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Art, Science, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe


By Pamela H. Smith*

ABSTRACT

This essay attempts a restatement of the relationship between art and science in terms of making and knowing. It rst surveys the various ways art and science were related in the early modern period, arguing that one result of the new naturalistic representation was the emergence of a new visual culture that reinforced appeals to eyewitness and rsthand experience and in some cases fostered a new examination of European culture. At the same time, art, understood as the work of the human hand in imitating nature, came to be viewed as one of the central characteristics that distinguished European society from the past. Moreover, artist/artisans helped constitute the aims and methods of the study of nature during the fteenth and sixteenth centuries, articulating a new kind of authority for nature and providing the artworks that engendered a culture of nature study and collection. Thus art and artisans were fundamental (but not exclusive) motors of the Scientic Revolution. More attention to the visual culture of early modern Europe, including religious and devotional imagery, and seeking out intersections between making and knowing, as some art historians studying techniques have begun to do, will add to our understanding of the relationship between art and science in the early modern period.

HE TERMS ART AND SCIENCE in early modern Europe bring to mind the stunning naturalistic plant studies of Hans Weiditz in the Herbarium vivae eicones (Strasbourg, 15321536) (see Figure 1) and those of the team of painter Albert Meyer, transfer draftsman Heinrich Fu llmaurer, and block cutter Veit Speckle, who produced the De historia stirpium (Basel, 1542) (see Figure 2), as well as the lavish illustrations by Jan van Calcar in De humani corporis fabrica (1543) (see Figure 3). Most historians will probably be more familiar with the authors of those worksOtto Brunfels, Leonhard Fuchs, and Andreas Vesaliusthan with the artists who in fact made these volumes so memorable that scholars think of them rst when considering art and science in the early modern period. The fact that the scholar-naturalist-physicians are more familiar to historians of science than the artisans who made the images points to a tendency both in the history of science and in our contemporary perception of art and science to privilege

* Department of History, Columbia University, 605 Fayerweather Hall, MC 2516, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, New York 10027. Isis, 2006, 97:83100 2006 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0021-1753/2006/9701-0005$10.00 83

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Figure 1. Hans Weiditz, woodblock, from Otto Brunfels and Hans Weiditz, Herbarium vivae eicones imitationem (Strasbourg, 15321536), Vol. 2, p. 260. The Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery.

the scholar, theorizer, and conceptualizer above the maker. This essay will attempt partly to undermine this point of viewor at least to present a way that might provide a new framework for thinking about this binary. Any consideration of art and science must engage with the terms themselves, both in their present meaningsas when we think of the scientic illustrations of these sixteenth-century scientic textsand with regard to their early modern denitions. When we use the term art today we mostly mean the visual arts; and by science (at least in the Anglophone world) we most often denote the investigation of nature. This is, of course, quite different from what these words meant in early modern Europe, when art, or ars, possessed a much broader connotation of practice and experience and was used in the case of the mechanical arts to refer to the work of the human hand; science meant theoretical knowledge that could be ascertained with certainty, usually by deductive

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Figure 2. Leonhard Fuchs, De historia stirpium (Basel, 1542), pp. 23. The Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary.

means. This essay will begin by considering how art, in the modern sense of the visual arts, inuenced the investigation of nature in early modern Europe, but then I will turn to a fuller exploration of the multiple dimensions of the relationship between ars and scientia in early modern Europe. Such an exploration entails examining the work of artisans as participants in the Scientic Revolution and, nally, suggests a restatement of the problem in terms of making and knowing. To return, then, to the remarkable images that rst appeared in medical works of the sixteenth century: although manuscript herbals, the manuals of health called tacuina sanitatis, works of alchemy, and astrological broadsheets were commonly illuminated throughout the Middle Ages, what have often been called the scientic illustrations of these Renaissance volumes mark a departure in the visual culture of the early modern investigation and depiction of nature, in terms not only of the proliferation of images in the age of the printing press but also of the epistemological status of images in the making of

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Figure 3. Portrait of the author, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543). Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

natural knowledge, as well as their practical communicative value. That departure is signaled in Leonhard Fuchss pugnacious preface to the reader in De historia stirpium:
Though the pictures have been prepared with great effort and sweat we do not know whether in the future they will be damned as useless and of no importance and whether someone will cite the most insipid authority of Galen to the effect that no one who wants to describe plants would try to make pictures of them. But why take up more time? Who in his right mind would condemn pictures which can communicate information much more clearly than the word of even the most eloquent men?1

Vesalius, too, extolled the value of images: Illustrations greatly assist the understanding, for they place more clearly before the eyes what the text no matter how explicitly de1 Leonhard Fuchs, De historia stirpium (Basel, 1542), pp. xxi. I have used the translation in James S. Ackerman, Early Renaissance Naturalism and Scientic Illustration, in The Natural Sciences and the Arts: Aspects of Interaction from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century: An International Symposium, ed. Allan Ellenius (Uppsala/Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1985), pp. 117, on p. 17.

