Download or read book Picturing Machines 1400 1700 written by Wolfgang Lefevre and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-07-16 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How technical drawings shaped early engineering practice. Technical drawings by the architects and engineers of the Renaissance made use of a range of new methods of graphic representation. These drawings—among them Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawings of mechanical devices—have long been studied for their aesthetic qualities and technological ingenuity, but their significance for the architects and engineers themselves is seldom considered. The essays in Picturing Machines 1400–1700 take this alternate perspective and look at how drawing shaped the practice of early modern engineering. They do so through detailed investigations of specific images, looking at over 100 that range from sketches to perspective views to thoroughly constructed projections. In early modern engineering practice, drawings were not merely visualizations of ideas but acted as models that shaped ideas. Picturing Machines establishes basic categories for the origins, purposes, functions, and contexts of early modern engineering illustrations, then treats a series of topics that not only focus on the way drawings became an indispensable means of engineering but also reflect the main stages in their historical development. The authors examine the social interaction conveyed by early machine images and their function as communication between practitioners; the knowledge either conveyed or presupposed by technical drawings, as seen in those of Giorgio Martini and Leonardo; drawings that required familiarity with geometry or geometric optics, including the development of architectural plans; and technical illustrations that bridged the gap between practical and theoretical mechanics.
Download or read book Picturing Machines 1400 1700 written by Wolfgang Lefevre and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-12-26 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How technical drawings shaped early engineering practice. Technical drawings by the architects and engineers of the Renaissance made use of a range of new methods of graphic representation. These drawings—among them Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawings of mechanical devices—have long been studied for their aesthetic qualities and technological ingenuity, but their significance for the architects and engineers themselves is seldom considered. The essays in Picturing Machines 1400–1700 take this alternate perspective and look at how drawing shaped the practice of early modern engineering. They do so through detailed investigations of specific images, looking at over 100 that range from sketches to perspective views to thoroughly constructed projections. In early modern engineering practice, drawings were not merely visualizations of ideas but acted as models that shaped ideas. Picturing Machines establishes basic categories for the origins, purposes, functions, and contexts of early modern engineering illustrations, then treats a series of topics that not only focus on the way drawings became an indispensable means of engineering but also reflect the main stages in their historical development. The authors examine the social interaction conveyed by early machine images and their function as communication between practitioners; the knowledge either conveyed or presupposed by technical drawings, as seen in those of Giorgio Martini and Leonardo; drawings that required familiarity with geometry or geometric optics, including the development of architectural plans; and technical illustrations that bridged the gap between practical and theoretical mechanics.
Download or read book The Machines of Leonardo Da Vinci and Franz Reuleaux written by Francis C. Moon and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-10-29 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book will be of as much interest to engineers as to art historians, examining as it does the evolution of machine design methodology from the Renaissance to the Age of Machines in the 19th century. It provides detailed analysis, comparing design concepts of engineers of the 15th century Renaissance and the 19th century age of machines from a workshop tradition to the rational scientific discipline used today.
Download or read book Picturing Technology in China written by Peter J. Golas and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the history of technological and scientific illustrations is a well-established field in the West, scholarship on the much longer Chinese experience is still undeveloped. This work by Peter Golas is a short, illustrated overview tracing the subject to pre-Han inscriptions but focusing mainly on the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. His main theme is that technological drawings developed in a different way in China from in the West largely because they were made by artists rather than by specialist illustrators or practitioners of technology. He examines the techniques of these artists, their use of painting, woodblock prints and the book, and what their drawings reveal about changing technology in agriculture, industry, architecture, astronomical, military, and other spheres. The text is elegantly written, and the images, about 100 in all, are carefully chosen. This is likely to appeal to both scholars and general readers.
Download or read book Picturing the Book of Nature written by Sachiko Kusukawa and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-05-21 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because of their spectacular, naturalistic pictures of plants and the human body, Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium and Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica are landmark publications in the history of the printed book. But as Picturing the Book of Nature makes clear, they do more than bear witness to the development of book publishing during the Renaissance and to the prominence attained by the fields of medical botany and anatomy in European medicine. Sachiko Kusukawa examines these texts, as well as Conrad Gessner’s unpublished Historia plantarum, and demonstrates how their illustrations were integral to the emergence of a new type of argument during this period—a visual argument for the scientific study of nature. To set the stage, Kusukawa begins with a survey of the technical, financial, artistic, and political conditions that governed the production of printed books during the Renaissance. It was during the first half of the sixteenth century that learned authors began using images in their research and writing, but because the technology was so new, there was a great deal of variety of thought—and often disagreement—about exactly what images could do: how they should be used, what degree of authority should be attributed to them, which graphic elements were bearers of that authority, and what sorts of truths images could and did encode. Kusukawa investigates the works of Fuchs, Gessner, and Vesalius in light of these debates, scrutinizing the scientists’ treatment of illustrations and tracing their motivation for including them in their works. What results is a fascinating and original study of the visual dimension of scientific knowledge in the sixteenth century.
Download or read book The Changing Face of Early Modern Time 1550 1770 written by Jane Desborough and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a reinterpretation of early modern clock and watch dials on the basis of use. Between 1550 and the emergence of a standard format in 1770, dials represented combinations of calendrical, lunar and astronomical information using multiple concentric rings, subsidiary dials and apertures. Change was gradual, but significant. Over the course of eight chapters and with reference to thirty-five exceptional images, this book unlocks the meaning embedded within these early combinations. The true significance of dial change can only be fully understood by comparing dials with printed paper sources such as almanacs, diagrams and craft pamphlets. Clock and watch makers drew on traditional communication methods, utilised different formats to generate trust in their work, and tried to be help users in different contexts. The calendar, lunar and astronomical functions were useful as a memory prompt for astrology up until the mid-late seventeenth century. After the decline of this practice, the three functions continued to be useful for other purposes, but eventually declined.
Download or read book Inessential Colors written by Basile Baudez and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive account of how and why architects learned to communicate through color Architectural drawings of the Italian Renaissance were largely devoid of color, but from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, polychromy in architectural representation grew and flourished. Basile Baudez argues that colors appeared on paper when architects adapted the pictorial tools of imitation, cartographers' natural signs, military engineers' conventions, and, finally, painters' affective goals in an attempt to communicate with a broad public. Inessential Colors traces the use of color in European architectural drawings and prints, revealing how this phenomenon reflected the professional anxieties of an emerging professional practice that was simultaneously art and science. Traversing national borders, the book addresses color as a key player in the long history of rivalry and exchange between European traditions in architectural representation and practice. Featuring a wealth of previously unpublished drawings, Inessential Colors challenges the long-standing misreading of architectural drawings as illustrations rather than representations, pointing instead to their inherent qualities as independent objects whose beauty paved the way for the visual system architects use today.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque written by John D. Lyons and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 907 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.
Download or read book Reckoning with Matter written by Matthew L. Jones and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-29 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reckoning with Matter" tells the story of early modern European calculating machines, from the early attempts of Blaise Pascal in the 1640s through Charles Babbage s efforts of the 1820s to 40s. All failed spectacularly. By exploring these failed technologies, Matthew L. Jones tracks diverse forms of technical life different social arrangements of practitioners, different legal conceptions of the ownership of work and ideas, and different philosophical conceptions of knowledge and skill. Philosophers, engineers, and craftspeople wrote about their distinctive competencies, about technical novelty, and about the best way to coordinate their efforts, and drawing on these remarkably well-preserved records, Jones reveals the concrete processes of imagining, elaborating, testing, and building key components for calculating machines. By highlighting the makers and their conceptions of invention right up to the instauration of modern patent regimes and the solidification of the concept of Romantic genius, Jones argues that these conceptions of creativity and of making are often more incisive and more honest than those still dominating our own legal, political, and aesthetic culture. Ultimately, "Reckoning with Matter "uses the fascinating history of calculating machines to explore major contingencies of European early modernity, from its economic history to its vision of creative activity itself."
Download or read book Beyond the Learned Academy written by Philip Beeley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-05 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprising fifteen essays by leading authorities in the history of mathematics, this volume aims to exemplify the richness, diversity, and breadth of mathematical practice from the seventeenth century through to the middle of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book History of Technology written by Ian Inkster and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the connections between technological change and its knowledge base, focusing in particular on Europe during the Industrial Revolution.
Download or read book Knowledge Patents Power written by Marius Buning and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge, Patents, Power offers a sophisticated analysis of patenting practices in the early modern Dutch Republic and their detailed legal framework, as well as the uses of expert knowledge not only in producing inventions but in evaluating them for patent purposes.
