Art, Science, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Author(s): Pamela H. Smith

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Isis, Vol. 97, No. 1 (March 2006), pp. 83-100
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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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 first 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 firsthand
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 fifteenth 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 Scientific Revolution.
More attention to the visual culture of early modern Europe, including religious and de-
votional 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.

T 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, 1532–1536) (see Figure 1) and those of the team of painter Albert Meyer,
transfer draftsman Heinrich Füllmaurer, 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 works—Otto Brunfels, Leonhard
Fuchs, and Andreas Vesalius—than with the artists who in fact made these volumes so
memorable that scholars think of them first when considering art and science in the early
modern period. The fact that the scholar-naturalist-physicians are more familiar to histo-
rians 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, 97:83–100

䉷2006 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
0021-1753/2006/9701-0005$10.00

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Figure 1. Hans Weiditz, woodblock, from Otto Brunfels and Hans Weiditz, Herbarium vivae eicones
imitationem (Strasbourg, 1532–1536), 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 view—or 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 meanings—as when we think of the “scientific illustrations” of these
sixteenth-century “scientific” texts—and with regard to their early modern definitions.
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. 2–3. The Burke Library at Union
Theological Seminary.

means. This essay will begin by considering how art, in the modern sense of the visual
arts, influenced 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 Scientific Revolution and, finally, suggests a restatement of the problem
in terms of “making” and “knowing.”
To return, then, to the remarkable images that first appeared in medical works of the
sixteenth century: although manuscript herbals, the manuals of health called tacuina san-
itatis, works of alchemy, and astrological broadsheets were commonly illuminated through-
out the Middle Ages, what have often been called the “scientific illustrations” of these
Renaissance volumes mark a departure in the visual culture of the early modern investi-
gation 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 sig-
naled in Leonhard Fuchs’s 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 de-

1
Leonhard Fuchs, De historia stirpium (Basel, 1542), pp. x–xi. I have used the translation in James S.
Ackerman, “Early Renaissance ‘Naturalism’ and Scientific 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. 1–17, on p. 17.

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scribes.”2 A bit more than a decade after Fuchs published his celebrated herbal, Georgius S
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 difficulty to posterity, in the same
way as to us difficulty is often caused by many names which the Ancients . . . have handed
down to us without any explanation.3

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 (Agricola’s
first 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 influence of these texts and the social, cognitive, and in-
tellectual 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. 63–82, on p. 77. Recent work, above all by Sachiko Kusukawa,
has shown how complicated Vesalius’s 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, Espe-
cially by Andreas Vesalius,” Preprint 281, Max-Planck-Institut für 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 figures 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 Dürer,”
Burlington Magazine, 1991, 133:588–597; 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. 130–148. On
Agricola as a humanist see Owen Hannaway, “Georgius Agricola as Humanist,” Journal of the History of Ideas,
1992, 53:553–560
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 débuts de l’imagerie alchimique (XIVe–
XVe siècle) (Paris: Editions le Sycomore, 1982); William B. Ashworth, Jr., “Natural History and the Emblematic
World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 303–332; 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 scientific 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 scientific process, required exact repeatability of communication, and this was
supplied by prints. Ivins thus regarded printmaking—an innovation of artists—as essential
to the development of science by naturalists and scientists. Peter Parshall has followed on
Ivins’s 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 counterfeit—an exact portrait
of a plant, animal, or human—began to be employed as a new type of visual evidence.
Further, he views botanical illustrations as having made possible the dissemination, com-
parison, and systematizing of botany that could lead to a taxonomic system of classifica-
tion. Parshall regards the appearance, within the space of a year, of Vesalius’s De humani
corporis fabrica and Fuchs’s 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,
1470–1550, 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 classification.6

Thus visual evidence came to have more importance in scientific investigation in general,
but it also changed the specific direction and content of botanical investigation.
Many historians have approached the interaction of art and science in early modern
Europe—still within the framework of the modern meaning of these terms—by way of
perspective construction. In the very early years of the fifteenth century, Filippo Brunel-
leschi (1377–1446) and his fellow Florentine artists developed perspective construction
to make a series of trompe l’oeil 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 (1400–1474) 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 (1401–ca. 1428) used mathematical

