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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
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Bookshelf
The Art of Science
By Marjorie Harth
REVIEW: The Body of the Artisan: Art and
Experience in the Scientific Revolution
By Pamela H. Smith, the Edwin F. and Margaret Hahn Professor in the
Social Sciences and associate professor of history, Pomona College
The University of Chicago Press, 2004, 367 pages, 180 illustrations
(28 in color), $35.00
Pamela Smith introduces her new book, The Body of the Artisan: Art
and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, by recounting an early
fascination with the highly detailed drawings and watercolors of
16th-century Nuremberg artist Albrecht Dürer, renderings—of grasses,
beetles, and the like—of such astonishing verisimilitude that to
20th-century eyes they appear almost surreal.
 It was the particularity and, especially, the illusionism of these works
that first captured Smith’s attention and that ultimately led her to
pose some of the key questions her book addresses: What do these works
of art tell us about how artists understood nature and their
relationship to it? Why did naturalism in art and the “new philosophy”
of science arise simultaneously in the 16th and 17th centuries? What was
the relationship of the two? An accomplished historian of science and
teacher who has previously published on the subject of alchemy, Smith’s
interests and methodology now extend well beyond close observation of Dürer’s paintings. Nonetheless, one of the many pleasures her book
offers is the intense focus it brings to works of art. A scholarly and
exhaustively researched treatise, its theoretical arguments clearly
articulated, its conclusions thoroughly defended, The Body of the
Artisan is also a brilliant reminder of the value of direct,
personal engagement with the unique work of art and of the limitless
wealth of information and insight to be gained from the process.
Smith argues that in early modern Europe, the work of the artisan—the
craftsperson who directly engaged nature, both through close observation
and through the physical manipulation of matter required to make
objects—influenced the development of the “new philosophy” of empirical
science, providing a model for its practitioners. During the period in
question (late 15th to late 17th century), the construction of knowledge
came to be seen as active, based not in abstract theory but in
interaction with nature. Artisans employed naturalism, Smith writes, “in
order to make claims about their status as active knowers, about their
knowledge of nature, and about their mode of working.” The artisan’s
articulation of this epistemology, accomplished primarily through the
objects he produced, in turn influenced scholars’ attitude toward
nature, which came to be seen as the authoritative source of knowledge.
The traditional view of the Scientific Revolution credits Sir Francis
Bacon (1561-1626) with transforming philosophy from a contemplative
discipline into the active, experimental model of “natural philosophy”
we now know as the scientific method. Countering this, Smith argues that
the notion of active engagement as essential to knowledge can be found,
before Bacon’s time, in the flourishing of naturalism in the art of
15th- to 16th-century Northern Europe and in the approach to nature and
workshop practices of those involved in its production. (It should be
noted that the significance Smith accords to Northern Europe has
implications as well for the history of art, which has traditionally
maintained that naturalistic representation developed most importantly
in Italy, where scientific perspective was formulated in the 15th
century.)
Furthermore, Smith locates the source of the new philosophy of science
not in the articulations of an individual “genius,” but rather in the
collective setting of the artisan’s workshop where masters and
apprentices dealt physically with the often cumbersome, unpredictable,
supremely messy materials and processes of art-making, and where
evidence of mastery lay in the objects that resulted, not in verbally
articulated theory. Like the alchemist who sought to transform matter,
the artisan engaged bodily with nature and his materials as a means both
to gain knowledge and to produce “effective” objects and processes. The
“artisanal epistemology” that Smith proposes, drawing upon scholarship,
theory, and (aptly) her own observations and hands-on experience in
studios and conservation laboratories, ultimately constitutes a new
narrative about the construction of knowledge and human creativity. In
her emphasis upon individuals commonly considered “marginal,” upon
sense-based, bodily activity traditionally deemed of a lower order, and
upon the collective nature of the workshop, Smith proposes a new and
significantly expanded understanding of the Scientific Revolution and of
the watershed historical period that changed forever the way we see and
understand the world.
