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Picturing Machines: 1400-1700

by Wolfgang Lefèvre, Editor
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
354 pp., illus. 129b/w. Trade, $40.00
ISBN: 0-262-12269-3.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens

jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.ac.be

By the end of the Middle Ages, books and manuscripts on architecture, urbanism, fortification, machines, agriculture, engineering, and so on, were increasingly illustrated by technical drawings. Those drawings are astonishing for many reasons. First, there is, of course, the very fact of their appearance, for the presence of technical drawings in medieval writings on the same subject was all but common. Second, there is the admiration they still inspire today, for the technical illustrations of this period are no less intriguing, complex, and inspiring than the better-known artistic or religious imagery. Third and most of all, there are finally the many riddles and questions raised for contemporary readers. Even for specialists, many questions of meaning and use continue to haunt these images, whose cognitive, epistemological, social and even ontological status is far from clear.

The collection of essays gathered by Wolfgang Lefèvre, senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, does not attempt to give an overall view of the social and scientific meaning of the very different ways in which machines used to be represented in the three centuries covered by the book. As the editor repeatedly stresses in both his general introduction and the smaller introductions of the various sections of the books, Picturing Machines: 1400-1700 tends to give priority to the close reading of key works, key authors, and key transformations of the period under question. Yet, despite of this methodological a priori, the editor’s contributions manage very well to put the very specialized contributions of the nine essays in a wider and coherent perspective. Hence, the major importance of this book for all scholars interested in issues of visual literacy and topics such as ocularcentrism and the history of visual representation in Western culture.

How Wolfgang Lefèvre tackles the three reasons of interest mentioned above gives a very good idea of the capacity of this book to transcend the apparent limitations of the close reading approach of individual topics.

Concerning the very appearance of the technical drawings, the editor presents a clear survey of the paradigm shift in technical culture in the early modern image. As Lefèvre argues, the study of technical drawings cannot be separated from that of the global scientific culture at the end of the Middle Ages. The development of new forms of division of labor, the spread of new forms of knowledge propagation and, therefore, of learning and instruction, the complexification of knowledge in general, which was no longer exclusively a matter of transmission of skills and experience, but also of science and speculation, and finally the connection with new types of communication with readers, for instance with possible sponsors with a real interest and training in technological devices, all these elements explain the paradigm shift between the "oral" Middle Ages and the "visual" early Modern Age.

As far as the second aspect of our reading of these images is concerned, the book continues the very welcome break, now usual in historical science studies, with the two stereotypes that have longtime hindered a more correct approach of ancient technical drawings: on the one hand, the fascination exerted by the aesthetic qualities of the images (and the fact that often these drawings were from the hand of "artists" such as Leonard da Vinci, only increased this type of misunderstandings); on the other hand, the denial of any real technical and scientific value to images that seemed incredibly naïve and ingenuous (the later belief in the "natural" status of monocular perspective has done a lot to discard the concrete scientific and technical use and usability of these drawings in which other types of representation were dominant). In either case, Lefèvre and the various contributors to the volume demonstrate very convincingly the necessity to exceed this double stereotype. Technical drawings of the early Modern period are no hidden or involuntary work of arts but devices of thinking, designing, and production of tools and environments. Yet this technological and scientific value can only be acknowledged if one accepts or manages to understand how these images were used: who made them, for whom they were made, how the maker and the reader of the images communicated, what was the role played by other instances of knowledge transmission, which other types of images were used in order to complete the technical drawings, etc. Picturing Machines. 1400-1700 focuses sharply on these issues, putting very consciously aside questions of aesthetics and politics, although the importance of these dimensions is of course not denied.

The third question, then, concerning the "what" and "how" of those images, occupies the central place of each contribution. In all cases, the authors show that technical images should be read and understood not so much as simple "visualizations" of already existing ideas or objects but as models that helped the thinking and hence the making of machines. In other words, the specific meaning of pictured machines can only be grasped provided one accepts to consider these images less in their retrospective than in their prospective dimension: technical images in the early modern period do not reproduce devices that already exist but devices one tries to imagine and to produce. Moreover, the communicative and performative space in which these drawings had to function is directly linked with the readers, most of them specialists themselves or amateurs with a strong, sometimes even vital interest in technology that used to work with them.

Picturing Machines. 1400-1700 is crucial also for another reason: the exceptional wealth of its illustrations, very well chosen and always captioned with perfect good sense. Even readers less familiar with a certain number of scientific insights or discussions which the makers of these drawings expected from their readership, will find in this book a superb encyclopedia of technical drawings in the early modern period. All these readers should feel encouraged to enter also the highly specialized articles of this book, which shall be appreciated by specialists as well as by amateurs.

 

 

 




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