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scribes.2 A bit more than a decade after Fuchs published his celebrated herbal, Georgius Agricola asserted a similar superiority over the ancients in introducing the remarkable woodcut illustrations by Blasius Weffring of St. Joachimsthal, which complemented his own vivid verbal descriptions in De re metallica (Basel, 1556):
I have not only described them [the objects, tools, and processes of mining], but have also hired illustrators to delineate their forms, lest descriptions which are conveyed by words should either not be understood by men of our own times, or should cause difculty to posterity, in the same way as to us difculty is often caused by many names which the Ancients . . . have handed down to us without any explanation.3

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These texts emerged out of the collaboration between artists, who had independently undertaken botanical nature study and developed naturalistic representation, as well as print techniques that allowed exact representation and so enhanced the communicative value of these texts, and humanists like Brunfels, Vesalius, and Agricola, who sought to match ancient textual descriptions to local objects, processes, and practices (Agricolas rst published work was a dialogue between a learned miner and traditionally trained physicians, in which the miner teaches about mining terms and the scholars comment on the relationship of these new terms to ancient texts and practices). The printer-entrepreneur was often key in bringing these two groups, with their previously independent trajectories, into conjuncture.4 Through the inuence of these texts and the social, cognitive, and intellectual processes involved in producing them, images came to play an integral part in the making of natural knowledge in the early modern period.5
2 Andreas Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body: A Translation of De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, trans. William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman (San Francisco: Norman, 1998), p. lvi; quoted in Pamela O. Long, Objects of Art/Objects of Nature: Visual Representation and the Investigation of Nature, in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 6382, on p. 77. Recent work, above all by Sachiko Kusukawa, has shown how complicated Vesaliuss use of images was. Pictures were meant by Vesalius to be employed in an active process of matching res and verba; they did not substitute for active investigation and dissection, nor for the use of words and texts. In other words, texts, verbal discussions, images, and cadavers all played off one another in dissections and demonstrations carried out in the anatomy theater, and this dynamic relationship resulted in understanding and knowledge. See Sachiko Kusukawa, Andreas Vesalius and the Canonization of the Human Body: Res, Verba, Picture, paper presented at the workshop Seeing Science, Princeton University, March 2005; this was based on a longer paper, From Counterfeit to Canon: Picturing the Human Body, Especially by Andreas Vesalius, Preprint 281, Max-Planck-Institut fu r Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, 2004. 3 Georgius Agricola, De re metallica, trans. Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (New York: Dover, 1950), p. xxx. 4 The literature on these gures is far too voluminous to cite extensively, but I will mention a few easily overlooked essays. On the development of nature study among artists see Fritz Koreny, A Coloured Flower Study by Martin Schongauer and the Development of the Depiction of Nature from van der Weyden to Du rer, Burlington Magazine, 1991, 133:588597; and David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470 1550 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1994), esp. p. 257. On the intermediary function of printers see F. David Hoeniger, How Plants and Animals Were Studied in the Mid-Sixteenth Century, in Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, ed. John W. Shirley and Hoeniger (Washington, D.C.: Folger, 1985), pp. 130148. On Agricola as a humanist see Owen Hannaway, Georgius Agricola as Humanist, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1992, 53:553560 5 For a sense of how these naturalistic illustrations differed in their epistemological and cognitive functions from the illustrations in alchemical treatises, e.g., see Barbara Obrist, Les de buts de limagerie alchimique (XIVe XVe sie ` cle) (Paris: Editions le Sycomore, 1982); William B. Ashworth, Jr., Natural History and the Emblematic World View, in Reappraisals of the Scientic Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 303332; and Adrian Johns, The Physiology of Reading, in Books and the Sciences in History, ed. Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

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Art and artists contributed to the production of scientic knowledge in other ways as well. William M. Ivins, Jr., argued that visual artists, especially in areas such as botanical illustration, furthered science by making a new mode of visual communication possible. Artists developed this powerful new tool through their naturalistic pictorial statements, and, even more important, they made these visual statements repeatable and reproducible by the development of printmaking. According to Ivins, trying and testing, a fundamental part of the scientic process, required exact repeatability of communication, and this was supplied by prints. Ivins thus regarded printmakingan innovation of artistsas essential to the development of science by naturalists and scientists. Peter Parshall has followed on Ivinss trail in his work on Renaissance prints, arguing that prints increased the status and authority of visual evidence. He charts the way in which the counterfeitan exact portrait of a plant, animal, or humanbegan to be employed as a new type of visual evidence. Further, he views botanical illustrations as having made possible the dissemination, comparison, and systematizing of botany that could lead to a taxonomic system of classication. Parshall regards the appearance, within the space of a year, of Vesaliuss De humani corporis fabrica and Fuchss De historia stirpium as attesting to the growing importance of visual evidence in knowledge-making in general and to a greater emphasis on accurate visual representation in the investigation of nature in particular. In The Renaissance Print, 14701550, Parshall and David Landau write,
Accurate visual representation was more than just a technical accomplishment. It was a highly specialized form of observation. . . . Making illustrations was a way of checking facts, and by mid-century it was being supported by other means as well. Public and private botanical gardens were being planted, and collections of dried specimens were being assembled into herbaria. In such a climate the illustrated herbal was bound to become the standard point of reference for scholars attempting to devise different schemes of classication.6

