
Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, esp. 13–27. Somewhat ironically, since his
views had the effect of disrupting “unity of science,” Kuhn’s book was published
as the last volume of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, the
Vienna Circle series founded by Otto Neurath and others and published by the
University of Chicago Press. See esp. George A. Reisch, “Planning Science: Otto
Neurath and the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science,” British Journal for
the History of Science 27 (June 1994): 153–175; and Ian Hacking, “The Disunities
of the Sciences,” and Jordi Cat, Nancy Cartwright, and Hasok Chang, “Otto
Neurath: Politics and the Unity of Science,” both in The Disunity of Science:
Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, ed. Peter Galison and David J. Stump (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 37–74 and 347–369, respectively.
35 For a concise summary, see esp. Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, esp.
1–46; and see Massimo Mazzotti, ed., Knowledge as Social Order: Rethinking

the Sociology of Barry Barnes (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2008). For a useful
discussion of the French context, see Geof Bowker and Bruno Latour, “A
Booming Discipline Short of Discipline: (Social) Studies of Science in France,”
Social Studies of Science 17 (November 1987): 715–748.
36 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).
37 Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era,
trans. Salvator Attanasio, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper and Row,
1970; James A. Bennett, “The Mechanics’ Philosophy and the Mechanical
Philosophy,” History of Science 24 (March 1986): 1–28; William Eamon, Science
and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Pamela O. Long, Openness,
Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to
the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and Pamela
H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution
38 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture
in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); William
R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle,
and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002); and Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire
39 Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science
in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007);
Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance
Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Alix Cooper, Inventing
the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Antonio Barrera-Osorio,
Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific
Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); and see Pamela O. Long,
“Plants and Animals in History: The Study of Nature in Renaissance and Early
Modern Europe,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38 (Spring 2008):
313–323.
40 Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the
Scientific Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007).
Chapter 2
1 For the mechanical arts, see James A. Bennett, “The Mechanical Arts,” in
The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine
Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
673–695; Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity
through the Thirteenth Century, Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society, n.s. 80, pt. 1, 1990. For ars and technē, 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), 16–45.
And see Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” in Paul Oskar
Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York:
Harper and Row, 1965), 163–227.
2 Lorraine Daston, “The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe,”
Configurations 6 (Spring 1998): 149–172.
3 Heinrich von Staden, “Physis and Technē in Greek Medicine,” and Mark J.
Schiefsky, “Art and Nature in Ancient Mechanics,” both in The Artificial and the
Natural: An Evolving Polarity, ed. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R.
Newman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 21–49 and 67–108, respectively.
4 Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye in The Complete Works
of Aristotle, rev. ed., ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1984), 1:329 (Aristotle, Physics, 2.1 [192b9–19]).
5 Ibid., 340 (Aristotle, Physics, 191a15–18). It should be underscored that
Aristotle did not have a generalized view of nature referring to the natural world
and its laws or principles. When he spoke of nature, he usually meant the nature
of a thing. See esp. Roger French, Ancient Natural History: Histories of Nature
(London: Routledge, 1994), esp. 15–18.
6 William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect
Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 34–114; and William R.
Newman, “Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages,” Isis 80
(September 1989): 423–445. For a recent discussion, see Leah DeVun, Prophecy,
Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2009), esp. 141–148.
7 Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 238–289; William R. Newman and
Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate
of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and
Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical
Quest (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
8 Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire
9 Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in
Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
10 Despite agreement concerning its importance, the precise role of
alchemy and many details concerning its characteristics and influence are still
matters of contentious debate. See esp. Ursula Klein, “Essay Review: Styles of
Experimentation and Alchemical Matter Theory in the Scientific Revolution”
Metascience 16, no. 2 (2007): 247–256; Brian Vickers, “The ‘New Historiography’
and the Limits of Alchemy,” Annals of Science 65 (January 2008): 127–156;
and William R. Newman, “Alchemical Atoms or Artisanal ‘Building Blocks’?
A Response to Klein,” and “Brian Vickers on Alchemy and the Occult: A
Response,” Perspectives on Science 17, no. 2 (2009): 212–231 and 17, no. 4 (2009):
482–506, respectively.
142 | Notes to Chapter Two

11 For a succinct summary of the issue, see David C. Lindberg, “Experiment
and Experimental Science,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed.
Robert E. Bjork, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2:604–605;
and see Peter Dear, “The Meanings of Experience,” in The Cambridge History
of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine
Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 106–131. For the
discipline of medicine, see Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, “Per una ricerca
su experimentum-experimenta: Reflessione epistemologica e tradizione medica
(secoli XIII–XV),” in Presenza del lessico greco e latino nelle lingue contemporanee,
ed. Pietro Janni and Innocenzo Mazzini (Macerata: Università degli Studi di
Macerata, 1990), 9–49.
12 Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 238–289, citation on 238.
13 Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the
Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Dear,
“Meanings of Experience”; and Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders
and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
14 Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 238–242. The word “scientist” was
invented in the nineteenth century by William Whewell. See Sydney Ross,
“Scientist: The Story of a Word,” Annals of Science 18 (June 1962): 65–85.
15 See esp. G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason, and Experience: Studies in the
Origin and Development of Greek Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979); and G. E. R. Lloyd, “Experiment in Early Greek Philosophy and
Medicine,” in G. E. R Lloyd, Methods and Problems of Greek Science: Selected
Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 70-99. It should be
noted that a group of philosophers insists on the primacy of Aristotle’s rationality
over his empiricism. See especially Michael Frede, “Aristotle’s Rationalism,” in
Rationality in Greek Thought, ed. Michael Frede and Gisela Striker (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 157–173; and Joseph Owens, “The Universality
of the Sensible in the Aristotelian Noetic,” in Aristotle: The Collected Papers of
Joseph Owens, ed. John R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1981), 59–73. I thank the philosopher Jean de Groot for discussing this view of
Aristotle’s rationalism in the light of her own work in progress, descriptively
titled “Aristotle’s Empiricism: Experience, Mechanics, and Natural Powers.”
16 Dear, Discipline and Experience, 24–25. For the complexity of the air-pump
and the difficulty others had in building it and replicating Boyle’s experiments,
see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes,
Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1985), esp. 225–282.
17 Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific
Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. 100–106 (Palissy).
See also Pamela H. Smith and Tonny Beentjes, “Nature and Art, Making
and Knowing: Reconstructing Sixteenth-Century Life-Casting Techniques,”
Renaissance Quarterly 63 (Spring 2010): 128–179
18 See esp. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 255–301; Paula
Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early
Notes to Chapter Two | 143

Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Martin Kemp,
“Wrought by No Artist’s Hand: The Natural, the Artificial, the Exotic, and the
Scientific in Some Artifacts from the Renaissance,” in Reframing the Renaissance:
Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450-1650, ed. Claire Farago (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 177–196; Pamela O. Long, “Objects
of Art/Objects of Nature: Visual Representation and the Representation 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),
63–82. For Arcimboldo, see esp. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Arcimboldo:
Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009), esp. 43–68 and 115–166, who has much to say concerning
the art/nature relationship in Arcimboldo’s work and surrounding culture..
19 Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York:
Doubleday, 1996).
20 For the maker’s knowledge tradition, see esp. Antonio Pérez-Ramos,
Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1988); and for the view of the pre-Baconian development of such a
tradition, see, for example, Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan
London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
2007); and Long, Openness, Secrecy, esp. 102–142 and 175–250.
21 The attribution to Francesco Colonna is supported by an acrostic formed
by the elaborately decorated initial letters of the thirty-eight chapters of the book
which reads: poliam frater franciscus columna peramavit (“Brother Francesco
Colonna greatly loved Polia”). Arguments for various other authors, including
Leon Battista Alberti, have not been convincing. My discussion is based on
the following edition and commentary: Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili, ed. Giovanni Pozzi and Lucia A. Ciapponi, 2 vols. (Padua: Editrice
Antenore, 1964). Translations are my own. For Francesco Colonna’s life and
a discussion of the work, see Maria T. Casella and Giovanni Pozzi, Francesco
Colonna: Biografia e opera, 2 vols. (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1959). For the
(unconvincing) claim that the author was Alberti, see Liane Lefaivre, Leon
Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-Cognizing the Architectural
Body in the Early Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). See
also Helen Barolini, Aldus and His Dream Book (New York: Italica Press, 1992);
and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco
Colonna: The Erotic Nature of Architectural Meaning,” in Paper Palaces: The
Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise, ed. Vaughan Hart with Peter
Hicks (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 86–104; For an English
translation see Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of
Love in a Dream, trans. Joscelyn Godwin (New York: Thames and Hudson,
1999).
22 Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, ed. Pozzi and Ciapponi, 1:19–28,
citation on 28, “intestine, nervi et ossa, vene, musculi et pulpamento.”
23 Ibid., 1: 34: “vedevsi quasi il tremulare degli sui pulpamenti, et più vivo
che fincto”; and 53–95.

24 Ibid., 1: 112–123, citation on 116: “omni pianta era di purgatissimo vitro,
egregiamente oltra quello che se pole imaginare et credere, intopiati buxi cum
gli stirpi d’oro.”
25 For Francesco, see esp. Richard J. Betts, “On the Chronology of Francesco
di Giorgio’s Treatises: New Evidence from an Unpublished Manuscript,” Journal
of the Society of Architectural Historians 36 (March 1977): 3–14; Francesco Paolo
Fiore and Manfredo Tafuri, eds., Francesco di Giorgio architetto (Milan: Electa,
1993); Gustina Scaglia, Francesco di Giorgio: Checklist and History of Manuscripts
and Drawings in Autographs and Copies from ca. 1470 to 1687 and Renewed Copies
(1764–1839) (Bethlehem, Penn.: Lehigh University Press; and Cranbury, N.J.:
Associated University Presses, 1992); and Ralph Toledano, Francesco di Giorgio
Martini: Pittore e scultor. (Milan: Electa, 1987).
26 Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte
militare, 2 vols., ed. Corrado Maltese, transcription by Livia Maltese Degrassi
(Milan: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 1967). See also Massimo Mussini, Il Trattato
di Francesco di Giorgio Martini e Leonardo: Il Codice Estense restituito
(Parma: Università di Parma, 1991), 82–88, 108–109, 121–124, nn. 75–79; and
Massimo Mussini, “Un frammento del Trattato di Francesco di Giorgio Martini
nell’archivio di G. Venturi alla Biblioteca Municipale di Reggio Emilia,” in
Prima di Leonardo: Cultura delle macchine a Siena nel Rinascimento, ed. Paolo
Galluzzi (Milan: Electa, 1991), 81–92.
27 Francesco di Giorgio, Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militare, vol.
1, which includes a facsimile of the sheets containing drawings of T. For a brief
but masterly description of the manuscripts and the scholarship surrounding
their origins and dating, see Massimo Mussini, “La trattatistica di Francesco di
Giorgio: un problema critico aperto,” in Francesco di Giorgio architetto, ed.
Fiore and Tafuri, 358–379. See also Scaglia, Francesco di Giorgio: Checklist,
154–159 (no. 62, for Manuscript L) and 189–191 (no. 80, for Manuscript T),
although it should be noted that Scaglia’s claim that the two manuscripts were
created at the monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore is without foundation
in evidence and has been cogently disputed by Mussini. A further discussion
of the complex issue of the chronology of Francesco’s writings and a summary
of the scholarship is in Marco Biffi, “Introduzione,” in Francesco di Giorgio
Martini, La traduzione del “De architectura” di Vitruvio dal ms. II.I.141 della
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2002),
xi–cxvii, esp. xxx–lxvii.
28 My discussion of Francesco di Giorgio and Leonardo is derived from
Pamela O. Long, “Picturing the Machine: Francesco di Giorgio and Leonardo
da Vinci in the 1490s,” in Picturing Machines, 1400–1700, ed. Wolfgang Lefèvre
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 117–141.
29 Francesco di Giorgio, Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militare
, vol. 1, fols. 33v–40r of facsimile pages, tav. 62–75. See also Vittorio Marchis,
“Nuove dimensioni per l’energia: le macchine di Francesco di Giorgio,” in
Prima di Leonardo, ed. Galluzzi, 113–120.

