Pamela H. Smith’s The Body of the Artisan is a brilliant and beautiful book, an elegant addition to any scholar’s shelf. It makes the necessary next move of bringing the recent scholarship on science and art together by examining the influence of artisans who sustained and promoted art and science. Smith makes a powerful case for the unity of art and science, now disparate fields, in their early modern incarnations because of their mutual and intertwined commitment to realistic representation of the natural world, a realism grounded in the intimate knowledge of nature developed in and through the bodies of artisans.
Smith leads the reader through artisans’ workshops, alchemical laboratories, artists’ studios, and philosophers’ studies, beginning in Flanders in the fifteenth century, moving to the imperial cities of south Germany in the sixteenth century, and ending in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Given the fluidity of the intellectual and economic cultures of Europe in these Renaissance centuries, people, ideas, and influences from regions far from northern Europe, especially Italy, play an important role in Smith’s story, but her geographic locations nonetheless reflect real and vital confluences of artisanal energy that created innovative ways of knowing and representing the world. Smith’s contention is not that something new happened to laborers or artisans in the Renaissance. The bodily knowledge of nature that came from working with one’s hands had long been the artisan’s stock in trade, ever since the sons of Adam began earning their keep from the sweat of their brows. Rather, in the commercial centers of northern Europe across these three centuries, social pressures shaped attitudes toward nature, art, and knowledge in ways that made the seemingly timeless knowledge of artisans ever more useful and necessary to scholars and humanists, reformers and healers, and nobles and merchants, whose patronage of craftsmen and demand for their skills created a new artisanal self-awareness: an artisanal epistemology. As Palissywrote in 1563 in a fictive dialogue between “Theory” and “Practice,” “some philosophy is needed by laborers” . Some philosophers also began to discover that they needed what laborers already knew.
The Body of the Artisan opens with a study of the panel painters of Flanders in the early fifteenth century, especially the work of van Eyck, who brought a new degree of realistic naturalism to northern European painting. The painter’s ability to hold up a mirror to nature, not merely visually but even to the texture of the subject’s surface, was intended to transcend mere imitation and to produce through replication an inner knowledge, a deep understanding, of the generative processes of nature itself.
A longer middle section of the book follows these developments to the south German cities of the sixteenth century, focusing in particular on Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, the medical, alchemical, philosophical, and religious adept who articulated the artisanal epistemology that was emerging in the wake of Dürer, goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer, and other sixteenth-century craftsmen skilled in creating art that mirrored and reproduced nature. As a philosopher-polymath, Paracelsus “placed ‘doing’ higher than ‘knowing’ and praised the process of learning by experience, such as that of an artisan’s apprentice . . . He regarded [artisans] in their strivings to imitate nature and to represent nature realistically as coming closest to a true and unmediated knowledge of nature”. Paracelsus thus inverted the traditional trajectory of theory into practice, from knowledge to experience, that had dominated western philosophy since antiquity.
The last third of Smith’s book follows the legacy of Paracelsus as it was elaborated amid the rich cultural production of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. In the work of mystical philosophers such as Jakob Böhme; alchemical artisans including CornelisDrebbel, who ground the lenses for Huygens’s telescopes; entrepreneurial inventors such as Johann Rudolf Glauber; and medical innovators and art collectors such as Sylvius, the legacy of Paracelsus branched off in new directions. Under pressure and encouragement from the marketplace, artisanal knowledge subdivided into new forms of endeavor that we can recognize as the beginnings of modern fine arts and specialized sciences once we realize that subsequent practitioners of these “high” arts and abstract forms of natural philosophy purposefully detached their endeavors from their roots in the lowly practices of their artisan predecessors. Smith’s great accomplishment in charting this story is to bring to light and to illustrate with convincing elegance and clarity the vernacular science of the artisan that was repressed and forgotten by the institutionalizing process that created the new philosophy of modern science.
Mark A. Peterson (University of Iowa), William and Mary Quarterly, volumen LXIV, 1.
Indice.
1. Artisanal World.
2. Artisanal Epistemology.
3. The body of the artisan.
4. Artisanship, Alchemy, and a Vernacular Science of Matter.
5. The Legacy of Parcacelsus: Practitioners and New Philosophers.
6. The Institutionalization of the New Philosophy.
Datos de la obra: Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan. Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, University of Chicago Press, 2004.