Thus visual evidence came to have more importance in scientic investigation in general, but it also changed the specic direction and content of botanical investigation. Many historians have approached the interaction of art and science in early modern Europestill within the framework of the modern meaning of these termsby way of perspective construction. In the very early years of the fteenth century, Filippo Brunelleschi (13771446) and his fellow Florentine artists developed perspective construction to make a series of trompe loeil panels on which images of buildings familiar to their fellow townsmen were painted in a way that made them look as if they were projecting into three-dimensional space. Francesco Petrarch (14001474) would say of the paintings resulting from this new artisanal practice that these are images bursting from their frames, and the lineaments of breathing faces, so that you expect shortly to hear the sound of their voices.7 During the same years in which Brunelleschi experimented with his perspective panels in the Florentine piazzas, the painter Massaccio (1401ca. 1428) used mathematical
Press, 2000), pp. 291314, esp. p. 296. Sachiko Kusukawas projected study on the use of images in early modern scientic texts will be crucial to understanding the social and intellectual processes involved in the making of knowledge using pictures. 6 William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (1953; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969); Peter Parshall, Imago contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance, Art History, 1993, 16:554579 (on the counterfeit); and Landau and Parshall, Renaissance Print, 14701550 (cit. n. 4), pp. 257258. 7 Petrarch is quoted in Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantication and Western Society, 1250 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), p. 175.

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perspective in such works as the Trinity Fresco (probably 1428). This artisanal technique was codied and theorized by the university-educated son of a banking family, Leon Battista Alberti, in De pictura (published in Latin in 1435, translated into Italian in 1436). There have been many accounts of the relations between mathematics, science, and art in the emergence of perspective construction. Erwin Panofsky suggested that the discovery of perspective construction that conceived of space as a free, ideal complex of lines, rather than as a substance that could have no void, might have helped give rise to a new concept of space that would become so fundamental to the new science. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., and Judith V. Field both discuss the mathematical knowledge of artists, whereas Martin Kemp traces the complex formation of perspective construction out of practical mathematics, the interaction of humanists and artisans, new modes of religious devotion, and the annexing of classical aesthetic values, especially the proportional system of architectural design by painters. David Summers has also discussed the rise of naturalistic perspective, arguing in The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics that the rise of naturalism in painting brought about the idea that art can be a model of vision and perception. Thus, art gained importance as it came to be seen as a new mode of investigating reality. As images became more important in knowledgemaking, this gave rise to the idea that a materially real, physical world could be known by viewing from a single, universal point. Once gained, this knowledge could be mathematicized; the laws of vision became the laws of nature.8 While the intersections of science and art in scientic illustration and perspective construction may seem obvious (and have been considered at length by historians), the place of images in the visual culture of early modern science more generally has not been so thoroughly researched. The desire expressed in the illustrated herbals, as articulated in Vesaliuss and Agricolas works, to couple (artisanal) visual and (humanist) verbal accuracy with the communicative potential of images is often accompanied by what appears to be a new emphasis on rst-person observation and autoptic proof, especially in an age when news out of the newfound world was arriving thick and fast. Images became an important way of recording, collecting, cataloguing, and witnessing the curious, the marvelous, and the particular. Indeed, the Spanish civil servant Gonzalo Ferna ndez de Oviedo (14781557) lamented that he did not have a famous artist with him to record the things he described in his natural history of the Indies in the early sixteenth century: it needs to be painted by the hand of a Berruguete or some other excellent painter like him, or by Leonardo da Vinci or Andrea Mantegna, famous painters whom I knew in Italy. For his part, Agricola asserts: I have omitted all those things which I have not myself seen, or have not read or heard of from persons upon whom I can rely.9 It is important to remember
8 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Heritage of Giottos Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientic Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991); J. V. Field, The Invention of Innity: Mathematics and Art in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997); Field, Mathematics and the Craft of Painting: Piero della Francesca and Perspective, in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen, and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, ed. Field and Frank A. J. L. James (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 7395; Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1990); and David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 15, 323. See also Michael Baxandall, The Bearing of the Scientic Study of Vision on Painting in the Eighteenth Century: Pieter Campers De Visu (1746), in Natural Sciences and the Arts, ed. Ellenius (cit. n. 1), pp. 125132. 9 Gonzalo Ferna ndez de Oviedo, Historia general, 2.7, quoted in J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 14921650 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), p. 21; and Agricola, De re metallica, trans. Hoover and Hoover (cit. n. 3), pp. xxxxxxi.