One of the underlying themes of Smith’s book is the hierarchy, based in
Aristotle, that values theory and the work of the mind more highly than
physical, hand-craft. Smith points out that historians of both art and
science have traditionally worked from the premise that knowledge moves
downward—from the theoretical scholar, whose knowledge is based on
abstract systems and articulated verbally, to the practitioner, whose
craft knowledge is thought to consist of technical rules and practices
largely devoid of intellectual content and expressed by means of
tangible objects. Smith suggests that as the methodology of science was
being formulated in the 15th and 16th centuries, knowledge might well,
in fact, have traveled the other way, moving from the artisan’s
unmediated engagement with nature and “nonverbal literacy” up to the
humanist’s scholarly theorizing. Smith’s approach, which reflects a
significant shift in understanding the Scientific Revolution, is equally
valuable to the history of art, questioning the received notion that
ranks abstract, verbally articulated thinking above (and imagines it
wholly distinct from) hands-on practice. And Smith’s book confronts the
mind/hand dichotomy on more than one level, not only documenting these
hierarchies and their manifestations over time but also demonstrating
through her scholarly approach a belief in the value of “common”
knowledge gained through broad-based, social (and often bodily)
experience. The aptness of Smith’s methodology to her subject
demonstrates a degree of consistency that only enhances her arguments.
In developing her thesis, Smith focuses on three geographic and
chronological “centers.” In 14th- to 15th-century Flanders, she writes,
the flourishing of naturalistic painting exemplified by such masters as
Roger Campin, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden reflected a new
self-consciousness on the part of artists whose close observation and
imitation of the natural world led them to claim, by means of their
paintings, special access to the authoritative knowledge of nature. This
development is then traced in the work of 16th-century German artists
such as Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer, who drew the attention of
scholars, humanists, and, importantly, the religious and medical
reformer Paracelsus (1493-1541) who was instrumental in articulating the
artisanal way of knowing the world. Finally, the focus shifts away from
artists to two fascinating figures of the 17th-century Dutch Republic.
Johann Rudolf Glauber (1604-70) was an apothecary, entrepreneur and
seller of such “natural commodities” as healing salts. Part scholar,
part artisan, he took on the identity of “experimental philosopher,”
thus joining the new empiricism with commerce. Franciscus dele Boë,
known as Sylvius (1614-72), was a professor of medicine in Leiden and a
patron of the arts, who, Smith writes, epitomizes the way in which the
new, experimental philosopher began to distance himself from the
artisan. Smith’s thorough examination of Sylvius’s collection and its
installation in the house he designed for it extends traditional art
historical analysis to include the oft-neglected significance of taste
and what an individual’s collection and its presentation can reveal. The
trajectory Smith traces—of the interrelationship of artisanship and
“natural science”—concludes with a parting of the ways in the late 17th
century when the influence of natural philosophers such as Descartes,
Hobbes and Leibnitz, along with that of Calvinism and Neo-Stoicism, led
to increasing ambivalence about, and, ultimately, distrust of knowledge
gained from senses. It is not entirely surprising
to learn that the reassertion of Aristotle’s hierarchy coincided with
the institutionalization of the new philosophy in university curricula.
In sections devoted to each of these historical “moments” and in
supporting chapters on topics such as the role of the body and physical
labor in the artisan’s way of knowing the world, and the relationship of
artisanship to alchemy, Smith examines an extensive range of issues and
objects, creating so rich a tapestry of information and insight that a
succinct summary is all but impossible. Remarkably, given its conceptual
and scholarly complexity, The Body of the Artisan is not only
accessible but highly readable. Smith’s style is lucid, and her
arguments build, in much the way that the Flemish naturalists whose work
she studies created their exquisitely detailed panels, layer by
painstaking layer. Like a well-constructed lecture course, the text
proceeds logically, panning seamlessly from close focus on individual
artists, objects and historical minutiae to an overarching view that
makes clear where each fits in the larger narrative. Smith deals deftly
with the often troublesome definition of terms—artist, artisan, craft,
theory, science—that, as often as not, have different meanings today
than during the period in question; “artisan,” for example, which is
actually closer in meaning to our “artist,” is used deliberately in
order to reinforce the emphasis on hand-work that is central to her
thesis. Finally, but by no means least important, the richly illustrated
volume is exceptionally handsome in design—a physical as well as
intellectual pleasure.
Smith’s research for The Body of the Artisan was conducted with
the assistance of a Pomona College Steele Leave and grants from the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Getty Research Institute.
Reading her report of an enormously productive recent sabbatical, funded
by an Andrew Mellon New Directions fellowship, that included an
internship at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, I was led to
wonder whether her investigation of artisanal and alchemical processes
had resulted in the discovery of a means of increasing the number of
hours in her day. Certainly, Smith’s scholarship represents a remarkable
transformation of the raw material of history and culture into a
scholarly work of exceptional breadth, clarity and persuasiveness that
is also, as befits its subject, a stunningly produced object.
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