ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The quarrier and the forge: sculpture’s instruments in Renaissance mineral arts

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

English Abstract

Art historians have long noted remarkable historical continuities in the metalwork sculptural tools of marble stone-working. From early antiquity to modernity, marble was cut, chiselled and figured by means of metal hammers, chisels, rasps and drills that remained relatively unchanged in form and purpose. While acknowledging the long-held observation of historical continuity, my paper uncovers histories of change within this overarching narrative. I examine incremental developments in Renaissance metalworking and metallurgy to forge a more flexible and resistant steel. Further, I consider the rapid expansion of metal-mining across Renaissance Europe and the New World as part of a newly-global economy; as well as the growth of stone quarrying for the ever-expanding architectural purpose that accompanied population growth and settlement. Such rapid expansion of mining and metallurgy had profound impacts on the natural landscape, in the form of widespread deforestation, and generation of toxic waste.
I use the example of sculptors’ metalwork tools to prise open the complex and often-conflicted histories of early modern mining and mineral extraction in its entanglements with art, environmental, and social history. Sculptors understood their tools as both the instrument and the sign of a close engagement with their material environment, or what Michelangelo called ‘taming mountains’. Bringing together visual and textual evidence of Renaissance sculptors’ tools, I consider them as artisanal, humanistic, and colonialist instruments in turn.

Author

• Genevieve Warwick, University of Edinburgh