In about 1770, an eccentric and apparently nearlyilliterate sculptor began an uncommissioned series of 69character heads (Figure 1), which have always puzzledart historians. Franz Xavier Messerschmidt (1736–1783)was extremely popular among the German nobility forhis portrait busts and so, when a visitor to his workshopin 1781 gave a detailed report of what he saw there, itaroused some interest.

According to this account, Messerschmidt was obsessedwith a strange ‘folly’. He believed that ghosts tormentedhim, among them (the worst, in fact) being the spirit ofproportion, who was envious of Messerschmidt’s knowl-edge of the laws of human proportions. Thus, whileMesserschmidt worked, the ghost of proportion causedpains in various parts of his body and Messerschmidtclaimed that he had to pinch himself and to pull the ap-propriate face in front of a mirror in order to break thepower of the spirit. The visitor recounted that, ‘Pleasedwith this system [of subduing the jealous spirit], Messer-schmidt resolved to represent these grimacing proportions…According to him there were sixty-four varieties… Everyhalf minute he looked into the mirror and with the great-est accuracy he pulled the face he needed.’ Messerschmidtapparently preferred the character heads to all his otherwork, because they expressed his knowledge and masteryof nature and of natural proportions1.

There are several remarkable points to notice about thisodd story: first, the bodily struggle of the artisan to createthese busts; second, his view that matter and nature areactive and that he must work with or against them toproduce realistic representations; third, his search for‘laws of proportion’, although in a manner we would nowregard as unscientific because they were somehow known

0160-9327/00/$ – see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0160-9327(99)01259-4 Endeavour Vol. 24(1) 2000 13

Artists as scientists: nature andrealism in early modern EuropePamela H. Smith

In about 1400, northern European artists suddenly began to depict the natural and human world in a‘realistic’ or ‘naturalistic’ manner. At about the same time, new ideas about how to describe naturerealistically emerged among scholars investigating the natural world. Over the next two centuries, thisnew approach to nature (which eventually became known as ‘science’) and the belief that it could providea realistic depiction of nature transformed human attitudes to nature and the material world. Artisans orcraftspeople were central to this transformation and thus more important than is usually recognized informing the new attitudes that characterized the Scientific Revolution.

Pamela H. Smith

Teaches the history of early modern Europe and history of scienceat Pomona College, Claremont, California, USA. She is the authorof The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the HolyRoman Empire (Princeton, 1994) and is now at work on a book,entitled The Body of the Artisan: Nature, Art and Science in EarlyModern Europe, about artisanal culture and vernacular epistemolo-gy in the scientific revolution.

Figure 1 Franz Xavier Messerschmidt, character bust called The Smell, c. 1770.Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

‘in the body’ of the craftsman; and, finally, the articulationof Messerschmidt’s ideas and actions by a literateintermediary. This is the knot of issues I will be tuggingat in this article, because they form a very fruitful nexusin helping us to understand the origins of the new sciencein early modern Europe. The emergence of a new naturalphilosophy – what eventually came to be called ‘science’– represented a momentous transformation in ourattitudes to nature and to the material world. Thistransformation involved a whole new set of beliefs aboutand practices involving nature. One of the most importantcomponents of this shift is that the pursuit of naturalknowledge became active and began to involve the body;the investigator of the natural world had to observe,record and engage with nature.

I believe that artisans or craftspeople were central inthis transformation. In this article, I examine the practiceof representing nature in a ‘realistic’ or ‘naturalistic’manner that gained momentum around AD1400 and arguethat this practice constituted a claim on the part of artisansabout their own social status and their mode of viewingnature. We can ‘read’ in their paintings and sculptures astatement that certainty is located in matter and nature,and that knowledge can be gained by observing andexperiencing – often by bodily struggle – the particularityof nature.

This artisanal epistemology assumed particular impor-tance in the sixteenth century, because scholars began tobe interested in it as a way to obtain knowledge of natureand to incorporate the artisanal epistemology into a newactive, empirical method of gaining natural knowledge,which Francis Bacon called the ‘New Philosophy, or

Active Science’, a phrase that, for Bacon, was an oxy-moron2. For these scholars, it was not at all clear how onecame to know nature, how one used one’s senses or howone produced things, and the artisans’ bodily encounterwith matter provided a model in the formation of the newscientific method. Thus, artisans and practitioners can beregarded as an important source for the new attitudestowards nature that were at the heart of the ScientificRevolution. To argue these points, I believe that we must understand what artisans sought to express and toconvey by their realistic representations; to this end, I willoffer several examples of artisanal productions and dis-cuss the use and significance of realism, or naturalism,in each.

