ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Collecting, Reusing and Remaking Nature Drawings: Felix Platter’s (1536-1614) Investigation of Stones

• In Event: From Sketch to Knowledge: Visual Mediation in Early Modern Natural History

English Abstract

Before it became a formal discipline, early modern investigations of Earth materials relied primarily on textual descriptions, naked-eye observations, and visual depictions. While the history of knowledge has studied the use of visual depictions of plants and animals, the specific challenges of depicting stones for epistemic purposes still need to be uncovered. Examining how they were made and remade, used and reused, this paper explores the evolution of the investigation of the Earth in the late sixteenth century. The considered drawings (and their engravings) are those of the doctor Felix Platter from Basel, who extensively reused the drawings of stones he received or purchased from his peers Conrad Gessner and Johannes Kentman, among others. He not only gathered these drawings, but he also had them cut, pasted, redrawn, renamed, grouped, listed, paired with the corresponding samples, and reclassified. Historians of science and knowledge have argued in the past two decades for a polymorphic and multifunctional use of drawings. Felix Platter let us however observe something more: the chronology of uses of these drawings, the life cycle of naturalistic depictions. This is fundamental to understanding how Earth materials were approached and observed at that time, beyond the mere textual and visual descriptions. Based on original archival work and close material study, this paper unfolds Felix Platter’s thoughts on stones by tracing his gesture in his workplace; it also serves as a reminder that epistemic enterprises are composed equally of thoughts and gestures.

Author

• Alexandre Claude, European University Institute, Florence; Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome