13450

SoSe 15: Recipes for Art: Art Technological Sources in Context

Sven Dupré

Kommentar

In the early modern period many artisans and artistic practitioners began to write down their working procedures. These writings often took the format of recipes. These recipes describe the materials, techniques, and meanings of skilled craft and artistic practices. Collected in manuscripts since Antiquity, with the advent of the printing press, there was a wave of printed texts on practical knowledge flooding the market: recipe collections, Kunstbücher, and books of secrets. This seminar will study art technological recipes in order to reflect on their use in conservation and restoration, in technical art history, and in the history of science, medicine and technology. It will reflect upon a series of issues, including craft knowledge and artisanal epistemology; the intersections between art and science; questions of artisanal literacy and artists’ authorship. While conservators and conservation scientists have investigated artists’ recipes for their potential to reconstruct the state of the art of workshop practices serving the purposes of conservation and attribution, there is a growing consensus that only a fraction of the thousands of recipes that have come down to us was used in the context of the workshop (and even less – if any – for learning the trade). The questions the seminar will be concerned with include: Who were the writers of Kunstbücher and books of secrets? What did the authors and publishers wish to convey? Who were the collectors and readers of these recipes? What were the social settings of reading and writing recipes? How do recipes reflect on the making and meaning of art? In what ways did the transition into print change recipe reading practices? Finally, we will also consider questions around the historical methodology of reconstruction of artisanal experience and artistic practice. Schließen

Literaturhinweise

Literature: Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2004; Sven Dupré (ed.), Laboratories of Art. Alchemy and Art Technology from Antiquity to the 18th Century, Dordrecht, Springer, 2014; Pamela O. Long, Artisan Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600, Oregon State UP, 2011; Pamela H. Smith and Tonny Beentjes, “Nature and Art, Making and Knowing: Reconstructing Sixteenth-Century Life Casting Techniques,” Renaissance Quarterly, 63 (2010): 28-179; Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell (eds.), Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550-1800, Manchester University Press, 2013; Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (eds.), Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500-1800, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2011. Schließen