Realism and efficacy

The kinds of meaning that a realistic representation mightcarry are many and varied. In 1338, the Sienese artisanLando di Pietro (d. 1340) sculpted a profoundly realisticCrucifixion. The fragments of this statue that survived thebombing of Siena in 1944 show clearly how Landoachieved this realism: he used joints, paste and parchmentto achieve the appearance of a suffering and specific per-son. The interesting point about this Crucifixion is that,when it was split open in the bombing, two inscriptionson parchment were found that Lando had placed insidethe head, one actually rolled up inside the nostril ofChrist. One stated ‘The Lord God made it possible forLando di Pietro of Siena to carve this crucifix in thiswood in the similitude of the real Jesus to remind peopleof the passion of Jesus Christ…and of the Virgin Mary,therefore you true and holy cross of Jesus Christ…renderthe said Lando to God.’3

C.W. Bynum has pointed out the bodily quality ofspirituality in the late middle ages, during which physi-cality became a means to the divine. Emphasis was placedon the humanity and thus the body of Christ4, and thisappears to have informed Lando. We can get another clueto his intentions by comparing a sixteenth-century magi-cal tract, entitled De arte crucifixi (About the Art of theCrucifix). This treatise purports to teach a magical art bywhich the reader can acquire the seven liberal arts and allof theology, resolve any intellectual query, and summonangels and spirits to foretell the future and to know thepast. The reader is instructed to ‘Make with your ownhands a carved image of our Lord hanging on the crosswith his arms outstretched… The more naturalistic andbeautiful the image, the more effective it will be – itshould be a complete and perfect image’. After a series ofrituals of purification and penitence, the crucifix makerwas then supposed to recite a prayer asking God ‘in thepresence of this crucifix’ to effect his wishes5. It wouldappear that the act of manually engaging with matter toproduce a realistic image could lead to both spiritual andnatural knowledge. Like other magic tracts, this one callsthe operation performed with the crucifix, an ‘experi-ment’ (experimentum), which would of course come to bea hallmark of the new philosophy. Realistic represen-tation, whether artisanal or magical, could be about pro-ducing tangible, efficacious things by bodily labour.

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Figure 2 Carrara Herbal. Convolvulus, c. 1400. BritishLibrary ms. 2020, f. 33.

Realism and artisanal self-consciousness

We are fortunate to have the inscriptions in Lando’s sculp-ture because, before about 1400, very few texts written byartisans exist. Around 1400, artisans appear suddenly, inthe words of one historian of technology, to ‘resort to penand paper in a field where their fathers had been satisfiedwith memory and the spoken word.’6 The artisans ofnorthern Italy and southern Germany seemed to have feltparticularly compelled to write down their modes ofwork, especially those involved in architecture, forti-fication building and gunnery. Historians have generallyaccounted for this sudden shift to a new medium bypointing to the new methods of warfare and the greaterfragmentation of Europe into competing noble territoriesthat gave these practitioners new importance in society.Furthermore, these writing artisans stood at the inter-section of courtly and commercial forces. Freed fromguild membership through the rise of the courts and thegreat increase in commerce, they were forced to becomemore self-conscious about their practices and to makeexplicit their claims for their skill and power because theywere competing for patronage, livelihood and reputation7.

At about the same time, another type of artisan began toarticulate his mode of working, not by writing but byproducing a new ‘naturalistic’ representation of nature8

(Figures 2,3). I see this realism as resulting from a newself-consciousness on the part of these artisans, not onlyabout their skill but also about their ability to comment onperception and cognition. Caught between the samepatronage and market forces that operated on fortificationbuilders and gunners9, they articulated their methods notin treatises but in paint.

We see this tendency developed particularly in fifteenth-century Flanders. The art historian H. Belting has arguedthat Flemish painters such as Jan van Eyck (d. 1441) andthe Master of Flemalle (Robert Campin, active 1406–1444) make significant social claims in their naturalisticart. First, these painters claimed that they were artisans ofa separate and higher order than their fellow artisans inthe guild of St Luke, a guild that included illuminators,leather gilders, jewellers, tapestry weavers, goldsmiths,sculptors and even saddle makers. Panel painting and,particularly, portraits became exceedingly popular amongmerchants and the nobility, and as these painters came torecognize their own economic power and success, theydeclared themselves to be unique in their guild. They didnot, however, denigrate their origins as artisans as theymight have but instead used their paintings to explain whythey were more skilled than other artisans in their guild.

They claimed to be superior by virtue of the medium in which they worked. This can be seen in these panelpainters’ self-consciousness about themselves as painters:they began portraying themselves in their own paintingswith great frequency10. More significantly, they began toportray the act of painting itself. For example, Rogier vander Weyden (1399/1400–1464), among others, painted arepresentation of St Luke producing a panel painting ofthe Virgin. This painting makes the claim that St Luke,patron saint of their guild, extended special and exclusiveprotection to panel painters.

In addition, Flemish painters maintained that they pos-sessed special abilities to observe and to imitate nature.Mirrors appeared frequently in their paintings, attesting totheir goal of and ability to mirror nature. Jan van Eyckclaimed to be able to produce a legally authentic likenessof a person. For example, the portrait of a scribe or notaryentitled Timotheos, in which van Eyck painted the‘inscription’ ‘Leal Souvenir’ beneath the portrait, makesthis point. ‘Leal’ today connotes loyal but, in van Eyck’sday, it had connotations of authentic or even ‘legal’ mem-ory. This interpretation of the painting is reinforced by thecontractual style in which Jan signed it: ‘Transacted onthe 10th day of October in the year of our Lord 1432 byJan van Eyck.’11

These painters claimed ‘autoptic authority’, that is, theauthority of the eye witness. It is the kind of authority thatanatomists claimed in their autopsia, or autopsies, and towhich authors writing about the new world made appealwhen they had no textual authorities to back them up12. InJan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Betrothal, a mirror behind thecouple reflects two figures, who may be actual legalwitnesses to the betrothal (or marriage) and are certainlymeant as eye witnesses to the event (Figure 4). Jan seemsto state that he too witnessed the scene he painted (andperhaps was present in the ceremony as one of the legalwitnesses), for he signed his painting over the mirror

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Figure 3 Carrara Herbal. Ear of Grain, c. 1400. British Library ms. 2020, f. 21.

