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CHAPTER 1
The Artisanal World
Artisanal Self-Consciousness
In seeking out an artisanal worldview, we can look to the objects artisans fashioned, to the texts they wrote, and, as we saw in the case of Messerschmidt, to literate intermediaries who put their actions into a form both comprehensible and accessible to a wider audience. Before the beginning of the fifteenth century, we have very few texts written by artisans, but around 1400 artisans appear suddenly, in the words of one historian of technology, to "resort to pen and paper in a field where their fathers had been satisfied with memory and the spoken word." The result was a veritable explosion of technical treatises between 1405 and 1420. The artisans of northern Italy and southern Germany seemed to have felt particularly compelled to write down their modes of working, especially those in architecture, fortification building, and gunnery. Historians have largely accounted for this sudden shift from oral transmission to the medium of written treatises by pointing to new methods of warfare and the greater fragmentation of Europe into competing noble territories. A new political culture emerged out of these changes that gave artisans and their handwork a newly perceived importance in society. Furthermore, these writing artisans stood at the intersection of courtly and commercial forces. Freed from (or never possessing) guild membership by the rise of the courts and the greater intensity of commerce, artisans were forced to become more self-conscious about their practices and to make explicit claims for their skill and power because they were competing for patronage, livelihood, and fama.
The number of practicing artisans who combined craft with authorship is striking in this period, even if we consider only a few of the best-known "high" artists of Italy: Lorenzo Ghiberti (ca. 1378–1455), who created the relief panels of the Florentine Baptistry doors, wrote a treatise on sculpture in 1447; Antonio Averlino (ca. 1400–ca. 1469), called Filarete, who was trained as a goldsmith, dedicated an architectural treatise to Francesco Sforza in the early 1460s; Piero della Francesca (ca. 1420–1492) wrote tracts on perspective and practical mathematics; and, finally, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) wrote notes and treatises that were never published and, like many of the others, painfully taught himself Latin. These artisan-authors represent one stream of a confluence of humanist and artisanal interest (often in the service of the same noble courts) in architecture, fortification, mechanical problems, practice, praxis, and the common good. Scholars began expressing interest in the crafts for at least two reasons. First, because artisans had become economically and politically powerful and their products had come to be regarded as integral to the common good, and, second, because humanists saw the practical knowledge of artisans as a model of praxis that could be set against contemplation. The result of this confluence was a set of shared values: an emphasis on the union of practice and theory, and on the need to relate mathematics to practice and experience. As Pamela O. Long puts it, artisans' books enabled the mechanical arts to become "central features of moral and political life, as they also began to take part in the construction of knowledge itself." Long makes the argument that humanists and artisans shaped a set of values for the pursuit of knowledge and that the treatises and books of artisans contributed substantially both to the formation of these values and to the construction of new knowledge.
Self-Consciousness and Naturalism
At about the same time, another type of artisan began to articulate his mode of working, not by writing, but by producing a new naturalistic representation of nature (plate 1, figs. 1.1, 1.2). Fourteenth-century Italian artists had "developed a wide variety of stratagems for the evoking of space and for the depiction of solid forms in a more or less convincing manner," culminating in about 1340 in a rudimentary system of perspective construction. By 1400 Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) was beginning his experiments with perspectiva to represent the buildings of Florence on small panels using painters' perspective. The aim of art was shifting from evoking an image of the form of the thing depicted to, as Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) put it in about 1435, making a picture that was an "open window" through which the world was seen. The development of perspective in the Italian Renaissance has been extensively studied, but the almost contemporaneous development of naturalistic depictions of nature has not inspired nearly the same interest. This naturalistic art — beginning in northern Italy and spreading to Flanders, aided by close commercial ties — does not show the use of mathematical perspective construction (although the use of the vanishing point appeared in the north in about 1370), but instead employed a particularizing light and multiple points of observation, and, especially in the portraits, exhibited an interest in individual detail unmatched in Italy at this time.
