INTRODUCTION

In the pictorial world of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, depictions of technical objects occur everywhere, in paintings and frescoes, on stained-glass windows, in reliefs carved in wood, chiselled in stone, cast in bronze, in illuminated Bibles, prayer-books, books of hours, on single-sheet woodcuts and engravings, in manuscripts and printed treatises with illustrations, on sketches, in notebooks, on plans— everywhere. Only a small fraction of them are technical drawings and thus subjects for this book. Presupposing a rather pragmatic definition, the authors of this volume consider those drawings to be technical that were either traced (or commissioned to be traced) and used by technicians in the pursuit of their professional life or derived from such practitioners’ drawings. Of these technical drawings, only machine drawings and a few architectural drawings are dealt with in this volume. However, despite this concentration, the number of drawings addressed here is still huge. According to some experts’ estimation, for the period 1400-1700 alone, one has to reckon with five to ten thousand drawings of machines and machine parts.

The unsatisfactory vagueness of such guesses results from the fact that nobody knows how many such drawings might be buried in such locations as the archives of states, cities, dioceses, monasteries, and princely families, and in the manuscript departments of libraries and museums. The expectation that hitherto unknown materials will surface there in the future rests primarily on a suspicious feature of the known material. The bulk of this material consists in presentational drawings that were published in booklets and books—manuscript books (Bilderhandschriften) as well as printed ones—in the early modern period. Only a small part consists of workshop drawings pertaining either to the documents of commissioners of machinery and buildings or to the private store of engineers and architects themselves. This fact can certainly be explained by the assumption that drawings of the design and construction process of technical artifacts were not kept but thrown away after a certain span of time. However, the unbalanced ratio of the presentational and the workshop shares of the known machine drawings of this period may also result, at least to some extent, from the storage and display policy of archives and libraries in past eras, when the cultural divide between the realm of technology and the realm of fine arts and literature was still prevalent.

For a first orientation, table I.1 showing the most important sources of early modern engineering drawings, to which the chapters of this volume frequently refer, may be convenient.

The prevalence of the presentational over the workshop material among the extant engineering drawings poses a serious problem to our enterprise. For a picture of the actual role technical drawings played in the practice of engineers and architects, workshop drawings are naturally of far more significance than the presentational ones. The latter may be telling in this respect as well. But only on the basis of thorough investigations of the drawings actually used in the design and construction processes will one be able to determine to what extent and through which of their features certain presentational drawings, too, give testimony to the use of drawings in early modern engineering.

Likely the most crucial problem for an interpretation of technical drawings of the early modern period is the determination of the probable purpose, or purposes, a certain drawing served. Even in the case of drawings in books with an explicit introduction, this purpose can be dubious when, for instance, experts and nonexperts are equally addressed by the book. On the other hand, as regards workshop drawings, it is sometimes impossible to determine the purpose. “Why pictures of machines?”—this seemingly simple question proves to be an intricate one. Familiarity with a considerable amount of the extant material is presupposed to outline some characteristic features of these engineering drawings and to propose convincing and useful categories according to which this material may be ordered. Presenting such an outline and proposing those categories, chapter 1 by Marcus Popplow not only provides an analytic survey of the subject of this volume but also prepares the ground for the subsequent chapters.