‘Johannes de Eyck fuit hic’ (‘Jan van Eyck was here’). He thereby claims to have witnessed and mirrored theevent.

These artists claimed to mirror nature, but a muchdeeper significance than simply holding up a mirror canbe seen in this ideal by examining another of van Eyck’spaintings. In his Portrait of the Goldsmith Jan de Leeuw(1436), van Eyck inscribed in the frame a verse that playson the notion of the artist imitating the act of Creation inhis work. He stated the birth date of the goldsmith and thestarting date of his painting. Hans Belting has pointed outthe novelty of inscribing the date of commencementrather than of completion. He believes that van Eyck isasking the observer to compare the origin of the person bythe Creator to the origin of the work by the painter and tounderstand the painter as a second Creator and painting asa work that imitates God’s creation13.

Realism and the primacy of nature

Artisans in northern Italy and Flanders were particularlyinterested in naturalistic representation. One such ex-ample of what the great art historian E. Panofsky called‘pre-Eyckian realism’ can be found in the illustrations ofan astrological treatise from 1403 (Figures 5, 6). Theseimages suggest the meanings that realism could hold for

the artisans of northern Europe14. These images illustratean astrological treatise that went through several editions,during which the original thirteenth-century southern-italian illustrations were reworked.

In the fourteenth century, the classical images of thethirteenth-century manuscript were transformed in north-ern Europe into homelier portrayals. The moon, depictedas the goddess Luna or Diana in the Italian version, waschanged to a vigorous man roaming the woods. Thisassimilated the moon to Germanic folklore, in which‘moon’ is masculine in German (der Mond) and is alsointimately connected with vegetation and growth. In1403, when the manuscript was copied in Bruges, furtherchanges were made to produce these illustrations.Mercury, who had been represented by an idealized scholarand musician in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-centuryversions, was now represented, in Panofsky’s happy de-scription, as an ‘elderly composer, his bald head fringedby curly locks, listening to the inner voice with an ab-sorption bordering on mild insanity’. The moon has be-come a bent and ragged peasant, trowel in his pocket, ‘hisupturned, hook-nosed, hatchet face slyly evoking the ideaof a crescent.’15

I think that, for the anonymous artisan–illuminator ofthis manuscript, this peasant represented nature, for thepeasant was close to nature and intimately involved (withhis trowel) in the bringing forth of fruits. Furthermore, thepeasant’s work was closely connected with the principleof generation and growth associated with the moon; themoon was seen to dominate all alterable things. The im-portance of the moon in artisanal practices can be gleanedfrom a humanist author’s account of the beliefs of pottersafter loading the kiln:

prayers are offered to God with the whole heart, ever

thanking Him for all that He gives us. Fire is taken, having

an eye however to the state of the moon, for this is of the

greatest importance, and I have heard from those who are

old in the art and of some experience that, if the firing

happens to take place at the waning of the moon, the fire

lacks brightness in the same manner as the moon its

splendour.16

‘Natural’ images have thus replaced classical models in the illustrations of this manuscript. I believe that thelack of desire to classicize results in part from northernEurope’s relationship to the ancient world and to thecorpus of classical texts. The lack of classical remains in the north led later northern humanists to sometimes-desperate language that accused the Italians of hiding thebooks of Tacitus that dealt more fully with the north, andclaimed that German, or even Swedish, was actually theoriginal language from which Greek and Latin werederived. In the visual and cultural world formed by thislack of connection to classical models, the artisan soughthis images partly in his own experience of work and in hisimitation of nature, as did our fifteenth-century illumi-nator. In such a world, Nature became prior to classicaltexts. This is not surprising to us now but was a novelty inthe fifteenth century.

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Figure 4 Jan van Eyck betrothal portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and GiovannaCenami, 1434. National Gallery, London.

Realism as a claim to certain knowledge

Naturalism gained momentum in the north throughout thefifteenth century and took on added significance in thework of Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), whose watercolourpaintings of landscapes, small animals and pieces of grass-land are highly realistic, detailed records of specific (and,in the case of the landscapes, locatable) observations. Inhis treatises on Perspectiveand Human Proportion, Dürerstated that certainty lay in nature and that this certaintywas expressed by realistic representation.

But life in nature manifests the truth of these things.

Therefore observe it diligently, go by it and do not depart

from nature arbitrarily, imagining to find the better by

thyself, for thou wouldst be misled. For, verily, ‘art’ [i.e.

