INTRODUCTION

At first glance, almost all of the machine drawings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries may appear unprofessional to a modern beholder. They in no way resemble the orthographical plans and schematics that engineers trace and employ today. Usually omitting crucial details, often representing instead superfluous particulars of apparently rhetoric nature, and rarely giving measurements, they may even evoke the suspicion that they are creations of interested laymen with limited competence as regards technological matters. Taking modern blueprints as standard, it is, indeed, hard to imagine that drawings of this kind were of any use for the practice of early modern engineers.

It is particularly the seemingly naivete of these drawings that is misleading. As the chapters by David McGee and Rainer Leng show, these drawings are anything but naive. Even the most awkwardly drawn ones do not testify to unskilled attempts of practitioners groping for any manner of depicting intricate technical objects. Rather, such drawings testify to first experimental steps toward depicting them in a specific style of rendering that distinguishes early modern machine drawings from the machine drawings of the Middle Ages as well as those of the modern age.

The few extant machine drawings from the Middle Ages, which David McGee discusses in the first part of his chapter, show a preceding style of technical drawings reminiscent of modern schematics. Focusing exclusively on some of the essential parts of a certain device and their arrangement, no effort is made to represent its appearance. Because of this, they are often as unintelligible for a nonexpert as modern engineering drawings. However, medieval technical drawings share one feature with the seemingly naive engineering drawings of the early modern period that distinguishes them from modern ones. They, too, omit crucial details, do not give measurements, and leave the question of the device’s dimensions unanswered.

Against the background of this preceding style of machine rendering, two points become immediately clear. First, the early modern style of representing machines was developed in a rejection of an earlier professional style of machine rendering and, thus, cannot be regarded as naive and unprofessional itself. Second, the fact that it shares with the preceding style a practice of neglecting crucial details, measurements, and dimensions, calls for a reconstruction of the engineering practice in these ages that accounts for the apparent usefulness of such incomplete drawings. Both points together warn us not to judge the early modern machine drawings from the viewpoint of present engineering drawings. Rather, one has to try to interpret them in their actual setting, that is, in the actual practice of early modern engineering.

The two chapters of part II do exactly this. They trace the origin and first developmental stages of the specific language of early modern machine drawings. The chapter by McGee explores the emergence of the new style with the Sienese engineer Mariano di Jacopo, called Taccola, whose drawings constituted the starting point for the Italian tradition of early modern engineering drawings, which became influential for the entire West. The chapter by Leng focuses on the less-known pictorial catalogues of German master gun-makers from the fifteenth century. They are of particu-

Lar interest with respect to the development of the language of early modern machine drawings for two reasons. First, the bulk of them addresses exclusively fellow experts; their pictorial language thus must have fit exactly the practical needs of these practitioners. Second, in these drawings, one can study how artificial views such as cutaways and exploded views were elaborated step by step.

Investigating carefully and in detail the pictorial means developed and employed, the two chapters inevitably lead to the social conditions that shaped the designing and manufacturing of machines in the fifteenth century. And insights into these conditions lead, in turn, to a better understanding of the peculiarities of the new drawing style, which looked so strange at first glance. This style now appears as a highly artificial compromise between the different ends these drawings had to fulfill at the same time, namely to present the device in question to nonexperts such as (potential) commissioners, on the one hand, and, on the other, to give the masters in charge of the (possible) construction of the device all of the technical information they needed. In reconstructing this double-faced nature of the early modern machine drawings, these chapters restore to these drawings their genuine technical character, which is easily eclipsed by their more obviously representational function for a contemporary beholder.