Download or read book Watermarks written by Leslie A. Geddes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An exploration of depictions and use of water within Renaissance Italy, and especially in the work of polymath Leonardo da Vinci. Both a practical necessity and a powerful symbol, water presents one of the most challenging problems in visual art due to its formlessness, clarity, and mutability. In Renaissance Italy, it was a nearly inexhaustible subject of inquiry for artists, engineers, and architects alike: it represented an element to be productively harnessed and a force of untamed nature. Watermarks places the depiction and use of water within an intellectual history of early modern Italy, examining the parallel technological and aesthetic challenges of mastering water and the scientific and artistic practices that emerged in response to them. Focusing primarily on the wide-ranging work of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)-at once an artist, scientist, and inventor-Leslie Geddes shows how the deployment of artistic media, such as ink and watercolor, closely correlated with the engineering challenges of controlling water in the natural world. For da Vinci and his peers, she argues, drawing was an essential form of visual thinking. Geddes analyses a wide range of da Vinci's subject matter, including machine drawings, water management schemes, and depictions of the natural landscape, and demonstrates how drawing-as an intellectual practice, a form of scientific investigation, and a visual representation-constituted a distinct mode of problem solving integral to his understanding of the natural environment. Throughout, Geddes draws important connections between works by da Vinci that have long been overlooked, the artistic and engineering practices of his day, and critical questions about the nature of seeing and depicting the almost unseeable during the early modern period"--
Download or read book A Companion to Medieval Art written by Conrad Rudolph and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 1040 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fully updated and comprehensive companion to Romanesque and Gothic art history This definitive reference brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe and provides a clear analytical survey of what is happening in this major area of Western art history. The volume comprises original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays written by renowned and emergent scholars who discuss the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. Part of the Blackwell Companions to Art History, A Companion to Medieval Art, Second Edition features an international and ambitious range of contributions covering reception, formalism, Gregory the Great, pilgrimage art, gender, patronage, marginalized images, the concept of spolia, manuscript illumination, stained glass, Cistercian architecture, art of the crusader states, and more. Newly revised edition of a highly successful companion, including 11 new articles Comprehensive coverage ranging from vision, materiality, and the artist through to architecture, sculpture, and painting Contains full-color illustrations throughout, plus notes on the book’s many distinguished contributors A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Second Edition is an exciting and varied study that provides essential reading for students and teachers of Medieval art.
Download or read book Engineering the Eternal City written by Pamela O. Long and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-11-20 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the “engineering pope” Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds. Using hundreds of archival documents and primary sources, Engineering the Eternal City explores the processes and people involved in these infrastructure projects—sewers, bridge repair, flood prevention, aqueduct construction, the building of new, straight streets, and even the relocation of immensely heavy ancient Egyptian obelisks that Roman emperors had carried to the city centuries before. This portrait of an early modern Rome examines the many conflicts, failures, and successes that shaped the city, as decision-makers tried to control not only Rome’s structures and infrastructures but also the people who lived there. Taking up visual images of the city created during the same period—most importantly in maps and urban representations, this book shows how in a time before the development of modern professionalism and modern bureaucracies, there was far more wide-ranging conversation among people of various backgrounds on issues of engineering and infrastructure than there is in our own times. Physicians, civic leaders, jurists, cardinals, popes, and clerics engaged with painters, sculptors, architects, printers, and other practitioners as they discussed, argued, and completed the projects that remade Rome.
Download or read book Approaches to Drawing in Architectural and Urban Design written by Fabio Colonnese and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-04 with total page 653 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architects draw for a variety of purposes; they draw to assimilate places and precedents, to generate ideas, to develop a concept into a consistent project in a team, to communicate ideas and solutions to patrons and clients, and to guide building contractors during the construction stages, as well as to produce further elaborations in order to publish their project in a treatise, a journal or their own portfolio. Most importantly, architects draw to think and to manage complexity in a visual way. By taking into account innovative and interdisciplinary uses of architectural drawing in the design process, both historical and current, the collection of chapters and interviews in this book frames a new critical perspective and a uniquely contextual appreciation of drawing as a way to encourage spatial thinking and practice in architecture and urbanism. The authors take the discussion to a new level of philosophical sophistication, while also considering drawing in relation to a series of specific engagements with urban development, planning, and architecture.
Download or read book The World of Renaissance Italy 2 volumes written by Joseph P. Byrne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-06-22 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Students of the Italian Renaissance who wish to go beyond the standard names and subjects will find in this text abundant information on the lives, customs, beliefs, and practices of those who lived during this exciting time period. The World of Renaissance Italy: A Daily Life Encyclopedia engages all of the Italian peninsula from the Black Death (1347–1352) to 1600. Unlike other encyclopedic works about the Renaissance era, this book deals exclusively with Italy, revealing the ways common Italian people lived and experienced the events and technological developments that marked the Renaissance era. The coverage specifically spotlights marginal or traditionally marginalized groups, including women, homosexuals, Jews, the elderly, and foreign communities in Italian cities. The entries in this two-volume set are organized into 10 sections of 25 alphabetically listed entries each. Among the broad sections are art, fashion, family and gender, food and drink, housing and community, politics, recreation and social customs, and war. The "See Also" sources for each article are listed by section for easy reference, a feature that students and researchers will greatly appreciate. The extensive collection of contemporary documents include selections from a diary, letters, a travel journal, a merchant's inventory, Inquisition testimony, a metallurgical handbook, and text by an artist that describes what the author feels constitutes great work. Each of the primary source documents accompanies a specific article and provides an added dimension and degree of insight to the material.