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that such an emphasis on rst-person experience can be noted by at least the thirteenth century, but the frequency of such proclamations accelerated in the sixteenth century, and images were increasingly used to convey such claims to witnessing.10 Artisanal skill in naturalistic representation gave rise to a new aesthetic and engendered a lively demand for lifelike representation, which, when coupled with the exploration of new lands and the commercial exploitation of natural resources, produced a culture of eyewitness description and depiction that helped people to look anew at their own world.11 Hans Weiditzs brother Cristoph, traveling in Spain in the 1520s, recorded in detail the dress and habits of resident Moriscos and imported Mexican Indians. Such a consideration of novelty and difference, coupled with the technology of printing and printmaking that made its wide dissemination possible, helped bring about a new sense of the potential (and uncertainties) of human agency in relation to the natural world. This was especially true in considerations of the mechanical arts. The set of engravings by the Flemish artist Jan van der Straet (Stradanus) (15361605), entitled Nova reperta New Discoveriesillustrated the distance between antiquity and the material and technological conditions of his own lifetime. The frontispiece of this set of engravings is framed by two allegorical gures: one, young and lively, enters the frame from the left, and the other, old and stooped, exits to the right; each carries a serpent biting its own tail, the oroborus, signifying Time (see Figure 4). No

Figure 4. Johannes Stradanus (Jan van der Straet), Nova reperta (ca. 1580), title page. The Burndy Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
10 For early emphasis on rst-person experience see Albertus Magnus, Books of Minerals, trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), pp. 153, 200; and Albertus Magnus, Libellus de alchimia, trans. and ed. Virginia Heines (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1958), p. 7: nothing else shall I write beyond what I have seen with my own eyes. On sixteenth-century claims see Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientic Revolution (Austin: Univ. Texas Press, forthcoming); and Daniela Bleichmar, Books, Bodies, and Fields: Sixteenth-Century Transatlantic Encounters with New World Materia Medica, in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. 8399. 11 Both Antonio Barrera, Local Herbs, Global Medicines: Commerce, Knowledge, and Commodities in Spanish America, in Merchants and Marvels, ed. Smith and Findlen (cit. n. 2), pp. 163181, and Schiebinger and Swan, eds., Colonial Botany, make clear just how inextricably linked natural history and commercial exploitation were in the age of European expansion.

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representation could more clearly state the sense that a new age was being ushered in as an old epoch left the stage. In the area between the two gures are depicted all the discoveries and inventions that brought the new era to pass for Stradanus and his contemporaries: America, the compass, cannon, gunpowder, the printing press, paper, a mechanical clock, medicinal plants from the New World (guiacum), distillation, Asian imports (silkworms), and more. The other engravings further document the mechanical arts that marked Stradanuss new world off from that of the ancients, including spectacle-making, windmills, the olive and cane sugar presses, armor polishing, the astrolabe, the art of engraving on copper, painting with oil pigments, and the establishment of longitude. Stradanus conveyed visually the sense expressed by others, such as Girolamo Cardano (1501 1576) and Michel Montaigne (15331592), that they were entering a new world. Cardano, for example, was much taken with the fact that in his day the whole world is known, whereas the ancients knew only a little more than a third. He waxed lyrical about the inventions of the moderns, such as pyrotechnics, the compass, and, above all, the typographic art: a work of mans hands, and the discovery of his wita rival, forsooth, of the wonders wrought by divine intelligence.12 The sense that the achievements of the present surpassed those of the ancients would grow into a generally held opinion by the seventeenth century, expressed forcefully by Francis Bacon, among many others. The most important cause of this change was the perceived power of artnow in the early modern sense of ars, the work of the human handin harnessing nature. Bacons reform of philosophy was in fact an attempt to employ the methods and processes of the arts in harnessing and investigating nature. In an early modern sense, then, art connoted the work of the human hand in imitating nature. Such an imitation of nature could lead to a faithful representation that in effect deceived the eye into thinking that it was real, such as in a still life that was painted after life or after nature, or it could lead to an imitation of the processes of nature, such as occurred in alchemy, for example. Art could also combine both the exact representation of nature and an imitation of the processes of nature, such as occurred most explicitly in the casting from life of the Nuremberg goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer or the French potter Bernard Palissy (see Figures 5 and 6).13 It has long been noted that the emergence of naturalism of the sort expressed in casting from life coincided with the rise of science in early modern Europe.14 In a classic article,
12 Girolamo Cardano, The Book of My Life (De Vita Propria), trans. Jean Stoner (New York: Dutton, 1930), p. 189. 13 Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004); and Hanna Rose Shell, Casting Life, Recasting Experience: Bernard Palissys Occupation between Maker and Nature, Congurations, 2004, 12:140. William Newman, Promethean Ambitions (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004), believes that the mimesis of the visual arts was in the main regarded as deceptive, while that of alchemy was often viewed as a true imitation of nature. For other evaluations of the status of the arts in the Middle Ages and early modern Europe see Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 80[1]) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1990); and David Summers, Pandoras Crown: On Wonder, Imitation, and Mechanism in Western Art, in Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture, ed. Peter G. Platt (Newark: Univ. Delaware Press, 1999), pp. 4575. 14 The literature is voluminous, and only a part can be cited here: Ellenius, ed., Natural Sciences and the Arts (cit. n. 1); A. C. Crombie, Science and the Arts in the Renaissance: The Search for Truth and Certainty, Old and New, History of Science, 1980, 18:233246; David Freedberg, Science, Commerce, and Art: Neglected Topics at the Junction of History and Art History, in Art in History, History in Art: Studies in SeventeenthCentury Dutch Culture, ed. Freedberg and Jan de Vries (Santa Monica, Calif.: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1991); Giorgio Santillana, The Role of Art in the Scientic Renaissance, in Critical

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Figure 5. Lifecast of a lizard, Wenzel Jamnitzer, sixteenth century, lead. Staatliche Museen zu BerlinPreuischer Kulturbesitz (Kunstgewerbemuseum). Photo: Irmgard Mues-Funke.

