Picturing Machines 1400–1700 (review)

As Marcus Popplow observes in the first essay in this volume, medieval and Renaissance drawings of machines have usually been studied by historians as sources for the current state of mechanical practice. In contrast, the general purpose of the essays in this volume, which came out of a conference at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin in 2001, is to examine drawings of machines in their own right, to reveal their graphical methods and techniques, and to determine why they were made and how they were used in the design and construction of machines. For his part, Popplow suggests that drawings of machines may be usefully classified by their social contexts of "contexts of employment." Drawings intended to advertise machines to a broad public he calls "presentational" (or sometimes, confusingly, "representational") since books of machine drawings were often presented to a patron. In addition, he distinguishes drawings made as part of the actual building of the machine from those made by engineers for their own records and from theoretical drawings, though he notes that all these categories can overlap and that some drawings are difficult to classify.

In tracing the origins of early modern machine design, David McGee looks at the work of Villard de Honnecourt, Guido da Vigevano, Konrad Kyeser, and Mariano Taccola, concluding that drawing offered these designers the freedom — from the constraints of both physics and actual construction — that permitted innovation. Rainer Leng parses master gunmakers' drawings from early fifteenth-century Germany to reveal an increasingly complex "grammar" of representation culminating a century later. Pamela Long explores the connections to higher learning of the machine drawings of Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Leonardo da Vinci, arguing that while Francesco linked his drawings to humanist architecture, Leonardo's reflect the influence of scholastic statics and dynamics. Both draughtsmen, she concludes, sought to transform drawing itself from a mechanical to a liberal art. Mary Henninger-Voss considers the role that drawings had in assessing the effectiveness of proposed fortifications (which were considered a kind of machine), arguing that measurement was increasingly invoked during the sixteenth century as providing the decisive criteria.

Drawing techniques themselves are the specific concern of several articles. Filippo Camerota traces the explicit codification of a number of drawing methods: linear perspective, orthographic (or soldierly) perspective, shadow perspec-tive, combined perspective (linked plan and elevation), and the stonemasons' geometry of rotation, overturning, and development. He argues that through the Renaissance there was the growing insight that perspective and geometric drawings were the same, culminating in the projective geometry of Girard Desargues in the mid-seventeenth century. The emergence of combined perspective drawings is traced in detail by Wolfgang Lefèvre, from Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Albrecht Dürer in the fifteenth century to when it became standard in the sixteenth. He suggests, rather inconclusively, that this method may have become established from stonemasons' practices for planning pinnacles. Jeanne Peiffer analyzes the use of geometrical projections in the drawings of Dürer, how these techniques were taught to artisans, and how they were received by more-theoretical men such as Daniele Barbaro and Egnazio Danti, ending with Philibert de l'Orme's mathematizations of stonecutters' methods and Girard Desargues's claim to offer a general method of projective geometry.

Finally, to illustrate a step in the movement of seventeenth-century mechanics beyond diagrams into abstract analytical mechanics, Michael Mahoney shows how Christiaan Huygens superimposed mathematical and dynamical relations on drawings of pendulums; then, with the help of a sketch by Huygens, he analyzes the controversy between Huygens and his clockmaker over the invention of the spiral-spring balance wheel.

This collection of essays begins with a general introduction by the editor, Wolfgang Lefèvre, who emphasizes the social roles of machine drawings; unfortunately, in the absence of external evidence, such social roles and the uses to which the drawings were actually put can only be inferred from the drawings themselves. The essays that follow...