Kunst, or theoretical knowledge, as opposed to Brauch] is

embedded in nature; he who can extract it has it.17

To see this point more clearly, we can turn to Dürer’scontemporary Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim,called Paracelsus (1483–1541), a self-consciously newphilosopher. In his reform of medicine, indeed of allknowledge, he took the methods of the artisan to be theideal mode of acquiring certain knowledge. Paracelsusseems to have attempted to learn from those who workedwith their hands; he gathered experiences from peasantsand artisans, and questioned miners on their knowledge ofdiseases and remedies. He lectured in the vernacular,admitted barber–surgeons to his courses18 and, in 1527,

issued a broadside against traditional medical education,advocating instead a curriculum based on first-handexperience of nature. In his works, he constantly held upartisans and their knowledge of the material they work asmodels for gaining natural knowledge and for creatingeffects. I would argue that he articulated an artisanalmode of cognition.

For Paracelsus, knowledge of nature was gained notthrough a process of reasoning but by a union of thedivine powers of mind and of the entire body with thedivine spirit in matter. This he called ‘experience’. Inexplaining this concept, he drew upon the terminology oftheory and practice but inverted the traditional under-standing of these terms in a remarkable way. Paracelsusdefined scientia (certain knowledge formed into adiscipline by its logical structure) as the divine power innatural things, which the physician must ‘overhear’ andwith which he must achieve bodily union in order to gainknowledge of medicines19. Thus, science (or certainknowledge) was, for Paracelsus, within nature. Experi-ence was the process by which the physician united withnature and learned this science.

Scientia is inherent in a thing… For instance, the pear tree

has scientia in itself, and we who see its works have

experientia of its scientia… Thus in this book, I show the

way scientia enters into you…20

This is an extraordinary inversion of the concepts oftheory and practice. In the traditional organization ofknowledge that was current at the time, theory was certainknowledge based on geometrical demonstration; by contrast,

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Figure 5 Mercury in Exaltation, c. 1403. Pierpont MorganLibrary, New York, ms 785, f. 48.

Figure 6 The Moon in Exaltation, c. 1403. Pierpont MorganLibrary, New York, ms. 785, f. 50.

experience was particular knowledge, which could not becertain. Paracelsus inverted this, finding certainty innature, the notoriously changeable realm of matter, and inthe unmediated experience of nature.

Dürer’s and Paracelsus’s slightly older contemporaryLeonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) also expressed a beliefthat certainty lies in nature:

Experience does not err… Men wrongly complain of ex-

perience, which with great abuse they accuse of falsity…

They say that knowledge born of experience is mechanical

but that knowledge born and ending in the mind is scientific

…but to me it appears that those sciences are vain and full

of error that have not been born of experience, mother of

every certainty and which do not likewise end in experience;

that is to say, those that have neither at their beginning, mid-

dle or end passed through any of the five senses.21

Realism and the generative powers of nature

Southern Germany in the 1520s and 1530s yields manyexamples of realism, but an extreme form emerged in thetechnique of casting from life, furthered above all byWenzel Jamnitzer of Nuremberg (1508–1585) (Figures 7,8). Nuremberg in this period had an urban culture filledwith economically powerful and self-conscious artisans,and in which a lively exchange between humanistscholars and artisans took place. Out of this interaction,new ideas about how to obtain knowledge of natureemerged. Humanists such as Petrus Ramus (1515–1572)and Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) encouraged scholarsnot to ‘be ashamed to enter into shops and factories, andto ask questions from craftsmen, and to get to know aboutthe details of their work.’22 These scholars began toformulate a new method of ‘natural’ or ‘practical’reasoning that would eventually lead to a new empiricalmethod23.

One of Wenzel Jamnitzer’s most famous still-extantpieces is the Merckel Tablepiece of 1549, now in theRijksmuseum in Amsterdam. This piece appears to haveno precedent in earlier life casting and was probably awork of private self-expression24. It features Jamnitzer’s

speciality (grasses and flowers cast from life) at the topand, around the base, his reptiles, also cast from life. Thecentral female figure is meant to represent Mother Earthand the whole piece symbolizes the fertility and gen-erative powers of nature. Jamnitzer clearly meant to dis-play his own powers of creation in this work, as well ashis ability to imitate nature, both in the sense of producingan accurate representation of nature and in understanding– and being able to harness – the processes of metallurgyin order to create this representation.

The idea of art imitating nature (ars imitatur naturam)goes back to antiquity25 but I believe that it had greatercomplexity in artisanal self-perception than art historianshave generally recognized. There are many examples ofartisans asserting their ability to reproduce created nature(natura naturata) but it is significant that many of theseartists also pointed to and saw themselves as imitating thecreative power of nature itself (natura naturans)26; likeJamnitzer, they claimed understanding of the generativeprocesses by which nature produces.

Imitating nature meant knowing not just how to mirrornature but also how to imitate (or reproduce, or harness)the creative power of nature itself. Artisans seem to haveseen matter as pregnant and filled with potential, andnature as prolific and copious, vivified by an omnipresentfluid, which they sought to capture in their art. Referenceto this concept can be found in the recurring motif of thefountain of life, such as in the van Eyck brothers’ GhentAltarpiece, in which biblical figures and the ancientsgather around the fountain of life to worship the SacredLamb. The Dutch artist and author Karel van Mander,writing in 1604, repeatedly characterized artistic talent asa fluid dispensed by natura generans(creative nature)27.

