Picturing Machines 1400 1700

How technical drawings shaped early engineering practice. Technical drawings by the architects and engineers of the Renaissance made use of a range of new methods of graphic representation. These drawings—among them Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawings of mechanical devices—have long been studied for their aesthetic qualities and technological ingenuity, but their significance for the architects and engineers themselves is seldom considered. The essays in Picturing Machines 1400–1700 take this alternate perspective and look at how drawing shaped the practice of early modern engineering. They do so through detailed investigations of specific images, looking at over 100 that range from sketches to perspective views to thoroughly constructed projections. In early modern engineering practice, drawings were not merely visualizations of ideas but acted as models that shaped ideas. Picturing Machines establishes basic categories for the origins, purposes, functions, and contexts of early modern engineering illustrations, then treats a series of topics that not only focus on the way drawings became an indispensable means of engineering but also reflect the main stages in their historical development. The authors examine the social interaction conveyed by early machine images and their function as communication between practitioners; the knowledge either conveyed or presupposed by technical drawings, as seen in those of Giorgio Martini and Leonardo; drawings that required familiarity with geometry or geometric optics, including the development of architectural plans; and technical illustrations that bridged the gap between practical and theoretical mechanics.

How technical drawings shaped early engineering practice. Technical drawings by the architects and engineers of the Renaissance made use of a range of new methods of graphic representation. These drawings—among them Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawings of mechanical devices—have long been studied for their aesthetic qualities and technological ingenuity, but their significance for the architects and engineers themselves is seldom considered. The essays in Picturing Machines 1400–1700 take this alternate perspective and look at how drawing shaped the practice of early modern engineering. They do so through detailed investigations of specific images, looking at over 100 that range from sketches to perspective views to thoroughly constructed projections. In early modern engineering practice, drawings were not merely visualizations of ideas but acted as models that shaped ideas. Picturing Machines establishes basic categories for the origins, purposes, functions, and contexts of early modern engineering illustrations, then treats a series of topics that not only focus on the way drawings became an indispensable means of engineering but also reflect the main stages in their historical development. The authors examine the social interaction conveyed by early machine images and their function as communication between practitioners; the knowledge either conveyed or presupposed by technical drawings, as seen in those of Giorgio Martini and Leonardo; drawings that required familiarity with geometry or geometric optics, including the development of architectural plans; and technical illustrations that bridged the gap between practical and theoretical mechanics.

"An exploration of depictions and use of water within Renaissance Italy, and especially in the work of polymath Leonardo da Vinci. Both a practical necessity and a powerful symbol, water presents one of the most challenging problems in visual art due to its formlessness, clarity, and mutability. In Renaissance Italy, it was a nearly inexhaustible subject of inquiry for artists, engineers, and architects alike: it represented an element to be productively harnessed and a force of untamed nature. Watermarks places the depiction and use of water within an intellectual history of early modern Italy, examining the parallel technological and aesthetic challenges of mastering water and the scientific and artistic practices that emerged in response to them. Focusing primarily on the wide-ranging work of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)-at once an artist, scientist, and inventor-Leslie Geddes shows how the deployment of artistic media, such as ink and watercolor, closely correlated with the engineering challenges of controlling water in the natural world. For da Vinci and his peers, she argues, drawing was an essential form of visual thinking. Geddes analyses a wide range of da Vinci's subject matter, including machine drawings, water management schemes, and depictions of the natural landscape, and demonstrates how drawing-as an intellectual practice, a form of scientific investigation, and a visual representation-constituted a distinct mode of problem solving integral to his understanding of the natural environment. Throughout, Geddes draws important connections between works by da Vinci that have long been overlooked, the artistic and engineering practices of his day, and critical questions about the nature of seeing and depicting the almost unseeable during the early modern period"--

The period between the fifteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries saw a great many changes and innovations in scientific thinking. These were communicated to various publics in diverse ways; not only through discursive prose and formal notations, but also in the form of instruments and images accompanying texts. The collected essays of this volume examine the modes of transmission of this knowledge in a variety of contexts. The schematic representation of instruments is examined in the case of the 'navicula' (a versatile version of a sundial) and the 'squadro' (a surveying instrument); the new forms of illustration of plants and the human body are investigated through the work of Fuchs and Vesalius; theories of optics and of matter are discussed in relation to the illustrations which accompany the texts of Ausonio and Descartes. The different diagrammatic strategies adopted to explain the complex medical theory of the latitude of health are charted through the work of medieval and sixteenth-century physicians; Kepler's use of illustration in his handbook of cosmology is placed in the context of book production and Copernican propaganda. The conception of astronomical instruments as either calculating devices or as cosmological models is examined in the case of Tycho Brahe and others. A study is devoted to the multiple functions of frontispieces and to the various readerships for which they were conceived. The papers in the volume are all based on new research, and they constitute together a coherent and convergent set of case studies which demonstrate the vitality and inventiveness of early modern natural philosophers, and their awareness of the media available to them for transmitting knowledge.

This fascinating book will be of as much interest to engineers as to art historians, examining as it does the evolution of machine design methodology from the Renaissance to the Age of Machines in the 19th century. It provides detailed analysis, comparing design concepts of engineers of the 15th century Renaissance and the 19th century age of machines from a workshop tradition to the rational scientific discipline used today.

Though Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570), the first illustrated cookbook, is well known to historians of food, up to now there has been no study of its illustrations, unique in printed books through the early seventeenth century. In Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy, Krohn both treats the illustrations in Scappi's cookbook as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations, including several newly-discovered hand-colored examples, connects Scappi's Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books. What emerges from both of these approaches is a new way of thinking about the place of cookbooks in the history of knowledge. Krohn argues that with the increasing professionalization of many skills and trades, Scappi was at the vanguard of a new way of looking not just at the kitchen-as workshop or laboratory-but at the ways in which artisanal knowledge was visualized and disseminated by a range of craftsmen, from engineers to architects. The recipes in Scappi's Opera belong on the one hand to a genre of cookery books, household manuals, and courtesy books that was well established by the middle of the sixteenth century, but the illustrations suggest connections to an entirely different and emergent world of knowledge. It is through study of the illustrations that these connections are discerned, explained, and interpreted. As one of the most important cookbooks for early modern Europe, the time is ripe for a focused study of Scappi's Opera in the various contexts in which Krohn frames it: book history, antiquarianism, and visual studies.

A landmark study of abstraction in architectural history, theory, and practice that challenges our assumptions about the meaning of abstract forms. In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, this book presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries. These divisions were anticipated by the architecture of antiquity, which established a distinction between manual and intellectual labor, and placed the former in service to the latter. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. In our own time, architectural abstraction serves the logic of capitalism and embraces the premise that all things can be exchanged—even experience itself is a commodity. To resist this turn, Aureli seeks a critique of architecture that begins not by scaling philosophical heights, but by standing at the ground level of material practice.

In Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences Karel Davids offers a new perspective on technological change in China and Europe before the Industrial Revolution. This book makes an innovative contribution to current debates on the origins of the 'Great Divergence' between China and Europe and the ' Little Divergence' within Europe by analysing the relationship between the evolution of technical knowledge and religious contexts. It deals with the question to what extent disparities in the evolution of technical knowledge can be explained by differences in religious environment. It takes a comparative look at the relation between technology and religion in China and Europe between c.700 and 1800 from four angles: visions on the uses of nature, the formation of human capital , the circulation of technical knowledge and technical innovation.