30 Francesco di Giorgio, Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militare, vol.
1, xi–xlviii. See also Mussini “La trattatistica di Francesco di Giorgio,” 358–359.
31 Francesco di Giorgio, Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militare,
2:500–501; and fol. 95 (tav. 325). The Magliabechiano manuscript contains several
other works by Francesco as well—the Trattato II is on fols. 1–102; Francesco’s
translation of Vitruvius on fols. 103–192; and a collection of drawings of military
machines and fortification designs is on fols. 193–244v.
32 Francesco di Giorgio, Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militare,
2:492–504, citation on 492, “Si ancora di alquanti pistrini metterò la figura acciò
che, per quelli, delli altri simili da li lettori possino essere trovati.”
33 Ibid., 2:500–501 and fol. 95 (tav. 325).
34 Ibid.
35 See Paolo Galluzzi, “The Career of a Technologist,” and Salvatore Di
Pasquale, “Leonardo, Brunelleschi and the Machinery of the Construction Site,”
both In Leonardo da Vinci: Engineer and Architect, ed. Paolo Galluzzi (Montreal:
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1987), 41–109, esp. 48–63, for Leonardo’s
early career in Florence, and 163–181, for Leonardo’s study of Brunelleschi’s
construction machinery. An excellent general introduction to Leonardo’s work
as a whole and to some of the vast scholarship is Martin Kemp, Leonardo da
Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
36 Leonardo da Vinci, The Madrid Codices, 5 vols., trans. Ladislao Reti (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 3:11–21, for the history of the volumes. And see
Robert Zwijnenberg, The Writings and Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci: Order
and Chaos in Early Modern Thought, trans. Caroline A. van Eck (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 83–111.
37 Leonardo, Madrid Codices, trans. Reti, 1:15v and 4:39–40.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 1:15v and 4:41–42.
40 Ibid.
41 See esp. Cesare S. Maffioli, La via delle acque (1500–1700): Appropriazione
delle arti e trasformazione delle matematiche (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2010), for
the transformation of the mathematical arts that led to the mechanics of Galileo
and his successors.
42 Sebastiano Serlio, Regole generali di architectura sopra le cinque maniere
de gliedifici, cioe, thoscano, dorico, ionico, corinthio, et composito, con gliessempi
dell’antiquita, che per la magior parte concordano con la dottrina di Vitruvio
(Venice: F. Marcolini da Forli, 1537); and Sebastiano Serlio, On Architecture,
vol. 1: Books I–V of “Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva,” and vol. 2: Books VI
and VII of “Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva” with “Castrametation of the
Romans” and “The Extraordinary Book of Doors” by Sebastiano Serlio, trans. with
introduction and commentary by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996, 2001), an English translation with extensive
commentary and bibliography. For Serlio’s life and the complex publishing
history of his writings, the fundamental work remains William Bell Dinsmoor,

“The Literary Remains of Sebastiano Serlio,” Art Bulletin 24 (March 1942):
55–91. More recent scholarship includes Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, “On
Sebastiano Serlio: Decorum and the Art of Architectural Invention,” in Paper
Palaces, ed. Hart with Hicks, 140–157; Myra Nan Rosenfeld, “From Bologna to
Venice and Paris: The Evolution and Publication of Sebastiano Serlio’s Books
I and II, On Geometry and On Perspective, for Architects,” in The Treatise on
Perspective: Published and Unpublished, ed. Lyle Massey (Washington, D.C.:
National Gallery of Art, 2003), 280–321; and Alina A. Payne, The Architectural
Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 113–143.
43 Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Basil: [Ex
officina I. Oporini, 1543]). For English translations, see Andreas Vesalius, On
the Fabric of the Human Body: A Translation of “De humani corporis fabrica
libri septem,” 7 vols., trans. William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman
(San Francisco: Norman, 1998–2009); and Andreas Vesalius, De humani
corporis fabrica, trans. Daniel H. Garrison and Malcolm Hast (in progress),
http://vesalius.northwestern.edu (accessed December 2010). For Vesalius,
see esp. Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance
Learning, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. 39–53 and 201–213; Andrew Cunningham, The
Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of Anatomical Projects of the Ancients
(Aldershot, Eng.: Scolar Press, 1997), 88–142; C. D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius
of Brussels, 1514–1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964); Vivian
Nutton, “Introduction,” Vesalius, De humanis corporis fabrica, ed. Garrison
and Hast, http://vesalius.northwestern.edu; Katharine Park, Secrets of Women:
Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone
Books, 2006), 207–259; Nancy G. Siraisi, “Vesalius and Human Diversity in
De humani corporis fabrica,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57
(1994): 60–88; Nancy G. Siraisi, “Vesalius and the Reading of Galen’s Teleology,”
Renaissance Quarterly 50 (Spring 1997): 1–37; and Andrew Wear, “Medicine in
Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700,” in The Western Medical Tradition, 800 BC to
AD 1800, ed. Lawrence C. Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter,
and Andrew Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 207–361,
esp. 273–279.
44 Serlio, On Architecture, ed. Hart and Hicks, 1:xix.
45 Andreas Vesalius, Tabulae anatomicae sex (Venice: B. Vitalis, 1538). For
Calcar, see Bert W. Meijer, “Calcar, Jan Steven [Johannes Stephanus] van,”
The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, 34 vols. (New York: Grove Dictionaries,
1996), 5: 415-416. For the complex issue of the identity of the illustrators, see
esp. Martin Kemp, “A Drawing for the Fabrica; and Some Thoughts upon the
Vesalius Muscle-Men,” Medical History 14 (July 1970): 277–288; Michelangelo
Muraro, “Tiziano e le anatomie del Vesalio,” in Tiziano e Venezia: Convegno
Internazionale di Studi, Venezia, 1976 (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1980), 307–316;
David Rosand and Michelangelo Muraro, Titian and the Venetian Woodcut
(Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1976–1977), 211–

235; and Patricia Simons and Monique Kornell, “Annibal Caro’s After-Dinner
Speech (1536) and the Question of Titian as Vesalius’s Illustrator,” Renaissance
Quarterly 61 (Winter 2008): 1069–1097.
46 The association with the Belvedere statue was first made by H. W. Janson,
“Titian’s Laocoon Caricature and the Vesalian-Galenist Controversy,” Art
Bulletin 28 (March 1946): 51. For a detailed discussion, see esp. Glenn Harcourt,
“Andreas Vesalius and the Anatomy of Antique Sculpture,” Representations
17 (Winter 1987): 28–61. For Polycletus and Vesalius, see esp. Jackie Pigeaud,
“Formes et normes dans le ‘De fabrica’ de Vésale,” in Le corps à la Renaissance,
Actes du XXXe Colloque de Tours, 1987, ed. Jean Céard, Marie Madeleine
Fontaine, and Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990),
399–421; and Catrien Santing, “Andreas Vesalius’s De Fabrica corporis humana,
Depiction of the Human Model in Word and Image,” in Body and Embodiment
in Netherlandish Art, Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 2007–2008, vol.
58, ed. Ann-Sophie Lehmann and Herman Roodenburg (Zwolle: Waanders,
2008), 59–85. For a broader context, see Martin Kemp, “‘The Mark of Truth’:
Looking and Learning in Some Anatomical Illustrations from the Renaissance
and Eighteenth Century,” in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and
Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 85–121.
47 Serlio, On Architecture, trans. Hart and Hicks, 1:266–269.
48 Ibid., 1:286–287.
49 Vesalius, On the Fabric, bk. 1: Bones and Cartilages, trans. Richardson and
Carman, “To King Charles V,” xlvii–xlix.
50 For an insightful discussion of this image and its meaning in relationship
to the famous frontispiece in which Vesalius is depicted dissecting the corpse
of a woman in a crowded anatomy hall, see Park, Secrets of Women, esp. 249–
255. For Vesalius’s interest in both natural philosophy, or scientia, and hands-
on observation and investigation through dissection, or ars, see esp. Siraisi,
“Vesalius and Human Diversity,” 65–67.
51 Vesalius, On the Fabric, bk. 1: Bones and Cartilages, trans. Richardson and
Carman, “To King Charles V,” liv–lv.
52 Ibid., lvi. The reference is to Galen, Procedures, 2.1.
53 Ibid., 1:1 and 8.
54 Ibid., 1:4.
Chapter 3
1 Vitruvius, On Architecture, ed. and trans. Frank Granger, 2 vols., Loeb
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931–1934). For a more recent
English translation of the text and commentary with helpful drawings, see
Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas
Noble Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3–5, for the
dating of the treatise. I have used Rowland’s translation. A recent study and
interpretation that places the work within the context of the Roman empire is

Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). An erudite synthetic account of Vitruvian influence
and architectural writing in the Renaissance is Alina A. Payne, The Architectural
Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
2 Vitruvius, On Architecture, ed. and trans. Granger, 1:4–5 (De arch. 1. pref.
2–3); and see Vitruvius, Ten Books, ed. Rowland and Howe, 21 and 135.
3 Vitruvius, On Architecture, ed. and trans. Granger, 1:151–247 (De arch. bks.
3 and 4—temples), 1:249–317 (De arch. bk. 5—public buildings), 2:1–59 (De
arch. bk. 6—private buildings), 1:34–67 (De arch. 1.4.–1.6—siting and layout of
cities), 1:88–149 (De arch. 2.3–10—building materials), 2:80–87 (De arch. 7.1—
flooring), 2:88–97 (De arch. 7.3—ceilings), 2:96–129 (De arch. 7.4–14—painting
and colors), and 2:86–101 (De arch. 7.2–7.4—stucco).
4 Ibid, 2:131–193 (De arch. bk. 8); and see Louis Callebat, ed. and trans.,
Vitruve De L’architecture, Livre VIII (Paris: Société D’Édition “Les Belle Lettres,”
1973).
5 Vitruvius, On Architecture, ed. and trans. Granger , 2:195–267 (De arch.
bk. 9); and see Jean Soubiran, ed. and trans., Vitruve De L’architecture, Livre IX
(Paris: Société D’Édition “Les Belle Lettres,” 1969).
6 Vitruvius, On Architecture, ed. and trans. Granger, 2:269–369 (De arch.
bk. 10); and see Louis Callebat and Philippe Fleury, eds. and trans., Vitruve De
L’architecture, Livre X (Paris: Société D’Édition “Les Belle Lettres,” 1986).
5); Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Rowland and Howe, 75–76, 249.
8 Vitruvius, On Architecture, ed. and trans. Granger, 1:6–7 (De arch. 1.1.1–2.);
Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Rowland and Howe, 21 (translation
slightly altered).
9 Vitruvius, On Architecture, ed. and trans. Granger, 1:8–25 (De arch. 1.1.4–18);
Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Rowland and Howe, 22–24, 135–143.
4.); Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Rowland and Howe, 75, 249.
11 Vitruvius, On Architecture, ed. and trans. Granger, 1:76–85 (De arch. 2.1.1–
7); Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Rowland and Howe, 34–35, 175. For
the anthropological tradition in antiquity see Thomas Cole, Democritus and
the Sources of Greek Anthropology (Chapel Hill, N.C.: American Philological
Association, 1967).
12 Eugene Dwyer, Peter Kidson, and Pier Nicola Pagliara, “Vitruvius,” in
The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., ed. Jane Turner (New York: Grove Dictionaries,
1996), 32:632–643. For Faventinus, see Hugh Plommer, Vitruvius and Later
Roman Building Manuals (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973). For
the medieval manuscript tradition, see especially Carol H. Krinsky, “Seventy-
Eight Vitruvius Manuscripts,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
30 (1967): 36–70.
13 Pamela O. Long, “The Contribution of Architectural Writers to a ‘Scientific’
Outlook in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” Journal of Medieval and
Renaissance Studies 15 (Fall 1985): 265–298.
Notes to Chapter Three | 149
14 For a popular but detailed account, see Paul Robert Walker, The Feud That
Sparked the Renaissance: How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Changed the Art World
(New York: HarperCollins, 2002).
15 Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi, introduction, notes,
and critical text by Howard Saalman and trans. Catherine Enggass (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970), 36–41. The dome of the
Florentine Cathedral has engendered much debate concerning Brunelleschi’s
methods. See esp. Howard Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi: The Cupola of Santa
Maria del Fiore (London: Zwemmer, 1980); and Barry Jones, Andrea Sereni,
and Massimo Ricci, “Building Brunelleschi’s Dome: A Practical Methodology
Verified by Experiment,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69
(March 2010): 39–61. A good popular account is Ross King, Brunelleschi’s Dome:
How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture (New York: Penguin Books,
2001).
16 Manetti, Life of Brunelleschi, 50–53, citation on 50–51.
17 Ibid., 52–53.
18 Ibid., 54–55.
19 Howard Saalman, introduction to Manetti, Life of Brunelleschi, 26, 30.
20 For Brunelleschi’s machines, including his patented ship, see esp. Christine
Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics, and
Eloquence, 1400–1470 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19–39; Frank D.
Prager and Gustina Scaglia, Brunelleschi: Studies of His Technology and Inventions
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970); and for the long-lived influence
of Brunelleschi’s machines in Florence, Salvatore di Pasquale, “Leonardo,
Brunelleschi, and the Machinery of the Construction Site,” in Leonardo da
Vinci: Engineer and Architect, ed. Paolo Galluzzi (Montreal: Montreal Museum
of Fine Arts, 1987), 163–181.
21 See Martin Kemp, introduction to Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting,
trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 1–29, on which this
summary is based. See also Stefano Borsi, Leon Battista Alberi e Roma (Florence:
Edizioni Polistampa, 2003; Stefano Borsi, Leon Battista Alberti e l’antichità
Romana (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2004); Joan Gadol, Leon Battista
Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1969), a still useful account especially for Alberti’s technical achievements;
Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); and Paul Davies and David Hemsoll,
“Alberti, Leon Battista,” Dictionary of Art, ed. Turner, 1:555–569, for a summary
of Alberti’s treatises on painting, sculpture, and architecture, and a succinct
treatment of his architectural works. See also Alessandro Gambuti, “Nuove
ricerche sugli Elementa Picturae,” and Luigi Vagnetti, “Considerazioni sui Ludi
Matematici,” both in Studi e Documenti di Architettura, no. 1 (December 1972):
131–172 and 173–259, respectively. And see Mario Carpo and Francesco Furlan,
eds., Leon Battista Alberti’s Delineation of the City of Rome (Descriptio urbis
Romae), critical edition by Jean-Yves Boriaud and Francesco Furlan, trans. Peter
Hicks (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007).
150 | Notes to Chapter Three