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Figure 8 Wenzel Jamnitzer (1508–1585). Lifecast of a lizard.Kunstgewerbemuseum, Staatliche Museen PreussischerKulturbesitz, Berlin.

Figure 7 Wenzel Jamnitzer (1508–1585). Pen case. Kunsthistorisches Museum,Vienna.

Interestingly, these claims about the ability to mirrornature and to imitate natural processes of generation alsoappear in alchemical texts. Throughout the early modernperiod, alchemy seems to have formed a language forartisans who wanted to articulate their processes of work-ing and for scholars who were trying to understand howartisans created things from matter. Alchemy, indistin-guishable in most ways from metallurgy or chemistry atthis time, also dealt with what we might call organicchemistry today, in that it sought the composition of thevital principle. In addition, alchemy was at this time oneof the few disciplines in which people worked both withtexts and with their hands, and it was practiced by bothscholars and craftspeople. This conjunction betweenalchemy and artisanry should perhaps not surprise us, forartisanal and alchemical practices overlapped. In a 1390painting manual, Cennino Cennini states that certainpigments were produced by ‘alchemy’, including ver-milion and verdigris (some of the colours Jan van Eyckused to such stunning effect)28. van Eyck himself musthave been an accomplished distiller of varnishes and pro-ducer of pigments29. Indeed, by the sixteenth century,Giorgio Vasari had come to believe that Jan van Eyck haddiscovered oil pigments through his work in alchemy30.More than one early modern artist self-consciouslyassociated his work with alchemy31.

Realism and the body

For the artisan, nature had an immediacy and primacy –nature, not words about nature, was the certain scientia,which they got to know by an individual bodily strugglewith matter. This emerges with particular clarity in the1580 account by the potter Bernard Palissy (~1510–1590)of his discovery of white glaze. The book in which thisaccount is contained discusses processes of generation,growth and change, and is cast as a dialogue in whichTheory attempts to pry out of Practice the secret of hisenamel making32. Rather than simply handing over arecipe to Theory, however, Practice recounts Palissy’sharrowing search for the white glaze, and this account isremarkable for its Paracelsian type of experience.Palissy’s body and home are consumed to form a unitywith the materials he works; in the end, his labour re-deems him and his household. His ceramic amphibians,fish and reptiles show the realistic products (also mouldedfrom life) of that experience (Figure 9).

The account by sculptor and goldsmith BenvenutoCellini (1500–1571) of casting a statue is similar: hisbody is wasted by fever and illness; the roof of his housecatches fire; he attempts to bring the ‘corpse’ of the metalback to life by throwing into the molten mass all hispewter utensils. Thus his body and his house, too, areconsumed, and he finally falls to his knees in prayer33.Dürer uses similar bodily language in recounting his ownprocesses of creation34. Dürer wrote that, in the process oflooking, the painter develops his own Augenmass(meas-ure, or sense of proportion, in his eyes) and by muchabmachen(reproducing from life), he will fill his mindfull, thus accumulating a ‘secret treasure of the heart’from which he can pour forth in his work what he ‘has

gathered in from the outside for a long time’. For Dürer,the painter was ‘inwardly full of figures’ that he pouredout in new inventions34. Somewhat later, van Manderwould say of Pieter Breughel the Elder that, afterBreughel had crossed the Alps, he ‘vomited forth wholeonto paper all the things he had seen’35.

Each of these artisans underwent an ‘individual strugglewith reality’36, and this struggle – this bodily experienceof the particulars of matter – resulted in knowledge ofnature, which proved itself through the artisan’s ability tobring forth effects.

Realism and active matter

C.W. Bynum has suggested that the deep interest paid tothe body in Europe in the high Middle Ages sprang froma view that matter, and particularly the body, was preg-nant with creative potential37. I believe that many artisansshared this view of nature and sought to make clear intheir work the creative power of matter and the copious-ness of nature, while at the same time proving their abilityto play on nature’s potential38. Their naturalism is thusrelated to their view of matter as active.

This can be seen in their focus on the diversity andcopiousness of nature, and especially in the exact repre-sentation of insects, reptiles and metamorphosis. We havealready examined Jamnitzer’s and Palissy’s insects andreptiles. Why these particular creatures? They certainlyrepresent the diversity and copiousness of nature, and per-haps the artisans made reference to Aristotle’s dictum that‘Things which in themselves we view with distress, we en-joy contemplating when they are represented with very greataccuracy – the forms of the lowest animals, for instance,and also of dead bodies.’39 However, we can also look againto Paracelsus for illumination: following alchemical theory,Paracelsus regarded all generation as taking place througha process of putrefaction and regeneration. In putre-faction, particular forms of life appeared first: ‘serpents,toads, frogs, salamanders, spiders, bees, ants, and manyworms.’40 The exact renderings by Jamnitzer and Palissyof precisely these creatures can be seen in this light.