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Figure 6. Oval plate, attributed to Bernard Palissy, mid-sixteenth century, lead-glazed terracotta, 33 cm in width. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Otto Pa cht has investigated the beginnings of this naturalism, considering the tradition of botanical illustration, the ultimate source for which was an eleventh- and twelfth-century revival of medicine under the inuence of Arabic medical activity in Salerno, as well as a new attitude to nature in fourteenth-century Italian poetic treatments of the seasons and months. While naturalism came to be far more prevalent and even to predominate in artistic representation for some time from about the fteenth century, it is also the case that naturalistic representation has blossomed forth, apparently independently, in diverse locales at different timesfor example, at the court of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II of Sicily (11941250), in an extraordinary text on hunting and birds; in the Gothic cathedrals of France and in the German city of Naumburg, where, from about the 1230s, artisans carved naturalistic capitals and choir gures; in Padua under the Carrara family (ruled, with interruptions, from 1318 to 1405), which sponsored both the stunning naturalism of the Carrara Herbal and the efforts of Cennino Cennini in writing an artists
Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1959), pp. 3365; James S. Ackerman, The Involvement of Artists in Renaissance Science, in Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, ed. Shirley and Hoeniger (cit. n. 4), pp. 94129; Ackerman, Early Renaissance Naturalism and Scientic Illustration (cit. n. 1); Ackerman, Science and Visual Art, in Seventeenth Century Science and the Arts, ed. Hedley Howell Rhys (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 6390; and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993).

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manual, the ultimate goal of which was to represent nature faithfully; in the Lowlands under the Burgundian dukes, who commissioned both the astonishingly lifelike sculpture of Claus Sluter (Haarlem, ca. 1350Dijon, 1406) and the realism of particularity and specicity in the manuscript illumination of the Limbourg Brothers, as well as the nature studies of Robert Campin (active from 1406 to 1444), Jan van Eyck (before 13951441), and Rogier van der Weyden (ca. 1399/14001464); and even the naturalism of Flemish polyphonic music in which bird calls were replicated. The inuence of these Flemish artists spread, to Martin Schongauer of Colmar (ca. 14501491), to Albrecht Du rer (14711528) in Nuremberg, and to the artists trained by Du rer and his pupils who became the illustrators of the great naturalistic herbals of the sixteenth century, such as Hans Weiditz, with whom this essay began. Following in the Netherlandish tradition, the artists of the Dutch Republic employed naturalism for a lively and wide-ranging visual discussion about simple description and plain speaking, on the one hand, and illusionism, deception, vice, and immorality, on the other.15 As James Ackerman, Eric Jan Sluijter, and numerous others have pointed outand as this long list makes clearnaturalism emerged in many diverse and specic social and political circumstances, and it could take many forms and possess a multitude of meanings.16 And, of course, it is important to remember that a realistic or illusionistic representation of nature may not necessarily be more powerful than a symbolic or allegorical image in determining the way nature is viewed. In an essay on emblems and allegories of nature in the Renaissance, Katharine Park demonstrates a transition from depicting nature as active and creating to depicting nature as a passive, fertile wet-nurse gure. Park views this shift as resulting from an increasing distance between the human and natural worlds that eventually made more plausible the sense that the body of nature needed to be anatomized and studied to yield her secrets. Historians have also made clear that a commitment to naturalistic representation is not necessarily a trustworthy guide to the extent of eyewitness observation involved in producing that representation.17 Despite these caveats, it is fair to argue that artistic naturalism was bound up in complex ways with the emergence of new attitudes to nature and to the pursuit of natural knowledge that formed a crucial part of the Scientic Revolution. Artistic naturalism and new forms of natural investigation in early modern Europe were neither sufcient nor necessary causes for one another, but once they converged they became intermeshed with one another and
15 Otto Pa cht, Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar Landscape, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1950, 13:1346; Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, The Art of Falconry: Being the De Arte Venandi cum avibus of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, trans. and ed. Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1943); and Lynn White, Jr., Natural Science and Naturalistic Art in the Middle Ages, American Historical Review, 1947, 52:421435 (carved capitals and choir gures). The literature on Dutch still-life painting is vast and growing. Of most relevance to art and science connections are Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1983); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987); and Schama, Perishable Commodities: Dutch Still-Life Painting and the Empire of Things, in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 478488. 16 Ackerman, Early Renaissance Naturalism and Scientic Illustration (cit. n. 1), usefully discusses the various forms naturalism took from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. See also Claudia Swan, Ad vivum, Naer het leven, From the Life: Dening a Mode of Representation, Word and Image, 1995, 11(4):353 372. 17 Katharine Park, Nature in Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and Emblems, in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 5073; Sachiko Kusukawa, Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures, J. Hist. Ideas, 1997, 58:403427; and Landau and Parshall, Renaissance Print, 14701550 (cit. n. 4), p. 253.