22 See Carroll William Westfall, In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas
V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447–55 (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974).
23 Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism, 98–132.
24 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, introduction and notes by Martin
Kemp, trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin Books, 1991); and Rocco
Sinisgalli, Il nuovo “De Pictore” di Leon Battista Alberti / The New “De pictore” of
Leon Battista Alberti (Rome: Edizioni Kappa, 2006).
25 “From Angelo Poliziano to his Patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Greetings,” in
Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Josph Rykwert,
Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 1. For
the Latin text with Italian translation, see Leon Battista Alberti, L’architettura
[De re Aedificatoria], 2 vols., ed. and trans. Giovanni Orlandi, introduction and
notes by Paolo Portoghesi (Milan: Edizioni il Polifilo,1966).
26 Alberti, On the Art of Building, 3.
27 Ibid., 3–4.
28 Ibid., 33–60 (bk. 2), 61–91 (bk. 3), 92–116 (bk. 4, public works), 117–153
(bk. 5, private works), 164–175 (tools and machines), 344–349 (roads, highways,
canals).
29 See Walker, Feud That Sparked the Renaissance.
30 For a succinct discussion, see Manfred Wundram, “(1) Lorenzo (di Cione)
Ghiberti,” Dictionary of Art, ed. Turner, 12:536–545; and for the third set of
doors, Gary M. Radke, ed. The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance
Masterpiece (Atlanta: High Art Museum; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 2007). The relief portrait of Brunelleschi was made by Lazzaro Cavalcanti
known as Buggiano circa 1446.
31 Lorenzo Ghiberti, I commentarii (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze,
II, I, 333), ed. Lorenzo Bartoli (Florence: Giunti Gruppo Editoriale, 1998).
And see Wundram, “(1) Lorenzo (di Cione) Ghiberti,” 12:543; and Richard
Krautheimer, in collaboration with Trude Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti,
3d ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 306–314.
32 Ghiberti, I commentarii, ed. Bartoli, 46 (II.1.), “Conviene che ‘llo scultore,
etiamdio el picture, sia amaestrato in tutte queste arti liberali.”
33 Ibid., 46 (II.2), “L’iscultura et pictura è scientia di più discipline et di varii
amaestramenti ornata, la quale di tutte l’altre arti è somma invention. È fabricata
con certa meditatione, la quale si compie per materia et ragionamenti”; 47 (II.3),
“Et così gli scultori et pictori gli quali sanza lettere aviano conteso come se colle
mani avessino exercitato, non poterono compiere né finire come se avessono
avuta l’autorità per le fatiche; et quelli i quali per ragionamenti et con lettere sole
si veggono conquisi ànno l’ombra, ma non la cosa.” For a useful discussion, see
Krautheimer with Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti, 306–309.
34 Filarete, Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, 2 vols., ed. and trans. John R.
Spencer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965); and Antonio Averlino
detto il Filarete, Trattato di Architectura, 2 vols., ed. Anna Maria Finoli and

Liliana Grassi (Milan: Edizioni il Polifilo, 1972), LXXXIX (for his attempted
theft of the head of St. John the Baptist). For a recent group of substantial
studies, see the special issue of Arte Lombarda—Berthold Hub, ed., Architettura
e umanismo: Nuovi studi su Filarete, Arte Lombarda, n.s. 155, 1 (2009).
35 Although the original manuscript is lost, several copies survive, of
which, scholars agree, the best is Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale,
Magliabechianus II, I, 140.
36 See Maria Beltramini, “Francesco Filelfo e il Filarete: Nuovi contributi alla
storia dell’amicizia fra il letterato e l’architetto nella Milano sforzesca,”Annali
della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, ser. 4, no.
1 (1996): 119–125; S. Lang, “Sforzinda, Filarete and Filelfo,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 391–397; and John Onians, “Alberti
and Filarete: A Study in Their Sources,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 34 (1971): 96–114, who documents both the friendship and the
relevant Greek sources for Filarete’s ideal city. A recent astute essay on Filelfo
that provides essential further bibliography and stresses the growing esteem for
practical knowledge in Italian princely courts is Margaret Meserve, “Nestor
Denied: Francesco Filelfo’s Advice to Princes on the Crusade against the Turks,”
in Expertise: Practical Knowledge and the Early Modern State, ed. Eric H. Ash,
Osiris, 2d ser. 25 (2010): 47–65.
37 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, trans. Spencer, 1:6; Filarete, Trattato, ed.
Finoli and Grassi, 1:13, “sanno mettere una pietra in calcina e imbrattarla di malta,
pare loro essere ottimi maestri d’architettura”; “nè misure, nè proporzioni.”
38 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, trans. Spencer, 1:16–17; Filarete, Trattato,
ed. Finoli and Grassi, 1:41–44, “la volentà e le misure.”
39 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, trans. Spencer, 1:198; Filarete, Trattato, ed.
Finoli and Grassi, 2:428, “di più esercizii intendere, e anche coll’opera della mano
dimostrarle, con ragioni di misure e di proporzioni e di qualità, e conveniente”;
“di sua mano, non saprà mai mostrare, nè dare a ‘ntendere cosa che stia bene.”
40 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, trans. Spencer, 1:228; Filarete, Trattato,
ed. Finoli and Grassi, 2:495, “Benchè non abbino tanta dignità”; “qui stia di più
esercizii di mano e anche di persona”; “cioè di begli vasi.”
41 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, trans. Spencer, 1:231; Filarete, Trattato,
ed. Finoli and Grassi, 2:500–501, “Questa sarà una cosa che sempre durerà e
una cosa che mai non fu fatta”; “non è se none in lettere questa comodità”; “gli
altri esercizii sono di necessità e degni, che ne viene buono maestro, et ancora
gl’ingegni non sono tutti a una cosa iguali. Si che è si vuole che ogni ingegno
si possa esercitare.” For a detailed recent study of the social and educational
ideas in the treatise and their relationship to Milanese society and culture, see
Hubertus Günther, “Society in Filarete’s Libro architettonico between Realism,
Ideal, Science Fiction and Utopia,” in Architettura e umanismo, ed. Hub, 56–80.
42 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, trans. Spencer, 1:245–255; Filarete, Trattato,
ed. Finoli and Grassi, 2:531–562, “E in questo luogo di quante arti o esercizii
che fare si possino in questo luogo sono tutte” (545); “erano onorati della loro

acquistata virtù” (547); “erano giudicati buoni maestri, se fusse stato giovane e
fusse che in questo luogo avesse imparato, come i dottori s’adottoravano” (552).
43 Marco Biffi, “Introduzione,” in Francesco di Giorgio Martini, La
traduzione del ‘De architectura’ di Vitruvio dal ms. II.I.141 della Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale di Firenze ([Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2002), XI–
CXVII, esp. LXIV (prepared for own use), LXXXVIII–LXXXIX (language),
and CV (improvement over the years). See also Massimo Mussini, Francesco di
Giorgio e Vitruvio: Le traduzioni del “De Architectura” nei codici Zichy, Spencer
129 e Magliabechiano II.I.141, 2 vols. (Mantua: Fondazione Centro Studi L.
B. Alberti, 2002). For Francesco’s architecture, see Francesco Paolo Fiore and
Manfredo Tafuri, eds., Francesco di Giorgio, architetto (Milan: Electa, 1993).
44 Francesco di Giorgio, Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militare.
2 vols., ed. Corrado Maltese, transcription by Livia Maltese Degrassi
(Milan: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 1967), 1:36–39; “l’architettura è solo una sottile
immaginazione concetta in nella mente la quale in nell’opra si manifesta” (36);
“d’ogni e ciascuna cosa non si può la ragione assegnare, perchè lo ingegno
consiste più in nella mente e in nello intelletto dell’architettore che in iscrittura
o disegno, e molte cose accade in fatto le quali l’architetto overo opratore mai
pensò”; “arroganti e presentuosi”; nelli errori fondati sono”; per forza della
lingnia [sic, the editor argues persuasively for lingua rather than linia (linea)]”;
“el mondo hanno corrotto” (36).
45 Giovanni Sulpicius, ed., L. Vitruvii Pollionis ad Cesarem Augustum De
Architectura Liber Primus (—Decimus) (Rome: [Giorgio Herolt or Eucarius
Silber], [1486–92?]. Leon Battista Alberti De re aedificatoria (Florence: Nicolaus
Larentii, [1486]).
46 For Pomponio Leto’s academy, see John F. D’Amico, Renaissance
Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 91–102; Eugenio Garin, “La
letteratura degli umanisti,” in Storia della Letteratura Italiana: Il Quattrocento
e l’Ariosto, rev. ed., ed. Lucio Felici (Milan: Garzanti, 1988), 3:7–368, esp. 144–
160; and Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and
Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 10–25.
47 On Sulpizio’s edition, see Dwyer, Kidson, and Pagliara, “Vitruvius,” in
Dictionary of Art, ed. Turner, 32:639–640; Luigi Vagnetti and Laura Marcucci,
“Per una coscienza vitruviana. Registo cronologico e critico delle edizioni, delle
traduzioni e delle ricerche piì importanti sul trattato Latino De architectura
Libri X di Marco Vitruvio Pollione,” Studi e Documenti di Architettura, no. 8
(September 1978): 29–30; and Laura Marcucci, “Giovanni Sulpicio e la prima
edizione del De architectura di Vitruvio,” Studi e Documenti di Architettura, no.
8 (September 1978): 185–195. On the theater production, see Ingrid D. Rowland,
introduction to Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture: The Corsini Incunabulum
with the Annotations and Autograph Drawings of Giovanni Battista da Sangallo, ed.
Ingrid D. Rowland (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 2003), 1–31; the performance

