Handling and Instruction in Early Modern How-to Books and Artists’ Manuals

早期的现代视觉艺术专业文献提供了广泛的方法来交流有关程序和制造技术的知识：他们按照修辞形式呈现他们的解释和配方，他们将它们与其他知识领域联系起来，他们将它们与图表和图像联系起来，将它们与文学惯例联系起来，并针对不同的收件人进行设计。简而言之：早期的现代手稿和印刷品以一种非常基本的方式进入了“技术”阶段。我们假设这些作品叙述和呈现材料的方式是“技术”的共同概念的一部分，因此是对工匠的努力和成就的集体想象。我们将分析意大利和德国的专业文献，关于工具，仪器和材料的处理，并通过文本和图像的组合分析程序的描述和他们的分期。我们想要研究手工艺知识是如何被明确地解释的，它是如何通过模板、模式或食谱的方式以缩写形式呈现的，以及即使是隐藏的知识也如何增加“技术”的表现，从而强调奇妙、技能、努力或毫不费力的概念。因此，“技术”可以在专业著作中找到，既可以作为实用领域的参考点，也可以作为空白空间，强调某些形式的工艺，只能从对象的角度来识别，不能在书面中交流。我们对早期现代技术写作中“技术”的表现和分期的关注包括这些书籍和手稿本身如何受制于文学惯例、技术需求、分类法的传统和创新以及解释模式的问题，它们如何被手稿文化和早期印刷的实践和需求或某个出版社的时间表所创造。因此，工匠知识的呈现和交流可以被语境化，并被描述为一种历史概念——一种“技术”的叙述，它不仅由车间及其操作形成，而且位于物体、实践及其表现的交叉点。该项目的设置结合了艺术史和文献学，以满足与这一星座相关的特殊方法论关注。

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.