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Figure 9 Palissy Ware platter, 16th century. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Significantly, Cellini’s first childhood memory,recounted in his autobiography, was of seeing asalamander in the fire. Salamanders were believed to becapable of surviving or regenerating in fire and were usedas a symbol of resurrection. Cellini recalls this eventbecause it was, in a sense, marked on his body: after his father called him in to see the salamander, he gave Benvenuto a ‘violent box on the ears’, which hisfather said was only to make him remember that ‘the lizard [he] saw in the fire [was] a salamander.’41 Avision of a salamander is certainly a suggestive startingpoint for this quintessential Renaissance artisan’s ac-count of his own creative and generative powers(including his own virile powers) in the imitation ofnature by art.

Conclusion

I have pursued two different lines of argument in thisarticle. First, an oblique argument that realism can be theresult of social as well as philosophical claims, and thatrealism can originate in bodily subjectivity as well as indualist objectivity42. The goal of this line of argument is to problematize the history of realism and objectivity.The second argument has been that a social history ofrealism can connect art and science43. M. Kemp, in hismagisterial book The Science of Art, argues that there was no parity and no causal link between realist ‘art’and realist ‘science’ in the early modern period becausescience seeks explanation and art seeks to createillusion44. Although this may be true today, I would ar-gue that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when themethods of the new science were being constructed,artist–artisans were in fact engaged in a kind ofphilosophizing about nature, and that, while so engaged,they articulated a body of claims about nature and aboutthe nature of authority that helped to form the basis of thenew science.

Representers of nature must be invested with the social,as well as intellectual, authority to formulate a picture of reality. S. Schaffer, discussing marginal scientificpractitioners in the eighteenth century, has noted that they‘worked hard to make a direct access to nature count andthen make it clear that they had such access.’45 In thisarticle, I have argued that artisans in the fifteenth andearly sixteenth centuries already engaged in the work of making direct access to nature count, both socially and intellectually, in order to legitimatize their newperception of themselves.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,liminal people such as Paracelsus both disseminated thisview and also made use of this authority to establish their own legitimacy as spokespeople for nature. By thelast half of the seventeenth century, however, naturalphilosophers had begun to create a persona forthemselves in the investigation of nature that was distinct from these artisans and liminal practitioners; by the end of the seventeenth century, a real ambiva-lence to the role of the body and the senses in the newnatural philosophy emerged. That is, however, anotherstory.

Notes and references1 My translation from Nicolai, F. (1781) Reisebeschreibung

durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781(Vol. 4),pp. 401ff, included as Appendix 1 in Kris, E. (1932) Diecharakterköpfe des Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. Versucheiner historischen und pyschologischen deutung. InJahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in WienNF 6,pp. 169–227. Also quoted in Wittkower, R. and Wittkower, M.(1963) Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct ofArtists, p. 127, Norton

2 Bacon, F. (1620) The Great Instauration3 King, C. (1995) Effigies: human and divine. In Siena,

Florence and Padua: Art, Society and Religion 1280–1400(Vol. 2) (Norman, D., ed.), pp. 105–127, Yale UniversityPress

4 Bynum, C.W. (1982) Jesus as Mother: Studies in theSpirituality of the High Middle Ages, University ofCalifornia Press, esp. Chapters 4, 5

5 De Arte Crucifixi Pelagij Solitarij, anonymous sixteenth-century Latin transcription, British Library, Harleian MS181, ff. 75r–81r. My thanks to Stephen Clucas for informingme about this passage and providing me with a transcription

6 Hall, B. (1979) Der meister sol auch kennen schreiben undlesen: writings about technology ca. 1400 – ca. 1600 AD andtheir cultural implications. In Early Technologies(Schmandt-Besserat, D., ed.), p. 48, Undena Publications

7 In the recent literature, see for example Eamon, W. (1994)Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets inMedieval and Early Modern Culture, Princeton UniversityPress; Long, P.O. (1997) Power, Patronage, and theAuthorship of Ars. ISIS88, 1–41; Hooykaas, R. (1987) Therise of modern science: when and why? Br. J. Hist. Sci.20,453–473

8 For a seminal discussion of this development and Figure 2,see Pächt, O. (1950) Early Italian nature studies and the earlycalendar landscape. J. Warburg Courtauld Inst.13, 13–46

9 The art trade in Italy and Flanders was already very livelyby the first half of the fifteenth century. See, among others,Floerke, H. (1905) Die Formen des Kunsthandels, dasAtelier und die Sammler in den Niederlanden vom 15.–18.Jahrhundert, Georg Müller; Goldthwaite, R. (1993) Wealthand the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600, Johns HopkinsUniversity Press; Jardine, L. (1996) Worldly Goods: A NewHistory of the Renaissance, Bantam Doubleday

10 Raupp, H-J. (1984) Untersuchungen zu Künstlerbildnis undKünstlerdarstellung in den Niederlanden im 17.Jahrhundert, p. 245, Georg Olms, Hildesheim; Stoichita,V.I. (1993) L’Instauration du Tableau, pp. 236–240,Méridiens Klincksieck

11 Belting, H. and Kruse, C. (1995) Die Erfindung desGemäldes: Das erste Jahrhundert der niederländischenMalerei, Hirmer Verlag

12 Pagden, A. (1993) European Encounters with the NewWorld: From Renaissance to Romanticism, Yale UniversityPress. It should be remembered that van Eyck is the firstFlemish painter to sign his works [Panofksy, E. (1971)Early Netherlandish Painting(Vol. 1), p. 179, Harper &Row]