was saved by the “plaintive royal laments in improvised verse” made during the
set reconstruction by a sixteen-year-old student in flowing robes playing the
queen—Tomasso Inghirami (1470–1516) (7).
48 Sulpicius, ed., L. Vitruvii Pollionis ad Cesarem Augustum; “Io. Sulpitius
Lectori Salutem,” n.p., “non modo studiosis: sed reliquis hominibus.” See also
Manfredo Tafuri’s introduction to “Cesare Cesariano e gli studi Vitruviani nel
Quattrocento,” in Scritti rinascimentali di architettura, ed. Analdo Bruschi,
Corrado Maltese, Manfredo Tafuri, and Renato Bonelli (Milan: Il Polifilo,
1978), 387–458, on 394–398.
49 Claudio Sgarbi, ed., Vitruvio ferrarese “De architectura”: La prima versione
illustrate (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 2004), esp. 11–20.
50 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture: The Corsini Incunabulum, ed.
Rowland, is a facsimile edition.
51 For Giovanni Giocondo, see esp. Lucia A. Ciapponi, “Appunti per una
biografia di Giovanni Giocondo da Verona,” Italia Medioevale e umanistica 4
(1961): 131–158; P. N. Pagliara, “Giovanni Giocondo da Verona (Fra Giocondo),”
Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, 74 vols. (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia
italiana, 1960–), 56:326–338; and Vincenzo Fontana, Fra’ Giovanni Giocondo
Architetto 1433–c. 1515 (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 1988), 21–36 (for his work
in Naples, including the Poggio Reale), 31–32 (for the drawings, which Fontana
suggests were for two no longer extant redactions of his treatise (similar to
Magliabechiana II, I, 141 in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence) for Alfonso,
which Francesco left without having time to illustrate them, 51–80 (on Giocondo’s
work on fortification in the Veneto). For Francesco’s exact whereabouts, see
Flavia Cantatore, “Biografia cronologica di Francesco di Giorgio architetto,” in
Francesco di Giorgio, architetto, ed. Fiore and Tafuri, 412–413.
52 Fontana, Fra’ Giovanni Giocondo, 15–20, citation on 16, “una conoscenza
scientifica e precisa dell’antichità, per mezzo di vere e proprie campagne di
misurazione, con schizzi presi dal vero e misurazioni quotate,” and note 1, 17–18,
for Giocondo’s dedication to Lorenzo in which he mentions how he obtained
the epigraphs in the collection. The location of Giocondo’s three epigraphic
collections are as follows: first redaction, dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici:
Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 10228; the second,
dedicated to Ludovico Agnelli, archbishop of Cosenza: Florence, Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale, Cod. Magl. CL; and the third: Venice: Marciana: Marciano
Latino cl. XIV, 171 = 4665.
53 Fontana, Fra’ Giovanni Giocondo, 47–48. The collection of drawings and
notes are in Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Plut. 29.43. Another manuscript
contains selections from mathematical texts and notes by Giocondo—Vatican
City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vatiana, Vat. Lat. 4539. See esp. Lucia A. Ciapponi,
“Disegni ed appunti di matematica in un codice di Fra Giocondo da Verona
(Laur. 29, 43),” in Vestigia: Studi in onore di Giuseppe Billanovich, 2 vols., ed.
Rino Avesani, Mirella Ferrari, Tino Foffano, Giuseppe Frasso, and Agostino
Sottili (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), 1:181–196.

54 See Fontana, Fra’ Giovanni Giocondo, 40–44 (for the Pont Notre Dame),
46–47 (lectures on Vitruvius), 51–80 (his work in the Veneto), and 74–76 (for
the two Vitruvian editions).
55 Giovanni Giocondo, M. Vitruvius per Iocundum solito castigatior factus cum
figures et tabula . . . (Venice: Ioannis de Tridino alias Tacuino, 1511); and Giovanni
Giocondo, M. Vitruvius et Frontinus a Jocundo revisi repurgatique quantum ex
collatione licuit (Florence: Filippo Giunta, 1513); “Iuliano Medicae frater Io.
Iocundus. S.P.D.,” n.p., “valeat artifex, et quantum liberalia studia mechanicis
addant, quae perinde ut vivax spums sunt corpori.” See esp. Lucia A. Ciapponi,
“Fra Giocondo da Verona and His Edition of Vitruvius,” Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984): 72–90, who emphasizes Giocondo’s often
correct emendations of the corrupt text and his efforts to make it understandable
to practitioners; and Rowland, Culture of the High Renaissance, 176–178.
56 See Vincenzo Fontana and Paolo Morachiello, eds., Vitruvio e Raffaello:
Il “De architectura” di Vitruvio nella traduzione inedita di Fabio Calvo Ravennate
(Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1975). The copies are in Munich, Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek, Cod. It. 37 (complete with Raphael’s additions) and It. 37a.
For Calvo, see Vincenzo Fontana, “Elementi per una biografia di M. Fabio
Calvo Ravenneta,” in Vitruvio e Raffaello, ed. Fontana and Morachiello, 45–
61, which includes extensive discussion of the sources; and Philip J. Jacks,
“Calvo, Marco Fabio,” in Dictionary of Art, ed. Turner, 5:448; and R. Gualdo,
“Fabio Calvo, Marco,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, 43:723–727. And for
Raphael’s methods of measuring, Rowland, introduction to Vitruvius, Ten Books
on Architecture: The Corsini Incunabulum, 17.
57 Vitruvius, De architectura libri dece [da Caesare Caesariano] ([Como]: G.
da Ponte, 1521), fol. 91v, “lo grammatical opusculo di Donato”; “la sua natural
furibondia.” See esp. Maria Luisa Gatti Perer and Alessandro Rovetta, eds., Cesare
Cesariano e il classicismo di primo Cinquecento (Milan: Vita e Pensiero 1996),
for studies and Cesariano’s translation and commentary. A succinct summary
of Cesariano’s life is Francesco Paolo Fiore, “Cesariano [Ciserano], Cesare,” in
Dictionary of Art, ed. Turner, 6:356–359, citation—“geometric discipline” on
357. See also Alessandro Rovetta, Elio Monducci, and Corrado Caselli, Cesare
Cesariano e il Rinascimento a Reggio Emilia (Milan: Silvana, 2008).
58 Vitruvius, De architectura libri dece [da Caesare Caesariano],, fol. 91v,
“per inspeculare e cognoscere varii ingenii e costumi de homini: conversando
e studendo asai,” “Qui male nati sunt impossibile est ut bene facere possint,”
“lo illuminatore de questa divina opera,” “maxima utilitate et necessitate,” and
(for the allegory of his own life), fol. 92r. Virtually all of Cesariano’s Aristotelian
citations appear in a small sentence book in which excerpts from various
classical authors including Aristotle are listed—Propositiones Aristoteles (Venice:
[Georgius Arrivabenus], ca. 1490), fol. 27, making this his probable source.
59 Vitruvius, De architectura libri dece [da Caesare Caesariano], fol. 46v,
“maxime de li docti e sapienti litterati,” “de li artifice quali asai hano insudato,”
“secundola loro bona professione utile e necessaria,” “ben che alcune volte la
fortuna qualcuno di quisti li afaticasse e li vexasse.”

60 Vitruvius, De architectura libri dece [da Caesare Caesariano], fol. 10r–12r,
“non solum la Architectura: ma ciscune altre arte”, “di opera seu fabricatione e
di rationcinatione”; “ben calculate e considerate,” “saper dire e fare,” “quasi a
magiore opportunita,” “il parlare de quella operaria cosa con ratione” (10r), “per
expositione trahendo il senso de la cosa como fano li periti magistri de qualche
artificio che non solum con li dicti ma con li facti dimonstrano le arte per
erudire li rudi operantii,” “in questa vita nisi per causa de la tractatione” (11v),
“che sano operare con le tractatione se perduceno a la elegantia . . . per essere
allegati del suo sapere” (11v–12r), “non solum un pocho da li Praeceptori: ma da
la natura” (12r).
“convien fare ordine: acio si possa demonstrare le cose che sono al proposito
de la formatione de qualunque cose intendemo operare,” “La imaginatione de
nostri pensieri sia per ordine dimonstrato per il sucessuro caso seu effecto: quale
per rationcinatione con la experientia ne indica larte e la preformatione de le
cose.”
62 Vitruvius, De architectura libri dece [da Caesare Caesariano], fol. 18r,
“la excogitativa e effectrice e inventrice del operatione manual,” “questa
Machinatione intellectiva cum sia causa de la formatione de li instrumenti
fabrili: seu artisti opportuni ad explicare lo effecto de qualunque cose che
noi volemo perficere,” “non solum in larte millitare bisogna questa ingeniosa
scientia Mechanica ma in tute le liberale dimonstratione e operatione senza la
qual niuno ornamento opportuno del mundo saria quasi possible per lo uso de
la vita commune ne del vestire e altre infinite cose artiste necessarie che al uso
humano e necessario.”
“praeclari Philosophi,” “la contemplatione intesa,” “le magne cogitatione,” “uno
ardente desiderio de produre in opera sensibile con le proprie mane quello che
con la mente havevano rationcinato.”
64 For the dispute between Cesariano and the editors, see Fiore, “Cesariano,”
5, 359, and for an edition of the Madrid manuscript, Cesare Cesariano,
Volgarizzamento dei libri IX (capitol 7 e 8) e X di Vitruvio, “De architectura,”
secondo il manoscrito 9/2790 Secciòn de Cortes della Real Academia de la Historia,
Madrid, ed. Barbara Agosti (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore [1996]).
Chapter Four
1 Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997), 781–844; Peter Galison, “Computer
Simulations and the Trading Zone,” in The Disunity of Science: Boundaries,
Contexts, and Power, ed. Peter Galison and David J. Stump (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1996), 118–157; and Peter Galison, “Trading with the
Enemy,” in Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise, ed. Michael E. Gorman
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), 25–52.

