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Chapter 4 Authorship on the Mechanical Arts in the Last Scribal Age W ritings on the mechanical arts expanded greatly in the fifteenth century, especially in northern and central Italy and southern Germany. Throughout the century, authors created pictorial and textual books on machines of various kinds, gunpowder artillery, fountains and pumps, hydraulic works, painting, sculpture, architecture, and fortification—an array of disciplines classified as mechanical arts. This activity of authorship emerged from within manuscript culture , either before the invention of the printing press (ca. 1450) or outside of its influence. The printing press cannot be claimed as a cause, although eventually printed books on the technical arts proliferated.1 Scholars investigate these books mostly in relation to specific topics, such as gunpowder artillery or architecture. Here I explore them in terms of the cultural phenomenon of authorship. My thesis is twofold. First, authorship in the mechanical arts expanded because of a changing political culture in which the legitimacy of rulership was increasingly supported by the constructive arts. A new alliance of techneμ and praxis led to openly purveyed treatises on the mechanical arts. Second, the expanded production of writings on the mechanical arts, beginning in the fifteenth century but increasing exponentially in the sixteenth century and beyond, significantly influenced the culture of knowledge. In the early fifteenth century the legitimation of political and military power came to be closely associated with building construction and technical arts such as painting and sculpture. Rulers, princes, and military captains who wanted to consolidate their power achieved legitimation through the remodeling of urban space and the creation of material artifacts such as buildings, paintings, and sculpture. As Christine Smith put it, such projects were indicative of the “use of the built environment as evidence for the authority of state.”2 The architecture of the Renaissance city-state, including palaces, loggias, churches and cathedrals , and urban design itself, constituted legitimating modalities for the politi- cal authority of new urban elites. In addition, the ornamentation of this built environment—painting, sculpture, and the other decorative arts—served to display the power of rulers and reinforce their authority. In oligarchic republics such as Florence, Venice, Nuremberg, and Augsburg banking, commercial activity, and wealth did not ensure political legitimacy, which traditionally had been conferred by kinship ties to the nobility. Nevertheless , the German emperors relied on the patrician oligarchies of the free imperial cities in their struggle against recalcitrant German nobles. In Italy, men who started their careers as condottiere, military captains leading mercenary armies, often achieved autonomous power as princes of cities and territories. Initially they established control through military force, a consequence of their ability to command and lead soldiers. Thereafter, like the merchant oligarchs of the republics , they sought to augment their power and authority by additional means, such as the creation of visible manifestations of power, including the reordering of urban space, the construction and decoration of great palaces and churches, and the staging of elaborate festivals.3 The cultural value of many mechanical arts was enhanced by their explication in treatises dedicated to patrons. No longer the result of mere craft know-how, the built environment came to be seen as the material manifestation of rational and mathematical principles appropriately elaborated in books. Construction projects were carried out by machines that themselves became illustrated and discussed in codices. Similarly, the praxis of military leadership came to be closely associated with armaments and techniques, in contrast to most ancient models, in which generalship was perceived to rest on character rather than technology. Along with a new image of princes and rulers who controlled military technologies came a new technology—gunpowder artillery. Several developments, then, were intrinsically related: the legitimization of rulership; the elevation of the technical arts, in part achieved through textual and pictorial authorship; the rising status of some categories of workers involved in material production, such as architects, engineers, painters, and sculptors; and finally, the proliferation of writings on the mechanical arts. To suggest an expansion of such authorship in the fifteenth century is not to deny prior traditions of writing in the mechanical arts, both those discussed in earlier chapters of this study and others, especially medieval Islamic writings. Yet fifteenth-century authorship represents an expansion both in the number of treatises written and in the range of topics treated. Artisan practitioners wrote some of these books; university-educated men, including physicians and learned humanists , such as Alberti, wrote others. Most authors, whether trained in...

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