Picturing Machines, 1400-1700 (review)

In 1992, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press published Eugene Ferguson's Engineering and the Mind's Eye, a small jewel of a book that proved a capstone to his distinguished career as a curator, scholar, and teacher who was equally adept in history and engineering. That book also opened a new field of inquiry for technological history: to understand the nature of engineering design and practice through a focus on drawing. Now this superb collection of essays edited by Wolfgang Lefèvre goes well beyond Ferguson to outline the different genres of engineering drawing used in the Renaissance and their roles in structuring the work and knowledge of engineers and architects. Picturing Machines originated in a 2001 conference at the Max Plank Institute, organized by Lefèvre, David McGee, and Marcus Poppolow. Its nine chapters are specialized inquiries by nine accomplished contributors who also grapple well with the collective endeavor. The result is an impressive and coherent analysis of Renaissance and early modern engineering practice, well edited, beautifully illustrated, attractively designed, and very reasonably priced given its pictorial riches.

Although each contributor has varied topical interests, they share a common method: rigorously close analysis of extant drawings—"reading" the plans and sketches as primary source documents. Poppolow opens the book with a frank confession, that it is nearly impossible to determine the specific purpose or motive behind most of the roughly ten thousand machine drawings that survive today from Renaissance Europe. Yet he persuasively outlines four basic functions of drawings: representing designs to patrons, realizing projects in working plans, documenting work to build a body of engineering knowledge, and aiding theoretical inquiry into design properties.

McGee offers a highly original contribution in considering the remarkable endurance of "a singular kind of graphic representation" (p. 53), the tradition of using one drawing and one view to represent even complex machines. Rejecting the notion that design is essentially a cognitive process, he persuasively argues that "early machine drawing should be analyzed . . . as a form of doing rather than thinking" (p. 55). In that light, the one-drawing/ one-view genre well suited the engineer's practical and theoretical needs.

Rainer Leng focuses on the uses of drawings by an elite group of craftsmen—itinerant master gun makers in early-fifteenth-century Germany. He argues that their very mobility caused them to rely on drawings to communicate, expand, and preserve their expert knowledge and notes that such openness was remarkable, given the traditions of secrecy in skilled-craft guilds. Still, it is not clear to me that these drawings were a shared instrument among craftsmen rather than a sales device to enlist potential patrons. Leng's great contribution in this chapter is to tease out from his drawings a set of de facto rules that late-fifteenth-century craftsmen followed in creating their renderings.

In her contribution, Pamela Long contrasts Leonardo's drawing styles and goals of machines with those of a contemporary, Francesco di Giorgio Martini. For both men, machines were "modalities for understanding certain problems in the natural world, such as motion" (p. 118). But Long argues that di Giorgio really was a humanist, collating engineering knowledge for the benefit of patrons, while Leonardo sought to advance knowledge of statics and kinematics.

In an original and compelling chapter, Mary Henniger-Voss looks at the evolution of fortress designs in sixteenth-century Italy. She demonstrates how designers mediated in their plans among a conflicting range of design factors and goals: local topographic conditions, conceptions of defense and offense with the advent of gunpowder weaponry, geometric-design innovations for fortresses, and the predictive powers of plans and models in crafting effective defenses.

Filippo Camerota considers the genesis of various drawing genres or styles across the Renaissance that presented different kinds of projection, perspective, and stereometry. This somewhat arcane chapter offers a fascinating contrast between "painterly perspective" and the perspective techniques employed by instrument makers and other mechanicians.

Wolfgang Lefèvre takes on the ambitious goal of tracing the emergence of combined...