ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Inside the Workshop: Images of Early Modern Mathematical Instrument Makers

• In Event: Practitioners, Artisans and Instruments in the Making of Premodern Science, II

English Abstract

There are vanishingly few surviving portraits of early modern mathematical instrument makers. As manual workers, instrument makers would not routinely expect (or afford) to be commemorated in portraiture. Further, the act of making instruments might be expected to serve or be subordinate to other higher purposes. For example, we have portraits of Regiomontanus and Mercator, both of whom made instruments; yet they are depicted as scholars (the astronomer, the cosmographer) without any hint that they crafted the instruments that they are shown holding. In this paper I offer the first treatment of the handful of portraits that do show instrument makers at work, specifically Hans Holbein’s 1528 portrait of Nicholas Kratzer; Jan van Stalburch’s 1557 engraved portrait of Gemma Frisius; Pietro Paolini’s portrait of an unnamed instrument maker at work, possibly painted circa 1640; and Wenceslaus Hollar’s 1666 engraved portrait of Elias Allen. These four exceptionally rich images each reveal different facets of the nature of instrument making, from Holbein’s geometrical game to Paolini’s meditation on the ‘mindful hand’ of instrument maker himself. Yet there is a thread connecting these disparate works. What these images share, I argue, is a deep interest in the nature of practical geometry itself, as a singularly powerful set of mathematical tools dependent on finely crafted material tools. It is this question of dependency – of the reliance of the natural on the artificial – that motivates these portraits, and also adds to the enigma of that rarely glimpsed figure of the instrument maker.

Author

• Boris Jardine, University of Cambridge