13 ‘Jan de Leeuw on St. Ursula’s Day/saw the light of theworld with his eyes 1401/Jan van Eyck portrayed me now/it is well known when he began 1436.’ From Belting, H. andKruse, C. (1995) Die Erfindung des Gemäldes: Das ersteJahrhundert der niederländischen Malerei, p. 50, HirmerVerlag

14 Panofsky sees these manuscript illustrations as ‘pervadedand illumined by a sense of reality which spurnsprettification’. Panofksy, E. (1971) Early NetherlandishPainting (Vol. 1), pp. 106–107, Harper & Row; Panofksy, E. (1971) Early Netherlandish Painting(Vol. 2),Plate 65, Harper & Row

15 Panofksy, E. (1971) Early Netherlandish Painting(Vol. 1),pp. 106–107, Harper & Row

16 Piccolpasso, C. (1558) The Three Books of the Potter’s Art(2 vols) (Lightbown, R. and Caiger-Smith, A., trans.),p. 109, Scholar Press

17 Panofsky, E. (1955) The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer,pp. 279–280, Princeton University Press, a translation ofParacelsus (1528) Vier Bücher von Menschlicher Proportion(Book 3)

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18 Pagel, W. (1970–1986) Paracelsus. In Dictionary ofScientific Biography (18 vols) (Gillispie, C., ed.), Scribner

19 Pagel, W. (1982) Paracelsus: An Introduction toPhilosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance(2ndedn), p. 51, Karger

20 Paracelsus (1538, first published 1553) Das BuchLabyrinthus Medicorum Genant. In Sudhoff, K., ed. (1928)Saemtliche Werke(Vol. 11), pp. 163–221, R. Oldenbourg

21 Kemp, M., ed. (1989) Leonardo On Painting(Kemp, M. andWalker, M., trans.), p. 10, Yale University Press

22 Vives, J.L. (1531) De Tradendis Disciplinis(Watson, F.,trans.), p. 209, Rowman and Littlefield

23 Hooykaas, R. (1958) Humanisme, Science et Réforme.Pierre de la Ramée (1515–1572), pp. 95–96, Brill

24 Kris, E. (1928) Der Stil ‘Rustique’: Die Verwendung desNaturabgusses bei Wenzel Jamnitzer und Bernard Palissy. In Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, NF1, pp. 137–207

25 See for example Bialostocki, J. (1963) The Renaissanceconcept of nature and antiquity. In The Renaissance andMannerism(Vol. 2), pp. 19–30, Princeton University Press;Gombrich, E.H. (1963) The style All’Antica: imitation andassimilation. In The Renaissance and Mannerism(Vol. 2),pp. 31–40, Princeton University Press; Kris, E. (1927)Georg Hoefnagel und der wissenschaftliche naturalismus. InFestschrift für Julius Schlosser zum 60. Geburtstag(Weixlgärtner, A. and Planiscig, L., eds), Amalthea; Pächt, O. (1950) Early italian nature studies and the earlycalendar landscape. J. Warburg Courtauld Inst.13, 13–46

26 For the distinction between and history of these twoconceptions of nature, see Bialostocki, J. (1963) The Renaissance concept of nature and antiquity. In The Renaissance and Mannerism(Vol. 2), pp. 19–30,Princeton University Press

27 Miedema, H., ed. and translated from van Mander, K.(1950) The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish andGerman Painters from the First Edition of the Schilder-boeck(1603–1604), Davaco. See the Life of Lucasvan Leyden (Vol. 1), pp. 104–105 and commentary (Vol. 3),p. 2; Life of Bartholomeus Sprangher (Vol. 1), pp. 330–331and commentary (Vol. 5), p. 87; Life of Aert Mijtens (Vol. 1), p. 313 and commentary (Vol. 4), p. 24

28 D’Andrea Cennini, C. (1960) The Craftsman’s Handbook (Illibro dell’Arte) (Thompson, D.V., Jr, trans. and ed.), Dover.This lists the colours made by ‘alchemy’ as vermilion, redlead, orpiment yellow, arzica yellow, verdigris and whitelead (pp. 24, 25, 28, 30, 33, 34). Other colours fell into thecategories of ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ (but not manufacturedby alchemy)

29 van Lennep, J. (1984) Alchemie: Bijdrage Tot deGeschiedenis van de Alchemistische Kunst, pp. 292–296,Gemeentekrediet

30 Vasari, G. (1971) Le Vite de’più Eccellenti Pittori, Scultori eArchitettori (Vol. 3) (Bettarini, R., ed.), p. 302, Sansoni Editore

31 See Dixon, L.F. (1981) Bosch’s Garden of Delightstriptych:remnants of a ‘fossil science’. Art Bull. 63, 96–113; Dixon,L.F. (1981) Alchemical Imagery in Bosch’s Garden ofDelights, UMI Research Press Ann Arbor; Hartlaub, G.F.(1937) Arcana artis: Spuren alchemistischer Symbolik in derKunst des 16. Jahrhunderts. Z. Kunstgeschichte 6, 289–324;van Lennep, J. (1984) Alchemie: Bijdrage Tot deGeschiedenis van de Alchemistische Kunst, pp. 292–296,Gemeentekrediet, Brussels. For an interesting meditation onthe overlap between alchemy and artists’ practices, seeElkins, J. (1999) What Painting Is: How to Think about OilPainting Using the Language of Alchemy, Routledge

