The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (review)

Pamela Smith's new book provides an interdisciplinary history of the evolution of a medieval, text-oriented explanation of nature to an experiment-centered production of knowledge that pointed the way to Enlightenment science. Central to her thesis is a new audience for "an artisanal epistemology": knowledge attained through practice, which transcended its normal workshop boundaries through contact between variously formed hybrid practitioners, from writing artists to experimenting gentlemen scientists.

The northern European (and some Italian) artists, alchemists, and physicians who populate Smith's case studies worked in societies that maintained hierarchical divisions between modes of working and learning, where class distinctions were based on calibrations of physical effort in labor and on nobility of materials. Smith's artists are book-owning, treatise-writing inventors who recorded a growing self-consciousness about their contribution to the study of nature in textual and visual form, both of which Smith investigates to prove that "the history of naturalistic representation and the rise of modern science are interconnected" (p. 23).

Smith chooses three moments and places from which to take core samples of such hybrid activity, beginning with fifteenth-century Flanders. From a "pre-Eyckian" relationship to nature and to antiquity, Smith establishes a thread through Flemish panel painters—including Jan van Eyck—working in south German cities during the sixteenth century and finally in seventeenth-century Leiden, with a glance forward to the British Royal Academy. She establishes the doctor/alchemist Paracelsus as bridging the gap between artisanal knowledge and scientific theory, explaining that "alchemy was one of the few disciplines in which people worked both with texts and with their hands" (p. 142). The dissemination of Paracelsus's ideas increased acceptance for results attained through artisanal methods while having little effect on the status of artisans. As other historians of art and science have pointed out, the main exception to this phenomenon concerned the intense atmosphere of princely courts, which enabled (and sometimes ennobled) artists like Dürer, Palissy, and Wenzel Jamnitzer, who claimed liberal-arts status for their craft.

As evidence of artists' elevated claims both for their technical skills and for their knowledge of nature, Smith posits an increase in artistic naturalism alongside learned signature forms, treatise writing, and the use of arcane mottoes and aristocratic devices. Her challenge throughout is to track the decline of the Aristotelian dogma that separated theory from practice, or especially from techne, "the lowly, productive knowledge practiced by animals, slaves and craftspeople" (p. 17). By the end of the seventeenth century the production of effects through guided experimentation had become fundamental to the proof of theories about nature. Smith argues that "[Artisans'] epistemology, as articulated in texts, in conversations with scholars and their patrons, and in naturalistic works of art, suggested that direct access to nature was both possible and necessary, that knowledge was gained through bodily engagement with matter, that scientific knowledge . . . could be extracted from nature, and that the imitation of nature yielded productive knowledge" (p. 20).

The chapters linking the society of seventeenth-century artists and men of science are the most convincingly argued and fluidly written. The amusing deceptions of the tavern-painter Adriaen Brouwer, the ambitions of the alchemist Johann Glauber and his painter children, and a description of the aristocratic house and learned art collection of the Leiden medical professor Sylvius (exemplifying for Smith the shape of the new, active philosophy) prove Smith's thesis more eloquently than the assertion of northern primacy in discovering natural effects and artistic self-consciousness.

Smith understands that between the rigidity of the guilds and the exclusivity of academies there occurred a period of cross-fertilization at courts, in noble houses, and in artists' workshops, often under the radar of regulating authorities. She says that "such influence runs both ways, although at times I will stress one side of the equation more than another" (p. 22). Although the difficulty of keeping such a discourse evenly...