Project Details
Projekt
Handling and Instruction in Early Modern How-to Books and Artists’ Manuals
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Christina Lechtermann
Subject Area
German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
Art History
Art History
Term
since 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 420353590
Early modern specialist literature on the visual arts offers a wide range of approaches to communicate knowledge on procedures and manufacturing techniques: they present their explanations and recipes in accordance with rhetorical forms, they connect them to other spheres of knowledge, they link them with diagrams and imagery, associate them to literary conventions, and design them with regard to different addressees. In short: early modern manuscripts and prints stage ‘techne’ in a very fundamental way. We assume that the way those writings narrate and present their material was part of a common notion of ‘techne’ and thus of a collective imaginary about the efforts and achievements of artisanry.We will analyse Italian and German specialist literature with regard to the presentation of the handling of tools, instruments, and materials and analyse the description of procedures and their staging through combinations of text and imagery. We want to investigate how artisan knowledge is explained explicitly, how it is presented in abbreviation by means of templates, patterns or recipes, and how even the concealment of knowledge can add to a representation of ‘techne’ that accentuates a notion of marvelousness, of skill, effort or effortlessness. Hence, ‘techne’ can be found in specialist writings either as point of reference to the realm of the practical and as a blank space that underlines, how certain forms of artisanry, recognizable only in view of the object, cannot be communicated in writing.Our focus on the representation and staging of ‘techne’ in early modern technical writing comprises the question how those books and manuscripts are themselves subjected to literary conventions, technical necessities, traditions and innovations in taxonomy, and patterns of interpretation, how they are coined by the practices and needs of manuscript culture and early print or by the schedules of a certain publishing house. Thus, the presentation and communication of artisan knowledge can be contextualized and described as a historical concept – a narration of ‘techne’ that is not only shaped by the workshop and its operations but is located at the intersection of objects, practices and their representation. The setup of the project which combines art history and philology is structured to meet the special methodological concerns connected with this constellation.
DFG Programme
Research Units
