Picturing Machines: 1400-1700 (review)

By the end of the Middle Ages, books and manuscripts on architecture, urbanism, fortification, machines, agriculture, engineering and so on were increasingly illustrated by technical drawings. Those drawings are astonishing for many reasons. First, there is, of course, the very fact of their appearance, for the presence of technical drawings in medieval writings on the same subjects was anything but common. Second, there is the admiration they still inspire today, for the technical illustrations of this period are no less intriguing, complex and inspiring than the better-known artistic or religious imagery. Third and most of all, there are the many riddles and questions raised for contemporary readers. Even for specialists, many questions of meaning and use continue to haunt these images, whose cognitive, epistemological, social and even ontological status is far from clear.

This collection of essays gathered by Wolfgang Lefèvre, senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, does not attempt to give an overall view of the social and scientific meaning of the very different ways in which machines were represented in the three centuries covered by the book. As the editor repeatedly stresses in both his general introduction and the smaller introductions of the various sections of the books, Picturing Machines: 1400-1700 tends to give priority to the close reading of key works, authors and transformations of the period under question. Yet, despite this methodological a priori, the editor's contributions manage very well to put the very specialized contributions of the nine essays in a wider and coherent perspective. Hence, the major importance of this book for all scholars interested in issues of visual literacy and topics such as ocularcentrism and the history of visual representation in Western culture.

How Wolfgang Lefèvre tackles the three reasons of interest mentioned above gives a very good idea of the capacity of this book to transcend the apparent limitations of the closereading approach to individual topics.

Concerning the very appearance of the technical drawings, the editor presents a clear survey of the paradigm shift in technical culture in the early modern image. As Lefèvre argues, the study of technical drawings cannot be separated from that of the global scientific culture at the end of the Middle Ages. The development of new forms of division of labor; the spread of new forms of knowledge propagation and, therefore, of learning and instruction; the complexification of knowledge in general, which was no longer exclusively a matter of transmission of skills and experience, but also of science and speculation; and finally the connection with new types of communication with readers, for instance with possible sponsors with a real interest and training in technological devices—all these elements explain the paradigm shift between the "oral" Middle Ages and the "visual" early modern age.

As far as the second aspect of our reading of these images is concerned, the book continues the very welcome break, now established in historical science studies, with the two stereotypes that have long hindered a more correct approach to technical drawings from earlier eras: on the one hand, the fascination exerted by the aesthetic qualities of the images (the fact that often these drawings were from the hands of "artists" such as Leonard da Vinci only increased this type of misunderstanding); on the other hand, the denial of any real technical and scientific value to images that seemed incredibly naive and ingenuous (the later belief in the "natural" status of monocular perspective has done much to denigrate the concrete scientific and technical use and usability of these drawings in which other types of representation were dominant). Lefèvre and the various contributors to this volume demonstrate very convincingly the necessity of exceeding this double stereotype. Technical drawings of the early modern period are not hidden or involuntary works of art but devices for thinking and for designing and producing tools and environments. Yet this technological...