Table Of ContentThe
The Early Renaissance and
Italian Re nais sance
Vernacular Culture
=
of Machines
The Bernard Berenson Lectures
on the Ital ian Renaissance
sponsored by villa i tatti
the harvard university center fo r
italian renaissance studies
florence, italy
The
Italian Renaissance
of Machines
P A O L O G A L L U Z Z I
translated by
translated by
jonathan mandelbaum
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2020
Copyright © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in Canada
First printing
9780674242326 (EPUB)
9780674242333 (MOBI)
9780674242296 (PDF)
Jacket design: Jill Breitbarth
Jacket art: Paolo Santini (after Taccola), De machinis, Ms. Lat. 7239, f. 42v, Bibliothèque
Nationale de France, Paris, France
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Galluzzi, Paolo, author.
Title: The Italian Re nais sance of machines / Paolo Galluzzi.
Description: Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts : Harvard University Press, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019014445 | ISBN 9780674984394 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Mechanical engineering— Italy— History—15th century. |
Mechanical engineering— Italy— History—16th century. | Engineering and the
humanities— Italy— History—15th century. | Engineering and the humanities— Italy—
History—16th century. | Art and technology— Italy— History—15th century. |
Art and technology— Italy— History—16th century. | Renaissance— Italy.
Classification: LCC TJ79 .G35 2020 | DDC 621.80945/09024— dc23 LC rec ord available
at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2019014445
Contents
Preface vii
1. The Sienese Machines 1
2. Leonardo versus the “Ancient Phi los o phers” 101
3. Immaterial Machines 163
Notes 213
Bibliography 243
Illustration Credits 259
Index 269
Preface
C
onventional visions of the re nais sance usually
grant little space to the protagonists of what may be defined as the
“Re nais sance of machines,” overshadowed by the Re nais sance of arts
and letters. Yet, from the first de cades of the f ourteenth century, Italy
was the stage of a revival of interest in technical issues, of original dis-
cussions on the very concept of machine, and of the development of new
graphic conventions for effectively representing its structure, components,
and functions.
To understand the rapid change in the cultural and social setting in
which technical players operated, we need only compare the image of the
medieval technicians with the reputation that the most skilled artist-
engineers acquired during the fifteenth c entury. With very few excep-
tions, the former remained anonymous, even t hose who were protagonists
of remarkable achievements: the construction of Gothic cathedrals; the
creation of innovative systems of production; the design of new machines
and instruments; and the radical changes in hydraulic, military, and ag-
ricultural techniques introduced by what is known as the “medieval
technological revolution.”
By contrast, the artist- engineer at the height of the fifteenth century
was a prominent figure, sought after by the most power ful patrons,
generously remunerated, and often exhibited as an ornament in courts.
There was fierce competition to secure the ser vices of the most- renowned
engineers, feted not only by popes, princes, and republics in the Italian
penin sula but also by leading Eu ro pean rulers and even by power ful
sultans. Many engineers, including Aristotele Fioravanti, Francesco
di Giorgio, Fra Giocondo, Giuliano da Sangallo, and Leonardo, under-
took tiring journeys to work on proj ects commissioned by patrons in
Italy and beyond the Alps: the design and building of churches and
vii
viii · preface
of palaces for royalty and the power ful nobility; the construction of
fortifications and the production of weapons; the design of efficient
aqueducts, of bridges, navigable canals, and dikes; the invention of spe-
cial effects for stage per for mances and courtly festivities—in addition,
of course, to the execution of paintings, sculptures, and decorative
artifacts.
In an age that witnessed continuous wars, the formation of the prin-
cipal seignories, the robust expansion of trade and industrial production,
and intense urbanization, the contribution of t hese prac ti tion ers— with
their multiple skills refined in that laboratory of artistic and technolog-
ical innovation that was the Re nais sance workshop— became ever more
impor tant.
This pro cess had two closely related effects. First, the artist- engineer
enjoyed growing social prestige, which soon came to resemble the honors
bestowed by sovereigns in the classical age upon the most eminent engi-
neers, such as Dinocrates, protégé of Alexander the Great, and Apollodorus
of Damascus, admired by the Emperor Trajan. In turn, this greater visi-
bility stimulated the artist- engineers to embark on an ambitious pro cess
of literary qualification to earn the recognition enjoyed by the humanists
who graced the courts with their elegant Latin orations and poetry, dis-
cussions on Aristotelian natu ral philosophy and logic, and commentaries
on the ancient Latin and Greek texts. Many Re nais sance artist- engineers
made enormous efforts to turn themselves from uncultured, literarily
“mute,” and purely operative technicians into authors of well- organized
texts based on classical models and replete with quotations from an-
cient sources.
The figure of the engineer- author had been substantially absent from
Western culture since the age of Vitruvius and Hero of Alexandria. The
emergence of these new players in the literary arena was marked by distinc-
tive features that had an impact on the overall development of Re nais sance
culture. The artist- engineers’ writings rarely display a coherently or ga nized
structure—in the vast majority of cases they appear as ambitious but
sketchily outlined and ultimately unfinished works. Moreover, none of the
many literary efforts of Italian engineers in the fifteenth c entury was ever
disseminated in print, but their texts circulated extensively and were
preface · ix
widely read—as attested by the considerable number of copies and deriva-
tive versions surviving in libraries and archives across the world.
The fortune enjoyed by this literary genre and its authors was due not
only to the novelty of the topics discussed and the interest aroused, in an
age of veneration for classical culture, by the revival of Vitruvius’s illustra-
tion of mechanical devices in Book X of his De architectura. It depended
above all on the fact that t hese works displayed a new dimension of the
very concept of “text,” as verbal descriptions now engaged in a construc-
tive dialogue with a vast apparatus of evocative visual repre sen ta tions.
The most original contribution of these new authors was indeed the
systematic recourse to images and the prominent role assigned to them.
Taccola, Francesco di Giorgio, and later— even more eloquently— Leonardo
da Vinci all emphasized the limits of purely verbal descriptions, incapable
of making technical systems understandable without the decisive support
of images. Thanks to his mastery of drawing, only the artist- engineer
could deal competently with subjects pertaining to architecture and ma-
chines, as well as to anatomy, hydraulics, and geology.
This generation of technicians contraposed a new concept of learning,
characterized by observation, know-h ow, and visual expression, to tradi-
tional knowledge, based on eloquence, rhe toric, and listening. Leonardo’s
definition of himself as an “unlettered man” should be viewed not as par-
adoxical praise of ignorance of bookish culture but as a resolute state-
ment of the need to combine the reading of texts with the careful obser-
vation of phenomena and to describe works of art and nature not with
words alone but above all with drawings. Aware of the vital contribution
that he could make thanks to his technical and drawing skills, the artist-
engineer engaged in a dialogue of equals with the humanists, thus
paving the way for the long- lasting affirmation and vast dissemination
of the machinae pictae, the portraits of machines, to which the lavishly il-
lustrated and extremely popu lar volumes of the authors of the Theaters of
machines also effectively contributed.
It should be kept in mind that, on entering the literary scene, the Re-
nais sance artist- engineers did not rely on drawing and technical skills
alone. They also strived to assimilate the achievements of classical tech-
nical and scientific culture, often traveling to Rome in an attempt to