2 For a study of expertise in these centuries, see Eric H. Ash, Power,
Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004).
3 For discussions of patronage in the history of science, see esp. Bruce T.
Moran, ed., Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the
European Court, 1500–1750 (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1991); and Mario
Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism
4 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies,
trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). See also Pierre Bourdieu,
Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), esp. 4–5, which points out that if subjective gift giving
were understood in the way Mauss describes it objectively, the practice would
fall apart. See also Paula Findlen, “The Economy of Scientific Exchange in Early
Modern Italy,” in Patronage and Institutions, ed. Moran, 5–24.
5 To say that the individuals from diverse backgrounds came to lose some of
their differences is not to suggest that they became the same. Although there are
some instances where it is impossible to know which background a particular
person came from, usually an individual maintained his own identity while
adopting some of the values of the other group. For studies of some of the
trading zones mentioned here, see Bruce T. Moran, “Courts and Academies,”
and Adrian Johns, “Coffeehouses and Print Shops,” in The Cambridge History
of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine
Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 251–271 and 320–340,
respectively; and Rob Iliffe, “Material Doubts: Hooke, Artisan Culture, and
the Exchange of Information in 1670s London,” British Journal for the History
of Science 28, no. 3 (1995): 285–318. For instrument makers’ shops, see James A.
Bennett, “Shopping for Instruments in Paris and London,” in Merchants and
Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela H.
Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 370–395.
6 See Kelly DeVries, “Sites of Military Science and Technology,” in The
Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Park and Daston,
306–319. For arsenals, see esp. Ennio Concina, ed., Arsenali e città nell’occidente
europeo (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1987); and Ennio Concina,
L’Arsenale della Repubblica di Venezia (Milan: Electa, 1984). For writings, see
Maurice J. D. Cockle, A Bibliography of Military Books up to 1642, 2d ed.
(London: Holland Press, 1957); Rainer Leng, Ars belli: Deutsche taktische und
kriegstechnische Bilderhandschriften und Traktate im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert,
2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2002); and Martha D. Pollak, Military
Architecture, Cartography, and the Representation of the Early Modern European
City: A Checklist of Treatises on Fortification in the Newberry Library (Chicago:
Newberry Library, 1991).
7 Kelly DeVries, Medieval Military Technology (Peterborough, Ont.:
Broadview Press, 1992), 143–168; Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in
Renaissance Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 105–200;
Notes to Chapter Four | 157

and Volker Schmidtchen, Bombarden, Befestigungen, Büchsenmeister: Von den
ersten Mauerbrechern des Spätmittelalters zur Belagerungsartillerie der Renaissance
(Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977), 1–42.
8 See Hall, Weapons and Warfare, 41–104; and Schmidtchen, Bombarden,
102–119.
9 See Erich Egg, Das Handwerk der Uhr- und der Büchsenmacher in Tirol
(Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag Wagner, 1982), 183–201; and Erich Egg, Der
Tiroler Geschützguss, 1400–1600 (Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag Wagner, 1961),
esp. 95–162.
10 Egg, Der Tiroler Geschützguss; Erich Egg, “From the Beginning to the
Battle of Marignano – 1515,” in Guns: An Illustrated History of Artillery, ed. Joseph
Jobé (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1971), 9–36; Schmidtchen,
Bombarden, 83–94.
11 Erich Egg, “From Marignano to the Thirty Years’ War, 1515–1648,” in Guns:
An Illustrated History of Artillery, ed. Jobé, 37–54; and David Goodman, Power
and Penury: Government, Technology, and Science in Philip II’s Spain (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 88–150. For Hogge and the English context,
see Edmund B. Teesdale, Gunfounding in the Weald in the Sixteenth Century
(London: Trustees of the Royal Armouries, 1991); and Edmund B. Teesdale, The
Queen’s Gunstonemaker: Being an Account of Ralph Hogge, Elizabethan Ironmaster
and Gunfounder (Seaford, Eng.: Lindel, 1984). For an introduction to the work
of Georg Hartmann, see John P. Lamprey, “An Examination of Two Groups of
Georg Hartmann Sixteenth-century Astrolabes and the Tables Used in Their
Manufacture,” Annals of Science 54, no. 2 (1997): 111–142.
12 Goodman, Power and Penury, 88–108; David Goodman, Spanish Naval
Power, 1589–1665: Reconstruction and Defeat (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997); and Carla Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial
Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1986). For a classic account of the relationships of artillery and ships in
the Mediterranean, see John Francis Guilmartin, Jr., Gunpowder and Galleys:
Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). For an excellent account
of Spanish efforts to acquire and monopolize new technical and scientific
knowledge, see Marìa M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and
the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
13 A. Rupert Hall’s view that there was no connection between scientific
ballistics and the practices of gunners has been effectively challenged by Frances
Willmoth, who shows that the ordnance office played an important role in
sustaining traditions of practical mathematics and mechanics, which included
studies of ballistics. See A. Rupert Hall, Ballistics in the Seventeenth Century: A
Study in the Relations of Science and War with Reference Principally to England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952); Richard W. Stewart, The
English Ordnance Office, 1585–1625: A Case Study in Bureaucracy (Woodbridge,
Suffolk: Boydel Press, 1996); and Frances Willmoth, Sir Jonas Moore: Practical
Mathematics and Restorations Science (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press,
158 | Notes to Chapter Four

1993); and for Tudor fortification, Steven A. Walton, “State Building through
Building for the State: Foreign and Domestic Expertise in Tudor Fortification,”
in Expertise: Practical Knowledge and the Early Modern State, ed. Eric H. Ash,
Osiris, 2d ser. 25 (2010): 66–84. See also Steven Johnston, “Making Mathematical
Practice: Gentlemen, Practitioners, and Artisans in Elizabethan England”
(Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1994), http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/staff/saj/
thesis/abstract.htm (accessed 17 May 2011), which contains much about artillery
and fortification as well as other mathematical topics; and see Anthony Gerbino
and Stephen Johnston, Compass and Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice
in England (Oxford: Museum of the History of Science, 2009).
14 See esp. Giorgio Bellavitis, L’Arsenale di Venezia: Storia di una grande
struttura urbana (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1983); Concina, L’Arsenale della
Repubblica; Robert C. Davis, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and
Workplace in the Preindustrial City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1991); and Franco Rossi, “L’Arsenale: I quadri direttivi,” in Storia di Venezia:
Dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, vol. 5: Il Rinascimento: Società ed
economia, ed. Alberto Tenenti and Ugo Tucci (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia
Italiana, 1996), 593–639.
15 Mauro Bondioli, “Early Shipbuilding Records and the Book of Michael
of Rhodes,” in The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime
Manuscript, 3 vols., ed. Pamela O. Long, David McGee, and Alan M. Stahl
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 3:243–280, esp. 271–280; and Frederic
Chapin Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934), 56–59.
16 Pamela O. Long, David McGee, and Alan M. Stahl, eds., The Book of
Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript, 3 vols. (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 1:211–217 and 2:272–281, for Michael’s service record
of his voyages. Based on his service record and other archival documents, Alan
M. Stahl has written a detailed biography: “Michael of Rhodes: Mariner in
Service to Venice,” in Book of Michael of Rhodes, ed. Long, McGee, and Stahl,
3:35– 98.
17 Raffaella Franci, “Mathematics in the Manuscript of Michael of Rhodes,”
in Book of Michael of Rhodes, ed. Long, McGee, and Stahl, 3:115–146; Franci
shows that Michael was a good mathematician and worked the problems
himself.
18 Piero Falchetta, “The Portolan of Michael of Rhodes,” in Book of Michael
of Rhodes, ed. Long, McGee, and Stahl, 3:193–210. Falchetta discusses the errors
in the portolan and suggests that it was included not as a practical guide for
navigators but to impress noble patrons and other nonskilled elite persons.
19 Dieter Blume, “The Use of Visual Images by Michael of Rhodes: Astrology,
Christian Faith, and Practical Knowledge,” in Book of Michael of Rhodes, ed.
Long, McGee, and Stahl, 3:147–191.
20 Faith Wallis, “Michael of Rhodes and Time Reckoning: Calendar,
Almanac, Prognostication,” in Book of Michael of Rhodes, ed. Long, McGee, and
Stahl, 3:281–319.

21 Blume, “Use of Visual Images,” 3:177, suggests the context of reversal in
a hierarchical society in which Michael created his image, a subversion of the
heraldic code.
22 David McGee, “The Shipbuilding Text of Michael of Rhodes,” and
Bondioli, “Early Shipbuilding Records,” in Book of Michael of Rhodes, ed. Long,
McGee, and Stahl, 3:211–241 and 243–280, respectively.
23 Falchetta, “Portolan of Michael of Rhodes,” 3:193–210, shows that the
portolan contains numerous errors and that it could hardly have been meant
as a guide for practical navigation. What he writes concerning portolan texts
also could apply also to other parts of Michael’s book: “They [portolans] were
no longer necessary or at any rate useful instruments for going to sea. Rather
they were texts distinguished by a certain degree of autonomy, whose contents
only have the appearance of being technical. In the final analysis we can assert
that these texts no longer maintained an instrumental function—or rather,
their instrumental function seems to be much less significant than the new
function they assumed, which belonged primarily within the symbolic sphere.
They manifest both the transformation of the epistemological framework of
knowledge related to navigation as well as the transformation of the more
general system of cultural values. Thus they bring into focus, even within the
maritime world, the ever-increasing value of the libro as testimony—as well as
means—of knowledge” (210).
24 McGee, “Shipbuilding Text,” 3: 237–241.
25 For more details, see Pamela O. Long, “Introduction: The World of
Michael of Rhodes,Venetian Mariner,” in Book of Michael of Rhodes, ed. Long,
McGee, and Stahl, 3:1–33, esp. 15–20 and 30–31.
26 Nicholas of Cusa, Opera omnia, vol. 5: Idiota: De sapientia, de mente,
de staticis experimentis, rev. ed., ed. Renata Steiger et al. from the edition of
Ludwig Baur (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983). There is an anonymous English
translation, The Idiot in Four Books (London: William Leake, 1650); and a more
recent English translation of De Mente—Nicholas of Cusa, Idiota de Mente: The
Layman: About Mind, trans. Clyde Lee Miller (New York: Abaris, 1979).
27 See Ennio Concina, Navis: L’umanismo sul mare (1470–1740) (Turin: Giulio
Einaudi, 1990); and Lane, Venetian Ships, 56–59, 64–71. For Vettor Vausto, see
F. Piovan, “Fausto, Vittore,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto
della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960- ), 45:398–401; and N. G. Wilson, “Vettor
Fausto, Professor of Greek and Naval Architect,” in The Uses of Greek and Latin,
ed. A. C. Dionisotti, Anthony Grafton, and Jill Kraye (London: Warburg
Institute, 1988), 89–95.
28 See Concina, Navis; Lane, Venetian Ships, 64–71. For Galileo, the arsenal,
and the military compass, see Galileo Galilei, Operations of the Geometric and
Military Compass, 1606, trans. Stillman Drake (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1978). And see Jürgen Renn and Matteo Valleriani, “Galileo
and the Challenge of the Arsenal,” Nuncius 16, no. 2 (2001): 481–503; and
Matteo Valleriani, Galileo Engineer (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 27–38 (on the
compass), 117–153 (on Galileo and the arsenal).

29 Vannoccio Biringuccio, De la pirotechnia, 1540, ed. Adriano Carugo (1540;
Milan: Il Polifilo, 1977); and an English translation, Vannoccio Biringuccio,
The Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio: The Classic Sixteenth-Century Treatise
on Metals and Metallurgy, trans. and ed. Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach
Gnudi, 2d ed. (1959; New York: Dover Books, 1990), 213–260 (bk. 6, 1–11).
30 Niccolò Tartaglia, Nova scientia inventa da Nicolo Tartalea B. (Venice:
Stephano da Sabio, 1537); and Niccolò Tartaglia, Quesiti et inventioni diverse
de Nicolo Tartalea Brisciano (Venice: Venturino Ruffinelli for N. Tartaglia,
1546). And see Gerhard Arend, Die Mechanik des Niccolò Tartaglia im Kontext
der zeitgenössischen Erkenntnis- und Wissenschaftstheorie (Munich: Institut für
Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, 1998); Serafina Cuomo, “Shooting by
the Book: Notes on Niccolò Tartaglia’s ‘Nova Scientia,’” History of Science 35
(June 1997): 155–188; and Mary J. Henninger-Voss, “How the ‘New Science’ of
Cannons Shook Up the Aristotelian Cosmos,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63
(July 2002): 371–397.
31 John U. Nef, “Mining and Metallurgy in Medieval Civilisation,” in
The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 2: Trade and Industry in
the Middle Ages, ed. M. M. Postan and Edward Miller, assisted by Cynthia
Postan, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 691–761, 933–
940; and see Ian Blanchard, Mining, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle
Ages, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2001–2005), vols. 2 and 3. Mining scholarship
includes numerous archivally based studies of local regions. See, for example,
Angelika Westermann, Entwicklungsprobleme der Vorderösterreichischen
Montanwirtschaft im 16. Jahrhundert: Eine verwaltungs’, rechts-, wirtschafts-,
und sozialgeschichtliche Studie als Vobereitung für einen multiperspektivischen
Geschichtsunterricht (Idstein: Schulz-Kirchner, 1993); and Catherine Verna, Les
mines et les forges des Cisterciens en Champagne méridionale et en Bourgogne
du nord, XIIe–XVe siècle (Paris: Association pour l’Édition et la Diffusion del
Études Historiques, 1995).
32 Nef, “Mining and Metallurgy,” 723–746. For Agricola, see Georg Agricola,
De re metallica libri XII (Basel: H. Frobenius and N. Episcopius, 1556); and the
English translation with extensive technical notes, Agricola, De re metallica,
trans. Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (1912; New York: Dover,
1950).
33 Nef, “Mining and Metallurgy,” 723–746; and Blanchard, Mining and
Metallurgy, 3:1071–1074. For coal production, see esp. Paul Benoit and Catherine
Verna, eds., Le Charbon de terre en Europe occidentale avant l’usage industriel
du coke, Proceedings of the XXth International Congress of History of Science
(Liège, 20–26 July 1997) (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1999).
34 Philippe Braunstein, “Innovations in Mining and Metal Production in
Europe in the Late Middle Ages,” Journal of European Economic History” 12
(Winter 1983): 573–591; and Hermann Kellenbenz, The Rise of the European
Economy: An Economic History of Continental Europe from the Fifteenth
to the Eighteenth Century, ed. Gerhard Benecke (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1976), 85–88.