Press, 2000), pp. 291–314, esp. p. 296. Sachiko Kusukawa’s projected study on the use of images in early
modern scientific 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, 16:554–579
(on the counterfeit); and Landau and Parshall, Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (cit. n. 4), pp. 257–258.
7
Petrarch is quoted in Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification 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 S
was codified 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 mathe-
matics, the interaction of humanists and artisans, new modes of religious devotion, and
the annexing of classical aesthetic values, especially the proportional system of architec-
tural design by painters. David Summers has also discussed the rise of naturalistic per-
spective, 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 knowledge-
making, 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 mathe-
maticized; the laws of vision became the laws of nature.8
While the intersections of science and art in scientific illustration and perspective con-
struction 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
Vesalius’s and Agricola’s works, to couple (artisanal) visual and (humanist) verbal accu-
racy with the communicative potential of images is often accompanied by what appears
to be a new emphasis on first-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 mar-
velous, and the particular. Indeed, the Spanish civil servant Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo
(1478–1557) 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 Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific
Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991); J. V. Field, The Invention of Infinity: 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. 73–95; 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 Nat-
uralism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 15, 323. See also
Michael Baxandall, “The Bearing of the Scientific Study of Vision on Painting in the Eighteenth Century: Pieter
Camper’s De Visu (1746),” in Natural Sciences and the Arts, ed. Ellenius (cit. n. 1), pp. 125–132.
9
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general, 2.7, quoted in J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New,
1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), p. 21; and Agricola, De re metallica, trans. Hoover and
Hoover (cit. n. 3), pp. xxx–xxxi.

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that such an emphasis on first-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 Weiditz’s 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)
(1536–1605), entitled Nova reperta—“New Discoveries”—illustrated the distance be-
tween antiquity and the material and technological conditions of his own lifetime. The
frontispiece of this set of engravings is framed by two allegorical figures: 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 first-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 Scientific Revolution (Austin: Univ. Texas Press, forthcom-
ing); 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. 83–99.
11
Both Antonio Barrera, “Local Herbs, Global Medicines: Commerce, Knowledge, and Commodities in Span-
ish America,” in Merchants and Marvels, ed. Smith and Findlen (cit. n. 2), pp. 163–181, 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 S
an old epoch left the stage. In the area between the two figures are depicted all the dis-
coveries and inventions that brought the new era to pass for Stradanus and his contem-
poraries: America, the compass, cannon, gunpowder, the printing press, paper, a mechan-
ical clock, medicinal plants from the New World (guiacum), distillation, Asian imports
(silkworms), and more. The other engravings further document the mechanical arts that
marked Stradanus’s 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. Stra-
danus conveyed visually the sense expressed by others, such as Girolamo Cardano (1501–
1576) and Michel Montaigne (1533–1592), 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 typo-
graphic art: “a work of man’s hands, and the discovery of his wit—a 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 art—now in the early modern
sense of ars, the work of the human hand—in harnessing nature. Bacon’s reform of phi-
losophy was in fact an attempt to employ the methods and processes of the arts in har-
nessing 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 Palissy’s Occupation between Maker and Nature,” Configurations,
2004, 12:1–40. 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, “Pandora’s 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. 45–75.
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, 18:233–246; 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 Seventeenth-
Century 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 Scientific Renaissance,” in Critical

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Figure 5. Lifecast of a lizard, Wenzel Jamnitzer, sixteenth century, lead. Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin—Preußischer 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 Pächt 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 influence 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 fifteenth century, it is also the case that
naturalistic representation has blossomed forth, apparently independently, in diverse lo-
cales at different times—for example, at the court of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick
II of Sicily (1194–1250), 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 figures; in Padua under the Carrara family
(ruled, with interruptions, from 1318 to 1405), which sponsored both the stunning natu-
ralism of the Carrara Herbal and the efforts of Cennino Cennini in writing an artist’s

Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1959), pp. 33–65;
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. 94–129; Ackerman, “Early Renaissance ‘Naturalism’ and
Scientific 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. 63–90; 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. 1350–Dijon, 1406) and the realism of particularity and
specificity 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 1395–1441),
and Rogier van der Weyden (ca. 1399/1400–1464); and even the naturalism of Flemish
polyphonic music in which bird calls were replicated. The influence of these Flemish artists
spread, to Martin Schongauer of Colmar (ca. 1450–1491), to Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)
in Nuremberg, and to the artists trained by Dürer 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 descrip-
tion 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
out—and as this long list makes clear—naturalism emerged in many diverse and specific
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 alle-
gorical 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
figure. 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 Scientific Revolution. Artistic naturalism and new forms
of natural investigation in early modern Europe were neither sufficient nor necessary causes
for one another, but once they converged they became intermeshed with one another and

15
Otto Pächt, “Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar Landscape,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, 1950, 13:13–46; 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, 52:421–435 (carved capitals and choir figures). 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. 478–488.
16
Ackerman, “Early Renaissance ‘Naturalism’ and Scientific 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: Defining 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. 50–73;
Sachiko Kusukawa, “Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures,” J. Hist. Ideas, 1997, 58:403–427; and
Landau and Parshall, Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (cit. n. 4), p. 253.