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were mutually reinforcing. Although this relationship may have been historically contingent, rather than strictly causal, its effects were therefore no less powerful and important. As I have argued in The Body of the Artisan, important components of empiricist techniques and the study of nature originated with the skilled artisanal practices of observing and representing that emerged in the fteenth and sixteenth centuries.18 This naturalistic representation was dependent on practices of visual observation but went beyond just vision and description; it was, instead, a bodily imitation of nature that resulted in embodied skill and knowledge. This bodily knowledge gave the artisan, in his own estimation, the ability both to render visible the invisible powers of nature and to extract positive knowledge from nature. Naturalistic representation formed much more than a visual practice; it was a mode of investigating, understanding, and knowing nature. Moreover, by means of naturalistic images, artisans presented themselves as self-aware experts on the processes and transformations of nature. Some artistsmost clearly, for example, Albrecht Du rerused this position to argue (in his works of art as well as his treatises) that direct access to nature and the ability to effect productive knowledge had the same authority as certain knowledge, or scientia; this was demonstrated not in words but, rather, by his production of works of art. Artist/artisans such as Du rer strove to establish their status as observers, representers, and knowers of nature and used images to engage in a kind of theorizing about nature. In doing so, they articulated a body of claims about nature and about the sources of natural knowledge. Artisans thus engaged in a profound way in constituting the goals and attitudes of natural history and natural philosophy during the early modern period. Their representations of nature surely communicated information and made possible an accurate description of the objects of nature, as Ivins argued, but, more important, they helped change the view of what constitutes positive, certain knowledge. They answered in new ways questions about what the foundations of scientic knowledge are and how such knowledge is to be gained. Their techniques of observation and representation were deeply important in the development of empirical science, but perhaps more foundational were their claims about the primacy of nature and the power and promise of natural knowledge. Artist/artisans, then, helped constitute the aims and methods of the study of nature during the fteenth and sixteenth centuries, articulating a new kind of authority for nature. The examination of art and science thus helps us see that art and artisans were fundamental (but not exclusive) motors of the Scientic Revolution. Artistic naturalism could also engender a culture of natureas it did in Nuremberg in the wake of Albrecht Du rerin which communities of laypeople and scholars began to learn to draw and observe, to collect and commission naturalistic representations of all kinds. The fashion for naturalistic representation helped to raise the intellectual and social status of the artisans who represented nature and to cultivate a taste for nature study (which could include simultaneously the natural historical study of objects and the pure aesthetic enjoyment of verisimilitude, a combination seamlessly displayed in the work of Maria Sibylla Merian, for example). In her scholarship on early American naturalists, including such gures as William Bartram (17391823) (see cover illustration), Amy Meyers makes the further point that the things of nature and their verbal and visual representations were constitutive of communities of artists, collectors, and naturalists and that, in turn, these communities shaped disciplines and created knowledge.19 For the community of natural
The following paragraph is drawn from Smith, Body of the Artisan (cit. n. 13). Amy Meyers, From Nature and Memory: William Bartrams Drawings of North American Flora and Fauna, in The Culture of Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740 to 1840 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, forthcoming).
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historians Meyers studies, to investigate nature was to glory in the interplay of nature and human art, in divine and human creation and artice, in the potential for human utility and pleasure, and, especially, in the community of their fellow nature enthusiasts, as they pored over the things of nature and particularly over the verbal and visual descriptions of those natural things. The objects of nature thereby gained a kind of amplication by being represented in words and images and then discussed by a group of like-minded men. In various settings, and increasingly throughout the early modern period, from the great commercial cities of Augsburg and Nuremberg to New Spain, the early British colonies, and the American Republic, artists and their naturalistic representations helped to form collections of natural and art objects at the same time that they helped to constitute communities of collectors, scholars, and patrons, all of which acted as agents in the shaping of natural knowledge. In a similar vein, in work on painters contemporary with Galileo, Eileen Reeves has eloquently shown that communities of artist/artisans and natural philosophers shared a culture and that their ways of seeing and depicting were reciprocally inuential.20 As the collection of essays Picturing Science, Producing Art, edited by Caroline Jones and Peter Galison, notes, science and art are both image-making and knowledge-producing activities. We must consider the ways in which these characters caused them to overlap in early modern Europe. David Freedberg has written extensively on images and visual culture, most recently arguing, in The Eye of the Lynx, that Prince Federico Cesi (15851630) experienced a loss of faith in picturing and a growing ambivalence as to whether the senses yielded knowledge of nature. The end point of this development, according to Freedberg, is articulated by Linnaeuss truculent statement: I do not recommend the use of images for the determination of genera. I absolutely reject themalthough I confess that they are more pleasing to children and those who have more of a head than a brain. I admit that they offer something to the illiterate. . . . But who ever derived a rm argument from a picture.21 According to Freedberg, Cesi and his immediate contemporaries in the seventeenth century lay somewhere in between these two poles of condence and disdain ever hopeful, but beginning to doubt that the large numbers of images they commissioned might lead them to know nature in any absolute sense. More than a concern about picturing, Freedberg seems here to have uncovered a tension between the abstract and the particular in the investigation of nature, one that may have been brought to a head by the attempt to engage with natural particulars by making images of them. There is no doubt that the tension between general and particular was a motor of early modern debates about making natural knowledge, but it is also the case that the picturing of nature went on unabated into the eighteenth century and beyond. Thus, picturing natureand, more especially, picturing nature in a naturalistic mannerwas an important component of the early modern investigation of nature. But if we understand art in the early modern sense as an imitation of the processes of nature,
20 Heidrun Ludwig, Nu rnberger naturgeschichtliche Malerei im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Marburg an der Lahn: Basilisken-Presse, 1998); Mark Meadows, Merchants and Marvels: Hans Jacob Fugger and the Origins of the Wunderkammer, in Merchants and Marvels, ed. Smith and Findlen (cit. n. 2), pp. 182201; Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, Introduction: Commerce and the Representation of Nature in Art and Science, ibid., pp. 125; and Eileen Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997). On the communities formed and the overlap between science and art in the context of the Kunstkammer see Kaufmann, Mastery of Nature (cit. n. 14). 21 Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998); and David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2002), p. 413.