35 Braunstein, “Innovations in Mining,” 587–591.
36 For these writings and further bibliography, see Pamela O. Long, “The
Openness of Knowledge: An Ideal and Its Context in 16th-Century Writings on
Mining and Metallurgy,” Technology and Culture 32 (April 1991): 318–355.
37 See ibid., and Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical
Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 176–191. For Biringuccio, see note 29.
38 For hydraulic projects, see David Karmon, “Restoring the Ancient Water
Supply System in Renaissance Rome: The Popes, the Civic Administration,
and the Acqua Vergine,” Aqua urbis Romae: The Waters of the City of Rome,
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/waters (accessed 19 May 2011); Pamela O.
Long, “Hydraulic Engineering and the Study of Antiquity: Rome, 1557–70,”
Renaissance Quarterly 61 (Winter 2008): 1098–1138; and Katherine Wentworth
Rinne, The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque
City (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010). For the obelisks, see
Brian A. Curran, Anthony Grafton, Pamela O. Long, and Benjamin Weiss,
Obelisk: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Burndy Library Publications, MIT Press,
2009).
39 See especially the essays in Antonella Romano, ed., Rome et la science
moderne entre Renaissance et Lumières (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2008);
and Maria Pia Donato and Jill Kraye, eds., Conflicting Duties: Science, Medicine,
and Religion in Rome, 1550–1750 (London: Warburg Institute, 2009).
40 Long, “Hydraulic Engineering,” 1101–1103 .
41 Ibid., 1103–1109. For Bacci’s flood writings, see Andrea Bacci, Del Tevere:
Della Natura et bonta dell’Acque e Delle Inondationi Libri II (Rome: Vincenzo
Luchino, 1558); Bacci, Del Tevere di m. Andrea Bacci medico et filosofo, libri tre
(Venice: [n.p.], 1576); and Bacci, Del Tevere libro quarto (Rome: Stampatori
Camerali, 1599). The handwritten tract is in the flyleaves of the 1976 edition of
Del Tevere, in the Vatican Library in Vatican City: BAV, shelf no. Aldine II 98.
42 Antonio Trevisi, Fondamento del edifitio nel quale si tratta con la santita
de N.S. Pio Papa IIII Sopra la innondatione del Fiume (Rome: Antonio Blado,
1560). For raising the ancient ship, see esp. Concina, Navis, 4–21. For Alberti’s
attempt to raise the ship, see esp. Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master
Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 248–253.
43 See Long, “Hydraulic Engineering,” 1113–1116; and Jessica Maier, “Mapping
Past and Present: Leonardo Bufalini’s Plan of Rome (1551),” Imago Mundi 59, no.
1 (2007): 1–23.
44 Long, “Hydraulic Engineering,” 1119–1123; and Luca Peto, Discorso di Luca
Peto intorno alla cagione della Eccessiva Inondatione del Tevere in Roma, et modo in
parte di soccorrervi (Rome: Giuseppe degl’Angeli, 1573); and Peto, De mensuris et
ponderibus Romanis et Graecis (Venice: [P. Manutius], 1573).
45 Curran, Grafton, Long, and Weiss, Obelisk. See also Brian Curran,
The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and see Giovanni Cipriani, Gli

obelischi egizi: Politica e cultura nella Roma barocca (Florence: Leo S. Olschki,
1993).
46 Curran, Grafton, Long, and Weiss, Obelisk, 107–109; and Camillo
Agrippa, Trattato di Camillo Agrippa Milanese De trasportar la guglia in su la
piazza di San Pietro (Rome: Francesco Zanetti, 1583).
47 Francesco Masini, Discorso di Francesco Masini sopra un modo nuovo, facile,
e reale, di trasportar su la Piazza di San Pietro la guglia, ch’è in Roma, detta di
Cesare (Cesena: Bartolomeo Raverij, 1586).
48 See Curran, Grafton, Long, and Weiss, Obelisk, 102–139, for an account
of the competition and successful move. For Fontana’s treatise, see Domenico
Fontana, Della trasportatione dell’obelisco vaticano et delle fabriche di nostro
signore Papa Sisto V, fatte dal cavallier Domenico Fontana, architetto di Sua
Santita (Rome: Domenico Basa, 1590). There is a modern edition with a useful
introduction and notes—Domenico Fontana, Della trasportatione dell’obelisco
vaticano, 1590, ed. Adriano Carugo, with an introduction by Paolo Portoghese
(Milan: Il Polifilo, 1978); and an English translation— Domenico Fontana,
Della trasportatione dell’obelisco vaticano, ed. Ingrid D. Rowland, trans. David
Sullivan (Oakland, Calif.: Octavo, 2002).
49 Filippo Pigafetta, Discorso di M. Filippo Pigafetta d’intorno all’historia della
Aguglia, et alla ragione del muoverla (Rome: Bartolomeo Graffi, 1586).
50 Michele Mercati, De gli obelischi di Roma (Rome: Domenico Basa, 1589);
and a modern edition— Michele Mercati, Gli obelischi di Roma, ed. Gianfranco
Cantelli (Bologna: Cappelli Editore, 1981).
51 Curran, Grafton, Long, and Weiss, Obelisk, esp. 116–134. For the interest
of humanists, antiquarians, and others in the Egyptian past as it was manifest in
Rome, see Cipriani, Gli obelischi egizi, and Curran, Egyptian Renaissance.
52 Andreas Beyer, “Palladio, Andrea [Gondola, Andrea di Pietro della],” in
The Dictionary of Art, ed. Turner, 23:861–872; and see esp. Guido Beltramini and
Howard Burns, eds., Palladio (Venice: Marsilio, 2008); Bruce Boucher, Andrea
Palladio: The Architect in His Time (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994). Also useful
is a timeline in Center for Palladian Studies in America, “Palladio’s Life and
World: A Timeline,” http://www.palladiancenter.org/timeline-Palladio.html
(accessed 19 May 2011). And see Alina A. Payne, The Architectural Treatise in
the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 170–213.
53 In addition to the references in note 52, see Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks,
Palladio’s Rome: A Translation of Andrea Palladio’s Two Guidebooks to Rome (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), xiv–liii. For Daniele Barbaro, see
esp. G. Alberigo, “Barbaro, Daniele Matteo Alvise,” in Dizionario biografico degli
Italiani, 6:89–95; and Manfredo Tafuri, “Daniele Barbaro e la cultura scientifica
veneziana del’500,” in Cultura, scienze e technica nella Venezia del cinquecento:
Giovan Battista Benedetti e il suo tempo (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze,
Lettere ed Arti, 1987), 55–81. His treatise on perspective is Daniele Barbaro,
La pratica della perspettiva di Monsignor Daniel Barbaro (Venice: Camillo and
Rutilio Borgominieri Fratelli, 1569).

54 For the Villa Maser, see Douglas Lewis, “Maser, Villa Barbaro,” in
Dictionary of Art, ed. Turner, 20:545–547. For Barbaro’s Vitruvian commentary,
see Daniele Barbaro, I dieci libri dell’architettura tradotti et commentati da
monsignor Barbaro (Venice: F. Marcolini, 1556); and Daniele Barbaro, I dieci libri
dell’architettura tradotti e commentati da Daniele Barbaro, 1567, ed. Manfredo
Tafuri and Manuela Morresi (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1987). For Palladio’s treatise
on architecture, see Andrea Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura di Andrea
Palladio (Venice: Dominico de’ Franceschi, 1570); and Palladio, The Four Books
on Architecture, trans. Robert Tavernor and Richard Schofield (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). See also Hart and Hicks, Palladio’s Rome.
55 For his topographical work, see Cipriano Piccolpasso, Le piante et i ritratti
delle città e terre dell’ Umbria sottoposte al governo di Perugia, ed. Giovanni
Cecchini (Rome: Istituto Nazionale d’Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte, 1963). And
see Piccolpasso, The Three Books of the Potter’s Art: A Facsimile of the Manuscript
in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2 vols., trans. and introduced by
Ronald Lightbown and Alan Caiger-Smith (London: Scholar Press, 1980), 2:105.
56 See Gerd Spies, ed., Technik der Steingewinnung und der Flusschiffahrt in
Harzvoland in früher Neuzeit (Braunschweig: Waisenhaus, 1992); and for Julius’s
mining activities, see Hans-Joachim Kraschewski, Wirtschaftspolitik im deutschen
Territorialstaat des 16. Jahrhunderts: Herzog Julius von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel
(1528–1589) (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1978), 151–165.
57 See Galison, “Trading with the Enemy,” esp. 41–44.
Conclusion
1 For the Aristotelian framework, 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), esp. 2–3 and 23–
24. The status of both labor and the mechanical arts rose during the medieval
period. See especially George Ovitt Jr., The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and
Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1987), and Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity
through the Thirteenth Century. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society,
n.s., 80, pt. 1 (1990).
2 Lissa Roberts and Simon Schaffer, preface to, and Lissa Roberts, introduction
to The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early
Industrialisation, ed. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam:
Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007), xiii–xxvii, esp.
xiv–xv, and 1–8.
3 Mary Henninger-Voss, “Comets and Cannonballs: Reading Technology
in a Sixteenth-Century Library”; Pamela H. Smith, “In a Sixteenth-Century
Goldsmith’s Workshop”; and Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, “Constructive Thinking:
A Case for Dioptrics”—all in The Mindful Hand, ed. Roberts, Schaffer, and
Dear, 10–31, 32–57, and 58–82, respectively.