32 Palissy, B. (1957) The Admirable Discourses,(la Rocque, A., trans.) pp. 188–203, University of IllinoisPress. For an illuminating discussion of this point, seeKamil, N.D. (1988) War, Natural Philosophy and theMetaphysical Foundations of Artisanal Thought in anAmerican Mid-atlantic Colony: La Rochelle, New York Cityand the Southwestern Huguenot Paradigm 1517–1730, PhDthesis, Johns Hopkins University

33 Cellini, B., translated by Bull, G. (1956) Autobiography,pp. 343–348, Penguin

34 Panofsky, E., translated by Peake, J.J.S. (1968) Idea:A Concept In Art Theory, pp. 121–126, University of South Carolina. In particular, the discussion on p. 123 of the

unique combination in Dürer’s writings of contemporaryItalian art theory (probably influenced by neoplatonism) andhis own, what Panofksy calls ‘personal’ and I would call‘artisanal’, vision of his creative process

35 van Mander, K. (1950) The Lives of the IllustriousNetherlandish and German Painters from the First Editionof the Schilder-boeck(1603–1604)(Vol. 1), p. 190, Davaco.

36 I draw this phrase from Panofsky, E. (1955) The Life andArt of Albrecht Dürer, p. 243, Princeton University Press,where it is used to comment on the principle, new in theRenaissance, that a work of art should be a faithfulrepresentation of a natural object. ‘Treatises on sculptureand painting, therefore, could no longer be limited tosupplying generally accepted patterns and recipes but had toequip the artist for his individual struggle with reality.’

37 Bynum, C.W. (1992) Material continuity, personal survivaland the resurrection of the body. In Fragmentation andRedemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body inMedieval Religion, pp. 239–298, Zone Books

38 Baxandall, M. (1980) The Limewood Sculptors of RenaissanceGermany, p. 37, Yale University Press. In this article,Baxandall makes this point about the demands of carvinglimewood, a softer wood than oak but one that demandsgreater judgement of the physical idiosyncracies of the wood.In this connection, too, Baxandall uses Paracelsus as aspokesperson for the artisans (p. 32). There is also acomment on the material meaning of the banausic person’sjudgement in Rossi, P. (1970) Philosophy, Technology, andthe Arts in the Early Modern Era(Attanasio, S., trans.),p. 62, Harper & Row

39 Aristotle Poetics1448b, 10–12, quoted in Baxandall, M.(1965) Guarino, Pisanello and Manuel Chrysoloras. J. Warburg Courtauld Inst.28, 183–204

40 Paracelsus (1537) Die neun Buecher De Natura Rerum(Book 1), p. 314. In Sudhoff, K., ed. (1928) SaemtlicheWerke(Vol. 11), R. Oldenbourg

41 Cellini, B., translated by Bull, G. (1956) Autobiography,p. 20, Penguin

42 For a similar attempt, see Lawrence, C. and Shapin, S., eds(1998) Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments ofNatural Knowledge, University of Chicago Press

43 For other who have treated this subject, see Ackerman, J.S.(1985) The involvement of artists in Renaissance science. InScience and the Arts in the Renaissance(Shirley, J.W. andHoeniger, F.D., eds), pp. 94–129, The Folger ShakespeareLibrary; Ackerman, J.S. (1985) Early Renaissance ‘naturalism’ and scientific illustration. In The NaturalSciences and the Arts(Ellenius, A., ed.), pp. 1–17,S. Acadamiae Ubsaliensis Uppsala; Freedberg, D. (1989)The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory ofResponse, University of Chicago Press, esp. Chapters 8 and 9;Kemp, M. (1990) The Science of Art, Yale University Press

44 See the coda to Kemp, M. The Science of Art, esp. pp. 340–341. Alpers, S. (1983) The Art of Describing: DutchArt in the Seventeenth Century, University of Chicago Pressasserts a weaker form of the same argument: ‘There is atwo-way street here between art and natural knowledge. Theanalogy to the new experimental science suggests certainthings about art and artistic practice, and the nature of theestablished tradition of art suggest a certain culturalreceptivity necessary for the acceptance and development ofthe new science… Didn’t northern viewers find it easier totrust to what was presented to their eyes in the lens, becausethey were accustomed to pictures being a detailed record ofthe world seen?’ (p. 25). I argue that artisanal attitudes andpractices actually shaped the new science

45 Schaffer, S. (1993) Augustan realities: nature’srepresentatives and their cultural resources in the earlyeighteenth century. In Realism and Representation: Essaysin the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature,and Culture(Levine, G., ed.), pp. 279–311, University ofWisconsin Press

Note added in proof.See the article by Cynthia Pyle in the next issue:Pyle, C.M. Art as science: scientific illustration,1490–1670 in drawing, woodcut and copper plate.Endeavour(in press)

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