The Body of the Artisan
Subtitle: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: September 2003
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 367
ISBN-13: 9780226764009
Subjects: Science; 16th century; 17th century; Art and science; History; Science/Mathematics
First sentence: In seeking out an artisanal worldview, we can look to the objects artisans fashioned, to the texts they wrote, and, as we saw in the case of Messerschmidt, to literate intermediaries who put their actions into a form both comprehensible and accessible to a wider audience.
Description: "Since the time of Aristotle, the making of knowledge and the making of objects have generally been considered separate enterprises. Yet during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the two became linked through a "new" philosophy known as science. In The Body of the Artisan, Pamela H. Smith demonstrates how much early modern science owed to an unlikely source - artists and artisans." "From goldsmiths to locksmiths and from carpenters to painters, artists and artisans were much sought after by the new scientists for their intimate, hands-on knowledge of natural materials and the ability to manipulate them. Drawing on a fascinating array of new evidence from northern Europe including artisans objects and their writings. Smith shows how artisans saw all knowledge as rooted in matter and nature. with nearly two hundred images, The Body of the Artisan provides astonishingly vivid examples of this Renaissance synergy among art craft and science, and recovers a forgotten episode of the Scientific Revolution - an episode that forever altered the way we see the natural world."--BOOK JACKET.