4 This conclusion dissents from Zilsel’s view that explicitly separates humanists
from “superior artisans”—Edgar Zilsel, “The Methods of Humanism,” in Zilsel,
The Social Origins of Modern Science, ed. Diederick Raven, Wolfgang Krohn,
and Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2000), 22–64.
5 For example, see Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience
in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp.
182–236: “Artisanal bodily experience was absorbed into the work of the natural
philosopher at the same time that the artisan himself was excised from it” (186).
For a nuanced discussion of the issue of the changing status and activities of
practitioners in the light of their influence on experimental philosophy, see Bert
de Munck, “Corpses, Live Models, and Nature: Assessing Skills and Knowledge
before the Industrial Revolution (Case: Antwerp),” Technology and Culture 51
(April 2010): 332–356.
Notes to Conclusion | 165

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Index Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, 35–37, 38
Page numbers in bold refer to Aretino, Pietro, 51
illustrations Aristotle and Aristotelianism, 2, 4–5,
7, 31–32, 34–35, 61, 88, 105, 114, 127,
academies, 81, 84, 120–21, 131 130. See also scholasticism
Agricola, Georg, 25, 108, 109, 111 ars, 30, 31. See also mechanical arts;
Agrippa, Camillo, 116–17, 119, 126 practical and technical arts
air-pump, 35, 36 arsenal(s), 8, 93, 96–107, 120, 125: of
Alberti, Leon Battista, 6, 23, 66, Barcelona, 99; of Innsbruck, 97–98,
69–73, 70, 74, 92, 105–6: De re 98; of Venice, 96, 100–103, 102,
aedificatoria, 69, 71–73, 81; Treatise 105–6
on Painting, 70–71 art. See ars; visual arts
alchemy, 7, 24, 26, 28, 32–33, 61, 110, art and nature, 7–8, 9, 28–29, 30–61,
130 129: in Aristotle, 31–32, 34–35
Alder, Max, 11–12, 18, 22 artes mechanicae. See mechanical arts
Alfonso, duke of Calabria (Alfonso artisan/practitioners, 1, 3–4, 7, 21, 25,
II, king of Naples), 83–84 28–29, 61, 65–66, 92, 95, 127, 132
Alhacen (Ibn al-Haytham), 34, 74 n1: influence on the new sciences, 1,
anatomy, 3, 51–53, 52, 55, 56–60, 57, 6, 15, 24, 127–31; See also architect/
58, 74, 76 engineers; under individual names
anti-Marxists, 24–25, 127. See also artisanal culture, 4, 5–6, 9, 10–11,
Marxism and Marxists 22–24, 28–29: and the world of
antiquities, 5, 8, 62, 65, 69, 71, 81, 84, learning, 8, 30, 50–53, 56, 62, 65, 71,
92, 94, 121, 123. See also obelisk(s); 87, 113, 116–17, 127–28
ruins, ancient Athenaeus Mechanicus, 74
antiquity, 5, 6, 25, 31, 40, 41, 62, Austria, 11–14, 15. See also Vienna
65, 67–69, 81–83, 105, 114. See also Austro-Marxism, 11–12, 20, 22
Egypt; Vitruvius Averlino, Antonio. See Filarete
aqueducts, 85, 113, 115 Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), 32, 74
Aquinas, Thomas, 32 Bacci, Andrea, 114, 116
archaeology, 81, 92, 95. See also Bacon, Francis, 37
antiquities; epigraphy Bacon, Roger, 32, 34, 74
architect/engineer(s), 1, 3, 63, 69, 71, Baptistery, Florentine, 66, 68, 70,
73, 82, 91, 92–93, 121, 131, 132 n1: 73–74, 75
Fontana, Domenico, 117, 119–20; Barbaro: Daniele, 121–23, 122;
Francesco di Giorgio, 41–47, 80, Marc’Antonio, 121
84, 92; Giocondo, Giovanni, 83–85, Barnes, Barry, 27
92, 106, 126; training of, 63–64, 76, Barrera-Osorio, Antonio, 28
78, 81 Battle of Actium, 116
architecture, 76–77, 80, 83, 92, 94, Baxon, Teodoro, 101
121–23, 131: for Alberti, 69–70, Belvedere Torso, 52
71–73; in the books of Serlio, Bennett, James A., 27
50–56, 54; in Vitruvius, 63–66; Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette, 31
See also building construction; De Bernardo, Bernardo di, 101
architectura of Vitruvius; Vitruvius Biffi, Marco, 80
190 | Index
Biringuccio, Vanoccio, 25, 106, 111, clocks and timekeeping, 63, 66, 72,
112 92, 103, 130
blast furnace, 108, 109 clothing and textiles, 2, 37, 40, 73, 128
Bloor, David, 27 coffee shops, 96
books and publication, 3, 7, 17, 38, Cohen, H. Floris, 22–23
95, 96, 106, 110–11, 125. See also coins. See numismatics
writings collecting and collections, 26, 37
Borkenau, Franz, 6–7, 10, 17–18, 19, Colonna, Francesco, 38, 144 n21. See
21, 23, 127. See also Grossmann, also Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
Henryk Columbia University, 20–21
Borromeo: Carlo, 115; Federico, 114, Columella, 111
115 communication between learned
Boyle, Robert, 27, 33, 35, 36, 130 and skilled, 8, 9, 62, 65–66, 77, 93,
Bracciolini, Poggio, 64 94–95, 104, 107, 112, 113, 120–23
Brahe, Tycho, 3 conspicuous consumption, 3, 37
Bramante, 87 Constantinople, 104–5, 121
bridges, 1, 39, 56, 72, 84, 85, 99, 113, Cook, Harold, 28
116 Cooper, Alix, 28
Brunelleschi, Filippo, 47, 66–69, Copernicus, Nicholas, 1, 3, 24, 130
70–71, 73, 92 Cornaro, Alvise, 121
Bufalini, Leonardo, 115, 115 cosmos, 2, 3, 93
building construction, 1, 3, 8, 37, 65, Council: of Ferrara-Florence, 104–5;
71, 112–13, 123. See also architecture of Trent, 113
buildings, 3, 8, 62, 65, 71, 121, 127, courts, 3, 41, 50, 76, 77, 81, 83, 96, 129
128, 129. See also Palladio; Santa craft practice, 4, 25, 78–80: and guild
Maria del Fiore; Serlio control, 113
Bukharin, Nicholai, 15 Cusa, Nicholas of, 104–5
Caesar, Julius, 121
Daston, Lorraine, 31, 34–35
Calbus of Freiberg, 111
De architectura by Vitruvius, 53,
Calcar, Jan Steven van, 51
92, 94: Barbaro commentary, 121,
calendars, 103
122; Cesariano translation and
caliber of guns, 97, 98, 106–7
commentary (1521), 87–91, 89;
Callon, Michel, 27
Ferrara ms., 82–83, 115; Giocondo
Calvo, Marco Fabio, 85–87
edition, 1511, 85–86, 86; Sulpizio
capitalism, 11–12, 15–17, 18,
edition (ca. 1486), 81–83
19–20: and mining, 107, 111–12;
De magnete by William Gilbert,
commercial, 2, 60
21–22
ceramics, 7, 37, 78, 123, 124
Dear, Peter, 34–35
Cesariano, Cesare, 87–91, 89, 92
dissection. See anatomy
Charles VIII, king of France, 84–85
Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter, 33
Cicero, 5
Dollfuss, Engelbert, 13
cities, 2, 8, 93, 112, 128: ideal, 77–80.
Donatello, 67–68
See also individual cities
drawing, 4, 67, 69, 87, 92. See also
Clement VIII, pope, 114
illustration; painting; visual arts
Index | 191
Duomo (dome of Florentine Galen, 34, 58, 86
cathedral). See Santa Maria del Fiore Galilei, Galileo, 1, 22, 23, 24, 50, 106,
Durkheim, Emile, 23 130, 711
Galison, Peter, 94, 125
Eamon, William, 27
Gallo, Agostino, 91
Egypt, 116, 119. See also obelisk(s)
gardens, 37, 39, 40, 41, 83, 121
empirical values and methodologies,
gears, 43–44, 46, 48–50, 49
1–2, 3, 7, 9, 21, 23–24, 30, 33–37,
Gerlach, Kurt, 17
67–69, 96, 125, 126, 127–31
Germany and the German states, 6,
Engels, Friedrich, 11, 17
14, 15, 20, 35, 98, 108, 111, 120
engineer. See architect/engineer
Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 23, 70, 73–76, 75,
engineering, 41–47, 71–73, 94, 96, 112,
92
116–20, 131: hydraulic, 8, 63, 83, 84,
gift exchange, 94
86, 112–16; modern, 94, 113
Giocondo, Giovanni, 83–85, 86, 92,
England, 98, 99–100, 120, 121
106, 126
epigraphy, 81, 84
Giovanni da Porlezza, 120
Ercker, Lazarus, 111
goldsmiths and goldsmithing, 23, 33,
Erzgebirge, 108, 111
66, 73–74, 75, 110, 129
Este: Alfonso d’, 123; Ecole I, 83, 87
Golinski, Jan, 26
experience, 7–8, 12–13, 33–37, 111, 125,
Graham, Loren, 15–16
130
Grant, Edward, 5
experimentation, 3, 7–8, 12–13, 33–37,
Greek, 30, 39, 53, 74, 77, 106, 115
96, 105, 109–10, 124
Gregory XIII, pope, 116, 119
exploration, oceanic, 2–3
Grosseteste, Robert, 34
fabrica and ratiocinatio, 63, 66, 72, Grossmann, Henryk, 6–7, 10,
76, 77–78, 80–81, 88 18–20, 21, 22, 127: criticism of Franz
Fausto, Vettor, 105–6 Borkenau, 18–19
fencing, 116 Grünberg, Carl, 17
Ferrara, 125. See also under De gun carriages, 97, 98
architectura by Vitruvius gunpowder artillery, 37, 84, 96–97,
Filarete (Antonio Averlino), 76–80, 101, 106–7, 108, 112, 124, 125, 129.
79, 92, 126 See also caliber of guns; weapons
Filelfo (Francesco da Tolentino), 77 and war
Flanders, 97
Hall, A. Rupert, 25, 127
flooding. See engineering, hydraulic
Harkness, Deborah, 28
Fontana, Domenico, 117, 119–20
Hart, Vaughan, 51
fortification and fortresses, 37, 44, 80,
Hartmann, Georg, 98–99, 106
84, 85, 96, 99, 100, 106, 123, 125
Henry VIII, king of England, 98, 99
fountains, 81, 83, 85, 113, 121
Hessen, Boris, 6, 10, 15–17, 20, 21, 22,
France, 84–85, 98, 108. See also Paris
23, 127
Francesco di Giorgio, 41–47, 42, 43,
Hicks, Peter, 51
45, 80–81, 83–84, 92, 126
hieroglyphs, 119
Frankfurt, 6–7, 17–18, 19, 20, 21. See
Hippocrates, 31, 34, 86
also Institute for Social Research
historians of science, 7, 23, 24–25,
Frontinus, 85
26–28, 34–35, 127
192 | Index
history of science, 4, 10–29: and Koyré, Alexandre, 24–25, 127
experience and experiment, 12–13, Kristeller, Paul, 31
24, 33–37; and theory, 24–25, 127; Kuhn, Thomas S., 26–27
constructivism in, 26–28
language, vernacular, 4, 22–23, 69,
Hobbes, Thomas, 27
70, 92, 126, 129
Hogge, Ralph of Buxted, 99
Lässl, Ludwig, 111
Hooke, Robert, 35, 36
Latin, 4, 8, 22–23, 39, 61, 62, 66,
Horkheimer, Max, 19, 20
74, 80, 81, 82, 87, 92, 105: and
Hoyningen-Huene, Paul, 26
humanism, 5–6, 65, 69, 70–71,
humanism, 5–6, 21, 62, 92, 114,
77, 86, 95, 111, 126; learned by
120–21, 123, 129: and Alberti, 69–70,
workshop-trained individuals, 62,
73; and Antonio Manetti, 66; and
65, 66, 74, 80
Filelfo, 77; and Francesco di Giogio,
Latour, Bruno, 27
41, 47; and Pomponio Leto, 81–82;
Leo X, pope, 85
and Vettor Fausto, 105–6; and
Leonardo da Vinci, 20, 22, 23, 47–50,
Vitruvian studies, 82–83, 85–86
93, 126
Hungary, 17–18, 108
Leto, Pomponio, 81, 82, 84
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 38-41,40
Leviathan and the Air-Pump, The by
idealism, 11, 24–25 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer,
illustrations, 111, 112, 119: of machines, 27
36, 42, 43, 45, 49, 84, 90, 109, Löffler, Gregor, 97
111, 112; of the De architectura by logical empiricism, 6, 10, 12–13
Vitruvius, 65, 84, 85, 86, 86, 89, 90, Luca della Robbia, 70–71
122 Lucretius, 64
innovation, technical, 96–101, 109–10 Lukács, Georg, 17–18
Innsbruck, 97–98, 98
machines, 8, 11, 65, 67, 69, 91, 92,
inscriptions. See epigraphy
93, 108, 127, 129: and Francesco
Institute for Social Research
di Giorgio, 41–50; Hessen and
(Frankfurt), 6–7, 17–19, 20–21
Grossmann’s view of, 16–17, 19–20,
instruments and instrument makers,
22
3, 37, 84, 93, 94, 96, 98–99, 107, 121,
Maiano, Giuliano da, 83
129
Manetti, Antonio, 66–69
investigation of nature, 1–6, 9, 30,
Manutius, Aldus, 38
33–35, 46–47, 50, 56–60, 114, 116,
maps, 113, 115, 115, 123
126, 127, 129, 130
Marx, Karl, 11, 17
Jardine, Lisa, 37 Marxism and Marxists, 6–7, 10,
John VIII Palaiologos, Byzantine 11–22, 23, 127, 129. See also Austro-
emperor, 104–5 Marxism, anti-Marxists
Julius II, pope, 85 Masaccio, 71
Julius, duke of Braunschweig- Masini, Francesco, 117–18
Wolfenbûttel, 123–24 mathematics, 12, 13, 23, 69, 85, 87,
99–100, 101, 103, 104–5, 106–7, 130
Kemp, Martin, 70
Mauss, Marcel, 95
Kepler, Johannes, 130
Maximilian I, emperor, 97
Kolman, Arnošt, 15
Index | 193
McGee, David, 104 obelisk(s), 113, 116–20, 118
measurement, 3, 8, 37, 67, 69, 78, 84, objects, cultural significance of, 3, 37,
93, 96, 99, 121, 122, 129, 130 38–41, 60, 88, 90
mechanical arts, 10, 30, 31, 37, 100, observation, 2, 3, 30, 33, 34, 35, 37, 111,
127. See also practical and technical 129, 130: of buildings, 53–56, 67–68;
arts of machines, 19–20, 50
mechanical world view, 10, 18, 19, 22 Ogilvie, Brian, 28
mechanics, 16, 19–20, 31 Olschki, Leonardo, 7, 10, 22–23
Medici: Giuliano de, 85; Lorenzo de, optics, 34, 61, 74
71, 84; Piero de, 77
Pacioli, Luca, 23
medicine, 31, 34, 56, 58, 60, 61, 63,
painting, 3, 4, 30–31, 37, 51, 60,
76, 86. See also anatomy; Vesalius
63, 66, 120, 121, 128, 130, 131:
Mercati, Michele, 116, 119
and Alberti, 6, 69, 70; and
Merton, Robert K., 7, 10, 11, 23–24,
Cesariano, 87; and Filarete, 78,
25, 127
80; and Ghiberti, 74, 76. See also
metals and metallurgy, 33, 97, 107–12
perspective, artist’s
Michael of Rhodes, 101–105, 103,
palaces and villas, 3, 37, 40, 82, 83, 85,
104, 106, 126
86, 87, 95, 113, 121, 125, 127
Milan, 76, 87, 91, 116
Palissy, Bernard, 7, 25, 35, 36
mills, 42, 43, 43–47, 45
Palladio, 120–23, 126
mining and ore processing, 2, 8,
Palopano, Nicolò, 101, 105
23–24, 33, 93, 96, 97, 107–12, 109,
Paris, 20, 24, 85, 121
120, 123–24, 125
Park, Katharine, 34–35
minting, 33, 107, 110
Parsons, Talcott, 23
models, 4, 105
patrons and patronage, 4, 6, 33, 41,
Montefeltre, Federico I, 81
44, 76–77, 95, 96, 101, 103, 113, 120,
More, Jonas, 100
121, 123
Naples, 83–85 Paul of Taranto, 32–33
natural history, 3, 28, 37, 95 Peckham, John, 74
natural philosophy, 2, 7, 8, 61, 116 perspective, artist’s, 3, 30–31, 66, 70,
nature and the natural world, 7, 71, 74, 121
30–61. See also art and nature; Perugia, 123
investigation of nature Peto, Luca, 115–16
navigation, 101, 104, 116 Petrarch, 5
Nazis, 14–15, 20 Philip II, king of Spain, 99
Neurath, Otto, 13 physics, twentieth century, 12, 13,
new sciences, 1, 2, 3, 10, 23–24, 28.130 15–16, 94
Newman, William R., 31, 32 physis. See nature
Newton, Isaac, 1, 15–16, 24, 33, 130 Piccolpasso, Cipriano, 123, 124
Norman, Robert, 21–22 Piero della Francesca, 23
numismatics, 5, 62, 81 Pigafetta, Filippo, 119
Nummedal, Tara, 28, 33 Pirova, Aloisio, 91
Nuremberg, 96, 98, 110 Pisano, Andrea, 73
Pittoni, Girolamo, 120
Pius IV, pope, 114, 115
194 | Index
Plato, 77 Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, 47,
Pliny the Elder, 44, 74, 76 66, 68, 68
Poliziano, Angelo, 71 Sarton, George, 23
Polycletus, 53 Schaffer, Simon, 128–29
portolan, 101, 160 n23 Schiefsky, Mark, 31
pottery. See ceramics scholasticism, 2, 4–5, 35. See also
practical and technical arts, 1–9, 11, Aristotle and Aristotelianism
22, 23, 25, 28, 30, 33, 50, 53–56, 73, Schwaz (in the Tyrol), 108, 111
128–31: and trading zones, 94–126; scientific revolution, 1, 6–7, 14,
in work of Francesco di Giorgio, 23–24. See also new sciences
41–47. See also architecture; sculpture, 6, 30–31, 37, 51–53, 52,
building construction; engineering 69, 70, 78, 128, 131: and Ghiberti,
princes and patrons, 33, 41, 107, 110, 73–76, 75
111–12, 120, 125 Second International Conference of
Principe, Lawrence, 33 1931 in London, 6, 15–17
printing, 3, 106, 109–10. See also Seneca, 82
books and publication Serlio, Sebastiano, 50–51, 53–56, 54,
professionalization and professionals, 121
92, 94, 131 Sforza: Francesco, 76–77; Galeazo,
proportion, 30–31, 53, 57, 67, 69, 74, 87; Maria Galeazzo, 77
77–78, 93 Sgarbi, Claudio, 83
Ptolemy, 34 ship design and construction, 72.96,
99, 100, 100–101, 103, 104, 105, 106
Raphael, 85–86
ships, raising from bottom of Lake
ratiocinatio. See fabrica and
Nemi, 114
ratiocinatio
ships, types of: galeazza, 106; galleon,
Raven, Diederick, 14
99, 100; galley, 99, 101, 103, 104,
reification, concept of, 18
105, 106; quinquereme, 105–6
Renn, Jürgen, 106
Sinisgalli, Rocco, 70
Rhodes, island of, 101. See also
Sixtus V, pope, 120
Michael of Rhodes
Smith, Pamela H., 28, 35
Riaro, Raffaele, 82
sociology of knowledge, 26–28
Roberts, Lissa, 128–129
Spain, 98–99
Rome, 22, 51, 66–69, 70, 76, 84, 96,
Staden, Heinrich von, 31
106, 112–20, 121, 125: and Vitruvius,
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The
53–56, 81–82, 83, 85–87
by Thomas S. Kuhn, 26–27
Rossi, Paolo, 27
studium generale. See universities
Rowland, Ingrid, 82
Sulpizio, Giovannii, 81–83, 84, 92
ruins, ancient, 5, 8, 53–56, 81, 83, 84,
surveying, 7, 69, 86, 99–100, 115
123
Sweden, 108, 120
rulers and trading zones, 120–26, 128
Tartaglia, Niccolò, 106–7
Saalman, Howard, 68–69
technē, 30, 31, 32, 127
Salutati, Coluccio, 5
technical arts and technology. See
Sangallo, Giovanni Battista da “il
practical and technical arts
Gobbo,” 83
Index | 195
terminology, technical, 85, 112, 125–26 weapons and war, 2, 23–24, 37, 72,
theater, 51, 80, 82 80, 97, 116, 120. See also gunpowder
theory, role in science, 24–25 artillery
Tiber River, 113–16 Weber, Max, 23
Titian, 51 weights and measures, 115, 119
trading zones, 8, 93, 94–126, 128, 131 Weil, Felix, 17
treatises. See books and publication; Weil, Hermann, 17, 20
writings Witelo, 74
Trevisi, Antonio, 114–15, 116 workshops, craft, 8
Trissino, Gian Giorgio, 120–21, 123 writings, autobiographical, 87–88,
89, 101
unity of knowledge, 13, 14, 135 n8
writings, practical and technical,
universities, 2, 4–5, 6, 61, 78, 81, 121,
6, 7, 23, 37, 96, 97, 106–7, 125:
129
by Michael of Rhodes, 101–5; on
university-trained individuals,
anatomy, 50–61; on architecture,
129: and relationship to skilled
6, 8, 50, 53–56, 54, 62–93, 79,
individuals, 8, 51, 56, 62, 65–66, 125.
121, 122; on ceramics, 123; on
See also humanism
engineering, 41–47, 113–20, 116,
Valleriani, Matteo, 106 121; on machines, 48–50, 63, 64,
vaults, 67 71, 72, 74, 123–24; on mines and
Venice, 85, 96, 100–103, 102 metallurgy, 106, 110–12; on ships
Verrocchio, Andrea del, 47 and shipbuilding, 101, 104, 124
Vesalius, Andrea, 50–60, 52, 55, 57, Wundrum, Manfred, 74
58
Zaneto, Giovanni di, 106
Vicenza, 120
Zilsel, Edgar, 6, 10, 12, 13–15, 14,
Vienna, 6, 12, 13, 14, 17, 19, 21: adult
20–21, 92, 127, 129
education in, 13, 21
zodiac, 101–3
Vienna Circle, 6, 12, 13, 14, 20–21
villas. See palaces and villas
Visconti, Antonio
visual arts and culture, 3, 57–60,
71, 94, 113. See also painting;
perspective, artist’s
Vitruvian man, 93
Vitruvius and the Vitruvian tradition,
8, 41, 44, 61, 62–93, 77–78, 80–93,
95. See also De architectura of
Vitruvius
196 | Index