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then art and science overlap in very fundamental ways; indeed, they might even be regarded as the same thing: technoscience.22 This returns us to an early question in the history of science about the craftsman and the scientist. Many mechanical artists, painters, engineers, and architects in early modern Europe were also investigators of nature, of course, and Reijer Hooykaas and Paolo Rossi have shown the ways in which the goals and values of the arts contributed to the formation of the new science. More recently, Florike Egmond has offered a wonderfully nuanced account of the practices of representation of Adriaen Coenen (15141587), a Schevening sh merchant and scribe to the sh auction clerk who kept a memory book of his observations on sea life from 1530 to 1587. Egmond argues that such lay observers in the area of natural history were the sources of certain practices of observation and description, techniques taken up by others at a higher social level in the course of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.23 Another such example of the overlap between artisanal practice and natural history can be found in the manuscript recipe book and instructional manual of an anonymous Parisian goldsmith from the late sixteenth century. This artisan makes explicit natural historical observations and experiments on the behavior of reptiles, instructing the reader in catching, keeping, feeding, killing, and, nally, molding and casting in metal the creatures from life:
MOULDING SNAKES: Before moulding your snake . . . do not remove its teeth, for [then] . . . snakes suffer gum pain and cannot eat. Keep your snake in a barrel full of bran, or, better, in a barrel full of earth in a cool place, or in a glass bottle. Give your snake some live frogs or other live animals, because snakes do not eat them dead. Also Ive noticed that when snakes want to eat something or to bite, they do not strike straight on, on the contrary they attack sideways as do Satan and his henchmen. Snakes have small heads, but very large bodies, they can abstain from eating for 7 or 8 days, but they can swallow 3 or 4 frogs, one after the other. Snakes do not digest food all at once, but rather little by little. . . . If you worry and shake your snake, it will bring up digested and fresh food at the same time. Sometimes 2 or 3 hours after swallowing a frog, it can vomit it alive. If your snake is long, mould it hollow, and if you want to mould it with its mouth open, put some cotton with a little melted wax into its mouth.24

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Alongside such explicit natural historical observations are numerous experiments on the behavior of sands and clays and on ring techniques, as well as directives for the best methods of casting reptiles. We can see, then, how this goldsmith, in order to produce his ornamental representations of nature, explored the behavior of natural materials in a systematic and empirical way. This is echoed in other artisans manuals, which advise constant trial: It is necessary to nd the true method by doing it again and again, to have a superabundance of tests . . . not only by using ordinary things but also by varying the quantities, adding now half the quantity of the ore and now an equal portion, now twice
22 Helen Watson-Verran and David Turnbull, Science and Other Indigenous Knowledge Systems, in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff et al. (London: Sage, 1995), pp. 115139. 23 Reijer Hooykaas, Humanisme, science et re forme: Pierre de la Rame e (15151572) (Leiden: Brill, 1958); Hooykaas, The Rise of Modern Science: When and Why? British Journal for the History of Science, 1987, 20:453473; and Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). There are many other more recent works on scholars and craftspeople; see Pamela H. Smith, Introduction, in Body of the Artisan (cit. n. 13), pp. 328, for a fuller list of recent authors. On Coenen see Florike Egmond, Natuurlijke historie en savoir prole taire, in Komenten, monsters en muilezels: Het veranderende natuurbeeld en de natuurwetenschap in de zeventiende eeuw, ed. Egmond, Erick Jorink, and Rienk Vermij (Haarlem: Uitgeverij Arcadia, 1999), pp. 5371. 24 Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, MS Fr 640, R 62 039, p. 109, feuillet 107.