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were mutually reinforcing. Although this relationship may have been historically contin- S
gent, 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 tech-
niques and the study of nature originated with the skilled artisanal practices of observing
and representing that emerged in the fifteenth 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 em-
bodied 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 prac-
tice; 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 artists—most clearly, for example, Albrecht
Dürer—used 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 Dürer 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 “scientific” knowl-
edge 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 prom-
ise of natural knowledge. Artist/artisans, then, helped constitute the aims and methods of
the study of nature during the fifteenth 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 Scientific Revolution.
Artistic naturalism could also engender a “culture of nature”—as it did in Nuremberg
in the wake of Albrecht Dürer—in 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 figures as William Bartram (1739–1823) (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
18
The following paragraph is drawn from Smith, Body of the Artisan (cit. n. 13).
19
Amy Meyers, “From Nature and Memory: William Bartram’s 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 artifice, 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 amplification 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 com-
munities 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 phi-
losophers shared a culture and that their ways of seeing and depicting were reciprocally
influential.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 cul-
ture, most recently arguing, in The Eye of the Lynx, that Prince Federico Cesi (1585–1630)
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 Linnaeus’s truculent statement: “I do not recommend the use of images
for the determination of genera. I absolutely reject them—although 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 firm argument from a
picture.”21 According to Freedberg, Cesi and his immediate contemporaries in the seven-
teenth century lay somewhere in between these two poles of confidence 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 nature—and, more especially, picturing nature in a naturalistic
manner—was 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, Nürnberger 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. 182–201; Pamela H.
Smith and Paula Findlen, “Introduction: Commerce and the Representation of Nature in Art and Science,” ibid.,
pp. 1–25; 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 S
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 represen-
tation of Adriaen Coenen (1514–1587), a Schevening fish merchant and scribe to the fish
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, finally, 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 I’ve 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

Alongside such explicit natural historical observations are numerous experiments on the
behavior of sands and clays and on firing 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 sys-
tematic and empirical way. This is echoed in other artisans’ manuals, which advise constant
trial: “It is necessary to find 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 Hand-
book of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff et al. (London: Sage, 1995), pp. 115–139.
23
Reijer Hooykaas, Humanisme, science et réforme: Pierre de la Ramée (1515–1572) (Leiden: Brill, 1958);
Hooykaas, “The Rise of Modern Science: When and Why?” British Journal for the History of Science, 1987,
20:453–473; 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 crafts-
people; see Pamela H. Smith, “Introduction,” in Body of the Artisan (cit. n. 13), pp. 3–28, for a fuller list of
recent authors. On Coenen see Florike Egmond, “Natuurlijke historie en savoir prolétaire,” 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. 53–71.
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 final avenues that may
repay further thinking about the relationship between science and art. The first 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 fasci-
nating 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 fifteenth 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 im-
portance for the pursuit of knowledge about nature. One need only think of sixteenth-
century religious reformers’ well-known attitudes to nature and the things of nature as
sources of God’s 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 l’oeil 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 contem-
poraneous art theoretical treatises. Baxandall’s incredibly fertile approach to the study of
art, manifested in a stream of articles and books—and most strikingly, perhaps, in The
Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany—tried to understand the significance of the
art-making process to the artists themselves. This is an effort that Svetlana Alpers’s The
Art of Describing followed up very suggestively.28 This approach has enormous importance
for historians of science, for it forces us to ask, first, What is the artisan’s 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, 1150–1750 (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 ramifications S
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 learn-
ing in a workshop setting; indeed, they have often ignored the conditions and materials of
making entirely. They have viewed craft knowledge as merely mechanical, inflexible, and
noninnovative—learned by rote practice rather than through theoretical or empirical in-
vestigation. This is odd, because new literature in the sociology of knowledge has shown
that much modern science involves experiential and tacit knowledge—how knowing is
making, in other words.29 In order to understand what changed in the investigation and
knowledge of nature in the Scientific 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 under-
pinned workshop practices? Several historians have approached this question from a va-
riety of viewpoints. In his remarkable work on Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), Michael
Cole has explored the practical reason and working intelligence of this goldsmith and
bronze caster, drawing out beautifully the significance of the materials he employed and
the profound and polyvalent meanings that his representation of certain things could hold:
the blood that gushes from Medusa’s trunk and severed head in his Perseus, or the figures
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 significance 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 metal-
workers apparently all held the view—as did many working alchemists—that 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 Sci-
entific Practice (London: Sage, 1985).
30
Michael W. Cole, “Cellini’s Blood,” Art Bulletin, 1999, 81:215–235; Cole, Cellini and the Principles of
Sculpture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002); Spike Bucklow, “Paradigms and Pigment Recipes: Ver-
milion, Synthetic Yellows, and the Nature of Egg,” Zeitschrift für Kunsttechnologie und Konservierung, 1999,
13:140–149; Bucklow, “Paradigms and Pigment Recipes: Natural Ultramarine,” ibid., 2000, 14:5–14; and Buck-
low, “Paradigms and Pigment Recipes: Silver and Mercury Blues,” ibid., 2001, 15:25–33.
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. 230–253. Anne Secord’s 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 cen-
turies.

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