Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance

7 Openness and Authorship II: Painting, Architecture, and Other Arts

Chapter 7 Openness and Authorship II Painting, Architecture, and Other Arts D uring the sixteenth century, artisan practitioners and their patrons increasingly construed arts such as painting, sculpture, and architecture as liberal arts, characterized by both learning and skill. This rising cultural status came about for complex reasons, including the appearance of books devoted to such arts; the development of theories of art and architecture that stressed their foundation in mathematics; a growing emphasis on the ingenuity and originality of the individual artist; and the founding of academies of art as alternatives to the workshop, which included in their membership both practitioners and learned men.1 Painting, architecture, and other decorative arts flourished as families of oligarchs , bankers, and patricians increasingly engaged in conspicuous consumption . The display of power and wealth required the construction, furnishing, and ornamentation of palaces; it necessitated elaborate dress based upon the manufacture of luxury goods such as silks, brocades, and precious jewelry; and it required decorative items and fine wares—majolica pottery, panel paintings, tapestries , inlaid wood cabinets, and other luxuries of all kinds. In newly extravagant ways rulers and patricians signaled their wealth and power by large-scale construction projects, including enormous and enormously expensive fortifications that served both practical and symbolic functions, and by the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods.2 As worldly goods and ornamentation gained symbolic value, both practitioners and learned men wrote books that described particularly those arts that provided the material foundations for conspicuous luxury. As we have seen, this activity of authorship developed significantly within the manuscript culture of the fifteenth century. Aided by the printing press, authors continued to write books on painting , architecture, and sculpture as they also treated topics such as pottery and goldsmithing. Commentaries on the De architectura of Vitruvius and independent treatises on architecture aroused particular interest. Authors continued to dedicate such books to wealthy and powerful patrons. Practitioners and patrons at times became collaborators. Practitioners became authors, sometimes struggling to learn Latin and to acquire knowledge of ancient texts and modern learning. Their more learned contemporaries, including patrons, sometimes aided them. Meanwhile, certain princes and wealthy patricians schooled themselves in the constructive arts with the aid of skilled clients and other practitioners.3 Authorship on architecture and other arts furthered communication and collaboration among the wellborn, the learned, and the skilled. Numerous interactions developed in the form of conversations and in the actual planning and execution of projects such as the construction of villas, loggias, and gardens. As important as actual collaboration are the representations of collaborative discussions within dialogues and other kinds of writings, similar to those we have seen in military writings. Communication across social boundaries concerning architecture and other arts of design and construction became commonplace in midsixteenth -century circles of painters, architects, and humanists and could blur (although not extinguish) hierarchical social distinctions. Elite individuals interested in the constructive arts communicated with trained artisans who wrote treatises and who understood their work within a cultural sphere far more extensive than fabrication pure and simple. A broad middle ground of communication, a trading zone of knowledge, developed between the wellborn who were seriously interested in the constructive arts and the skilled individuals who became their employees, clients, teachers, and sometimes friends. Authorship and the Arts in the Southern German Cities Southern Germany, as we have seen, in the fifteenth century produced a signi ficant number of manuscript writings primarily on gunpowder artillery but also on machines and other mechanical arts. In contrast to this manuscript tradition are printed German books on Gothic design techniques, published in the 1480s. One of the authors, Mathes Roriczer, a mason, wrote booklets on designing pinnacles and on practical geometry. He was a member of a well-known family of masons in Regensburg. His father, Conrad Roriczer, supervised the construction of the Regensburg cathedral and intermittently served as overseer and adviser, often at a distance, for cathedral construction in nearby towns, including Nuremberg . Conrad trained his son Mathes as a mason and subsequently had him placed as his undermaster (Parlier) in the church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg. The hands-on supervision of St. Lorenz fell to Mathes, who eventually worked his way up to the post of Werkmeister, a position of direct authority made possible by his elevation from journeyman to master mason. Mathes remained in this Openness and Authorship II 211 position until, for unknown reasons, he was...