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and now three times.25 In this reading, then, early modern artisans were the scientists of their day. Because art is long and space is short, I will explore only two nal avenues that may repay further thinking about the relationship between science and art. The rst area that might prove fruitful is the work of historians writing on religious imagery. In The Visual and the Visionary Jeffrey Hamburger has written persuasively about the new place of objects and images in devotional practices beginning in the twelfth century.26 In a fascinating account of the novel bodily- and object-centered spirituality practiced by cloistered nuns in Flanders, which engendered new attitudes to devotional objects and new types of images in religious practices more generally, Hamburger charts an important shift in the attitude to material things and their representation as a soteriological bridge to the divine. Although the fteenth century would see a partial repudiation of these new practices and a constriction on nuns bodily devotion, and local iconoclasm would begin in the sixteenth century, such important shifts in the view of objects and images cannot be without importance for the pursuit of knowledge about nature. One need only think of sixteenthcentury religious reformers well-known attitudes to nature and the things of nature as sources of Gods revelation, the growth of collections of natural and art objects in the Kunstkammern, the interest in particulars and curiosities, the still-lifes of the Netherlands and the paradox of representing moral truths through sensuous (and sensual) perception, and the lifelike trompe loeil of Baroque churches to be convinced that much further exploration of the relationship of images, materiality, and spirituality to the investigation of nature in early modern Europe is warranted.27 The last dimension of the relationship between art and science that I will consider is the attempt by art historians, museum curators, and conservators to understand the techniques of making used by artists and artisans. Some of the most interesting recent work that has implications for the relationship between art and science follows in the footsteps of Michael Baxandall, whose Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy set a course for the study of visual culture by art historians and historians of science alike by positing the existence of a period eye, an early modern way of seeing and apprehending a painting that can be recovered by the historian through the study of audiences, texts, and contemporaneous art theoretical treatises. Baxandalls incredibly fertile approach to the study of art, manifested in a stream of articles and booksand most strikingly, perhaps, in The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany tried to understand the signicance of the art-making process to the artists themselves. This is an effort that Svetlana Alperss The Art of Describing followed up very suggestively.28 This approach has enormous importance for historians of science, for it forces us to ask, rst, What is the artisans understanding of nature and the natural processes of which he or she is a master? Second, it brings us to
25 Vannoccio Biringuccio, The Pirotechnia, trans. Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi (New York: Basic, 1943), pp. xvi, 143. 26 Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone, 1998). 27 James Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1995); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 11501750 (New York: Zone, 1999); and Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2002). 28 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1980); and Alpers, Art of Describing (cit. n. 15).

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consider how making is implicated in knowing. These questions have broad ramications for the history of early modern science and technology because, well into the nineteenth century, artisans were the experts on natural processes and the behavior of natural materials, a role that new experimental philosophers began taking on in the seventeenth century. Despite this, historians have generally treated artisanal expertise as the result of rote learning in a workshop setting; indeed, they have often ignored the conditions and materials of making entirely. They have viewed craft knowledge as merely mechanical, inexible, and noninnovativelearned by rote practice rather than through theoretical or empirical investigation. This is odd, because new literature in the sociology of knowledge has shown that much modern science involves experiential and tacit knowledgehow knowing is making, in other words.29 In order to understand what changed in the investigation and knowledge of nature in the Scientic Revolution, we must understand how making relates to knowing. Did artisans possess what might be called a vernacular science of matter? Was there a body of beliefs about nature and the behavior of natural materials that underpinned workshop practices? Several historians have approached this question from a variety of viewpoints. In his remarkable work on Benvenuto Cellini (15001571), Michael Cole has explored the practical reason and working intelligence of this goldsmith and bronze caster, drawing out beautifully the signicance of the materials he employed and the profound and polyvalent meanings that his representation of certain things could hold: the blood that gushes from Medusas trunk and severed head in his Perseus, or the gures and elements represented in his salt cellar. Through a careful study of medieval paint pigments and their recipes, Spike Bucklow has also explored the paradigms that appear to have informed medieval painters.30 Finally, the investigation of making and knowing has signicance for the history of science because it offers a way to reframe discussion about the relations between craft and natural philosophy in the early modern period, to see them both as underpinned by a broad shared view of nature, along the lines that Roger Chartier suggested a decade ago when he urged historians to abandon the dichotomy of popular and elite and to view knowledge in early modern Europe as held in common but used differently at different levels of society.31 The case could be made that the type of natural investigation carried out by artisans (think of the life-casting goldsmith) was very similar to that among other groups (physicians and natural historians, for example). In a like vein, pigment makers and metalworkers apparently all held the viewas did many working alchemiststhat sulfur and mercury are key to the transformations they observed in their processes of making. For these artisans, knowing and making were intimately bound up with one other. These cases
29 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987); and Harry M. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientic Practice (London: Sage, 1985). 30 Michael W. Cole, Cellinis Blood, Art Bulletin, 1999, 81:215235; Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002); Spike Bucklow, Paradigms and Pigment Recipes: Vermilion, Synthetic Yellows, and the Nature of Egg, Zeitschrift fu r Kunsttechnologie und Konservierung, 1999, 13:140149; Bucklow, Paradigms and Pigment Recipes: Natural Ultramarine, ibid., 2000, 14:514; and Bucklow, Paradigms and Pigment Recipes: Silver and Mercury Blues, ibid., 2001, 15:2533. 31 Roger Chartier, Culture as Appropriation, in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), pp. 230253. Anne Secords work on nineteenth-century artisans, including her forthcoming book, Artisan Naturalists (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, forthcoming), has done much to illuminate these issues. I thank her for allowing me to see her work in progress.

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indicate that the spheres of art/technology/making and science/knowledge should not be viewed as separated by an epistemological gulf but, rather, that we should attempt to think with Chartier about ways in which artisanal making and knowing began to be employed by new groups of people in the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

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