Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (review)

In his Nova Iconologia, Cesare Ripa chose a most unexpected image to represent the skills of a courtier — what he called artifitio. Decked in artfully embroidered robes, the aspirant to courtly success stands between a beehive and a winch, on which he lightly lays a hand. While the beehive represents the hard work done by Nature, the winch represents the defeat of Nature by ingenuity, performing marvelous feats of strengths with ease. Ripa glosses his emblem with a paraphrase from the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanical Problems: "we may by way of art triumph over those things in which we are opposed by nature."

Ripa's application of a mechanical simile to the courtier's contrived grace is at once incongruous and peculiarly apt, almost as ingenious as the courtier's (or mechanic's) machinations themselves. It provides a striking opening to Wolfe's book, which charts the relationship between ideal of courtly and political behavior on the one hand, and the simultaneous rise of interest in mechanics and machinery on the other. English literature provides the primary focus: the work concludes with a close reading of the figure of Talus in Spenser's Faerie Queene. Wolfe treats a remarkable range of English sources, from Gabriel Harvey to George Chapman, via Thomas Harriot and Henry Savile.

She begins, however, by tracing the origins of artifitio — mechanic's craft and courtier's art — in Renaissance Urbino, home both to the mathematicians Guido Ubaldo and Bernardino Baldi, and to Castiglione, the arbiter of courtly behavior. Machines are (or can be read as) a manifestation of sprezzatura, the nonchalant ease with which they achieve remarkable feats of strength mirroring the courtier's apparently effortless achievements and advancement. It must be said that, in the Italian case, this is a more often a matter of suggestive linguistic parallels in mechanical and political texts, rather than explicit association. Yet there are many English writers, in particular, who (like Ripa) forge a direct link between political and mechanical artifice.

Wolfe establishes, in exhaustive detail, that mechanics and political craft used a shared vocabulary of artifice. Courtly writers drew on metaphors of instrumentality and preternaturality. Engineers advertised the virtues that their arts own promoted: calliditas, astutia, sollertia, and dexteritas — all of which were trans-ferable to the slippery and deceitful practices of political advancement. Yet Wolfe is probably going too far in claiming that a work such as Kratzer's Canones Horopti (in which these words appear) offers "a new way of conceptualizing virtue for Tudor humanists and politiques" (95), or that "machinery clarifies and justifies political instrumentalism" for statesmen such as Lord Burghley and King James I (21). The causal link, which Wolfe clearly wishes to assert, is very difficult to establish from the texts themselves. Mechanicians were at court, and were among those who provided political writers with a source of metaphors. The mechanical writers themselves, moreover, were only few among many vying for a prince's attention. It is perhaps not surprising that these rhetorically-astute writers drew on political metaphors in order to pique their patron's interest.

Moreover, such metaphors are highly ambiguous. For instance, Wolfe reads the objects in Holbein's Ambassadors as emblems of the new mechanical "craftiness": shadows fall "ambagiously," a torquetum measures "eccentric motions" of planets, and the manual of double-entry bookkeeping teaches a practice which is, again, "crafty and ambagious" (102). These are precisely the morally ambiguous virtues required of ambassadors, themselves regarded as "instruments" of their masters (a metaphor which Wolfe traces brilliantly in this chapter). Yet surely itis just as possible to read these instruments as professions of openness and de- pendability: qualities which ambassadors may not actually possess but which they surely wish to portray. After all, although merchants were certainly guilty of "crafty" practices, double-entry bookkeeping was not itself necessarily one of these. Indeed, it may be thought of as a remedy against guile (as Tunstal says in a passage quoted by Wolfe) or...