Pamela H. Smith. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004. Pp. x, 367. $35.00.

Extract

Who has the right to interpret nature? Although the recent conflicts over intelligent design show that this question is still an open one in some quarters, the disciplinary structure of modern knowledge gives the right overwhelmingly to science. For the past generation, historians of science have wondered how, precisely, science came to possess this right. Pamela H. Smith's new book is less an effort to provide an answer than to pose the problem even more forcefully.

From roughly 1450 to 1650, Smith argues, the exploration and experience of nature was dominated by what she calls the “artisanal epistemology,” the conviction that practice, not theory, was the primary mode of engagement with the world (p. 59). Particularly in northern Europe, a congery of painters, sculptors, alchemists, apothecaries, doctors, and humanists embraced the idea that to know nature was to engage with it through the body. In the workshops of fifteenth-century Nuremberg, in the print shops of Martin Schongauer and Albrecht Dürer, and in the panel paintings of Jan van Eyck, Smith discovers a world of practical knowledge aimed not at describing nature in any theoretical terms but rather at generating it anew in a work of art. “Bodily labor and experience”—the endless grinding of paints, the detailed secrets of glazes, the complex techniques of metal casting—was the foundation of this epistemology, whose treatises read more like cookbooks than theoretical descriptions of nature's secrets (p. 96). The ceramic artist Bernard Palissy (ca. 1510–1590), for example, conducted more than 300 experiments in hot kilns, burning not only his entire supply of wood but even “the tables and the floor of [his] house” before he found a white enamel that pleased him (p. 104). Palissy's struggles with heat and stone were mirrored by the struggles of alchemists like Paracelsus to transfigure nature in their laboratories and painters like Michelangelo to recreate the human form on paper. Together these figures—rarely associated in conventional histories of science—created what Smith calls a “vernacular science of matter,” an immensely powerful and broad reaching engagement with nature rooted in the conviction that “knowledge is active and knowing is doing” (p. 149).