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 editors
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.