The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution

"There’s one section exclusively on Dürer in Smith’s book. It’s just a few pages long, but that is almost the point. She clearly references Koerner’s ideas, but is intent on showing that Dürer isn’t just about self-portraiture. His work is also very much about observation from nature. This links up to a very different claim, that by patiently and faithfully observing nature, you make knowledge of a different kind. That is a hugely influential idea at the time, and consequential also for the later development of humanism and the Scientific Revolution . She reveals a very different Dürer and inscribes him in a very different tradition, the tradition of many artists involved in a cultural movement. So it seems a much more collaborative effort that he was involved in. In fact, Dürer himself makes this very explicit in his own theoretical writings, in which he describes what practices he and his circle of fellow artists, artisans and thinkers are engaged in. I think this is so important to remember when looking at a Dürer. This also relates to the great success Smith had with her Making and Knowing project which developed from The Body of the Artisan. In her view, it would be absolutely wrong to look at Dürer merely in terms of his artistic product. What mattered to him, and again, what the Heller letters bring out so clearly, is that painting at the time was a process that mattered greatly to Dürer. It was absolutely related to the materials that were worked with. Dürer cared very much about finding good colours and make fine pigments and paints . These all had materialised meanings about evoking certain emotional states. They were linked to healing properties, to ideas about how to make people joyful or pensive, how to induce certain states in the viewer. Colours were linked to a whole system of natural philosophy. This is something that Pamela Smith’s work brings out very clearly, that the activity of making is a form of knowing — the very act of making through experimentation meant that the people involved in the making were immersed in the natural philosophies that were enacted. Important though they are, looking at texts or only looking at artistic final products we’re just not getting a view of the whole complex world they came out of and the ways in which artists and viewers were physically and mentally involved in making or seeing paintings. These days we distinguish very clearly between medicine, alchemy, philosophy. There wasn’t such a delineation between these disciplines during the Renaissance, no hard and fast divide between what you might call science on the one hand, and revelation on the other. Engaging with the world by working with your hands was a way of communing with God. This perspective, drawn out clearly in Smith’s work, really led me also to reread German humanism and the cultural world Dürer is part of. In fashioning themselves as Renaissance individuals, Dürer and his circle are absolutely not just about textual traditions or high-minded philosophy. All of them are involved in making cosmetics for themselves. They’re all men who want to dye their hair, they make beauty products for themselves and their female friends, invoking all sorts of chemical transformations. And it’s not just about physical appearance. These efforts are also linked to ideas about healing and longevity. Concerns with alchemy, healing, and medicinal treatments underpin so much Renaissance thinking and continue into the seventeenth century."