Otto Pächt has traced the new depictions of nature back to a tradition of botanical illustration, the ultimate source for which was an eleventh- and twelfth-century revival of medicine under the influence of Arabic medical and scientific activity in Salerno. An herbal produced in Padua around 1400, called the Carrara herbal, emerged out of this tradition, but the naturalism of its illustrations (plate 1, figs. 1.1, 1.2) was without precedent in earlier herbals. It is a vernacular Italian translation made in the closing years of the fourteenth century of the Liber Serapionis aggregatus in medicinis simplicibus by the ninth-century Arab author Serapion the Younger (Ibn Sarabi) on medicinal plant simples. The illustrations in this codex all include close observation and some are drawn from pressed specimens (plate 1), practices probably partly associated with the medical faculty at the university in Padua. Yet these illustrations are not strictly descriptive, that is, they do not always adhere to the function of an illustration in a medicinal herbal, as they do not represent complete botanical specimens, often lacking root, stalk, leaf, flower, or fruit. As Pächt notes, this is significant because it indicates the dawning of a painterly aesthetic, in that it both begins "to see in plant portrayal an aesthetic problem" and deliberately confuses painted and real space (thus is illusionistic). It is also significant as an expression of empiricism; as Pächt puts it: the illustrator "is an illusionist who prefers the empirical truth of the one-sided view to the lifeless completeness of an abstract image." Pächt goes on to speak of this illustrator's "courage to turn his back on all patternbooks and to look nature straight in the face." I would argue that this empiricism comes not so much out of the heroic mix of science and art posited by Pächt, but, rather, out of a new self-consciousness on the part of the artisan. Caught between patronage and market forces similar to those that operated on fortification builders and gunners, this artisan articulated his methods not in treatises, but in paint.
The Carrara family, rulers of Padua from 1318 to 1405, commissioned what came to be known as the Carrara herbal, and their interests contributed to the self-consciousness of the artist and the new attitude toward nature evident in it. Besides employing the artist who illustrated the Carrara herbal, they commissioned remarkably naturalistic portraits, and their funerary monuments show evidence of the sculptors having worked from death casts of their faces and hands. Their palace was painted with lifelike animals. Under their patronage, the painter Cennino d'Andrea Cennini penned Il libro dell'arte, a manual for painters, in which he states that painting is the imitator of nature and describes the technique for exact replication by casting from life for the first time since antiquity. Much more will be said about Cennini and casting from life in the following chapters, but it is important to note here that Cennini's treatise signals both a self-aware artisan concerned with justifying the mechanical arts and a potent interest in nature at the Carrara court. The interest in nature on the part of the Carrara family was undoubtedly related to their own precarious and "unnatural" hold on power. The family had risen through the communal government of the city, from which they had subsequently seized power, with the result that they possessed political legitimacy neither from pope nor emperor. Instead they based their authority on the language of the jurists at the university in Padua who claimed that government must imitate nature; the same kind of language the commune had employed when it originally separated itself from the local seigneury. Claiming the natural reasonableness of their rule, the Carrara family thus walked an uneasy course between the claims of the commune that they were unnatural tyrants and the assertions of the pope that they stood outside any divinely ordered hierarchy. They appear to have employed nature (and artisans) to construct a theater of state that would make authoritative their claims to legitimate rule, or, at the very least, they used nature as a way to display their mastery. The naturalism of the Carrara herbal was an artisan's response to this discourse about nature and also a statement of the importance of his own part in the construction of this theater of state. In this respect, the herbal's illustrations are analogous to Cennino Cennini's written treatise on painting. Both come out of the elevation of the artisan and of nature in the theater of state that constituted a central mode of governing at the Carrara court.