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Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of

the New Sciences, 1400–1600

Oregon State University Press | corvallis

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

© 2011 Pamela O. Long

Oregon State University Press

Allison Rachel Korn

and Lucas Samay Yunga Korn

Introduction: Artisanal Values and the Investigation

chapter 1. Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History

chapter 2. Art, Nature, and the Culture of Empiricism 30

chapter 3. Artisans, Humanists, and the De architectura of

chapter 4. Trading Zones: Arenas of Production and

conclusion. Empirical Values in a Transitional Age 127

Artisanal Values and the Investigation of Nature

A long-standing issue in the history of science can be framed as a

Introduction: Artisanal Values and the Investigation of Nature | 1

2 | Introduction: Artisanal Values and the Investigation of Nature

Introduction: Artisanal Values and the Investigation of Nature | 3

“Artisan/practitioners” were men and women who worked with their

4 | Introduction: Artisanal Values and the Investigation of Nature

Introduction: Artisanal Values and the Investigation of Nature | 5

This book is aimed at a nonspecialist readership, and it is hoped that

6 | Introduction: Artisanal Values and the Investigation of Nature

Introduction: Artisanal Values and the Investigation of Nature | 7

8 | Introduction: Artisanal Values and the Investigation of Nature

Introduction: Artisanal Values and the Investigation of Nature | 9

Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the

10 | Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science

The Marxist Tradition

Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science | 11

12 | Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science

Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science | 13

14 | Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science

Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science | 15

16 | Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science

Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science | 17

18 | Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science

Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science | 19

20 | Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science

Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science | 21

Leonardo Olschki and Robert Merton:

Scholars working outside of the Marxist tradition also contributed to the

22 | Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science

Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science | 23

Alexandre Koyré and the Anti-Marxists

Opposing most of the scholars discussed above, many Anglo-American

24 | Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science

Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science | 25

Hall’s view of the history of science as a history of ideas developed by

26 | Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science

Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science | 27

The influence of artisanal culture on the development of the new sciences

28 | Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science

Artisan/Practitioners as an Issue in the History of Science | 29

Art, Nature, and the Culture of Empiricism

By the early fifteenth century fundamental cultural changes were under

30 | Art, Nature, and the Culture of Empiricism

Art and Nature: Changing Concepts in History