As Pächt notes, the fruits of this attention to the details of nature were not reaped in Italy, where only Pisanello made more frequent use of this "discovery of the non-human world," but in the north, particularly in the Burgundian Netherlands. Here again, a noble family foreign to the Lowlands attempted to "naturalize" their right to rule. The wealthy and independent Flemish cities, grown rich from their textile production, had always been difficult to control, for the indigenous counts as much as they would be for the Burgundian dukes. From the marriage on 19 June 1369 of Philip the Bold, brother to the king of France and duke of Burgundy (duke since 1363, ruled the Netherlands 1384–1404), and Margaret of Male (ruled jointly with Philip 1384–1405) that joined Burgundy and the Netherlands, the conflict between the cities and the dukes was nearly constant, as both attempted to pursue their own goals in the Lowlands. Out of the forced integration of foreign nobles and urban burghers resulting from their rule, a great efflorescence in music, panel painting, and elaborate court celebrations emerged, especially under the rule of Philip the Good (d. 1467) from 1419 to 1467. The wealth of rich Netherlandish cities, containing some of the densest population in Europe, and the intensive agriculture of the countryside provided Philip with the means to assert an autonomous position from which he could contend with the emperor and the warring kings of England and France. After he moved his court to Flanders in 1420, Philip spent much of the first half of his reign consolidating his power within the Lowlands, dealing with conspiracies by the indigenous noble estates and urban rebellions (Ghent from 1432 to 1436 and Bruges in 1436). The force by which he kept his subjects sometimes only tenuously under control was a mix of armed might and theater of state. The duke's effort to hold rich and powerful local urban dwellers, nobles, and self-assertive artisan guilds under his control while at the same time claiming his right to status within the Holy Roman Empire engaged him in an escalating contest of patronage and cultural production that employed visual display to maintain authority. The culture of display and "living nobly" that he engendered at his court became a model for all of Europe, especially after 1454, when he had sworn a crusade in Lille with a spectacle of unprecedented proportions, known as the Feast of the Pheasant, and had attended the 1454 Reichstag in Regensburg, during which he vaunted his luxurious lifestyle before the eyes of the higher-ranking but less splendorous (and poorer) German princes. The gains made by this journey to Regensburg were reaped in 1477 when Philip's son Charles the Bold (ruled 1467–77) married off his daughter Mary of Burgundy to Maximilian, heir to the Holy Roman Empire. Philip's journey to Regensburg also mobilized a discourse on the relationship of nature and art that reverberated throughout Europe, but especially in the lands under Habsburg rule and among the urban patriciate, eager to imitate the consumption of the nobility. From the beginning of the dukes' reign in the Netherlands, the Burgundians had patronized the highly skilled Flemish artisans and their humble and sometimes earthy subjects. In manuscript illuminations, sculpture, and eventually panel paintings, these artisans often took their subjects from peasant life and from the natural world. This subject matter arose partly from the new religious ideas and practices of the devotio moderna, which emphasized the imitation of Christ in his humility. Under the dukes of Burgundy, these "low" genre subjects came to constitute a noble aesthetic. The dukes encouraged the local aesthetic of depicting nature, and they collected natural curiosities and wonders, because nature had a heightened meaning in their realm. Even the ars nova of Flemish polyphonic music, such as that of Guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois, employed nature in its imitation of birdsong. Through a discourse elaborated in lavish court banquets, "joyous" city entries, tapestries, stainedglass windows, panel paintings, and all manner of rich objects of nature and art, they organized a narrative that articulated the naturalness and rightness of their own rule in the Netherlands. In so doing, they desired to make autochthonous their reign in a homeland that was not their own.
The amalgam of court nobility and urban bourgeoisie that shaped this culture of display gave power to the artisans who made possible its operation, and Netherlandish artisans were aware of the power they possessed. A declaration of their self-consciousness and their power — both in the sense of artisanal virtuosity and social power — can be found in the illusionism of a joke played by the Limburg brothers, Pol, Hermann, and Jehanequin, on Jean de France, duc de Berry, on New Year's Day in 1411. The brothers, born into a family of artisans in Nijmegen, had entered the duke's service in 1404. As a New Year's gift in 1411, they presented him with a block of wood painted to precisely resemble a book. This simulacrum of a book not only reaffirmed the social bonds of patronage and homage between the duke and his court painters, but also demonstrated the Limburg brothers' power of representation, made clear their wit, and alluded to the artisanal virtuosity of their "real" books, the Belles Heures and their great masterpiece, the Très riches heures (1411–16) produced for the duc de Berry. This last manuscript achieved its fame through its apparently precise depictions of courtly scenes and natural landscapes (plate 2,fig. 1.3). Naturalism of this kind was meant to inspire wonder, and its ability to do so through illusionistic representation had long been an essential part of the valuation of the mechanical arts. Such a capacity was especially appreciated and validated by nobles like the duc de Berry and the Burgundian rulers of the Netherlands in this period.
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Excerpted from "The Body of the Artisan"
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