Sensory Perception in the Early Modern World
March 24-26, 2011
A panel organized by David Karmon, Holy Cross, and Niall Atkinson, University of Chicago, and chaired by Fabrizio Nevola, University of Bath
Renaissance Society of America, Montreal, Canada
Abstracts of Papers
“The Touch of the Craftsman”
Christy Anderson, University of Toronto
The scholarly attention to aesthetic value in architecture, what is beautiful and the role of the architect in shaping the design, has devalued the knowledge of the craftsman. Workers in stone, brick, wood, ceramics and metals brought specialized abilities to the worksite. They also worked in ways that emphasized a range of senses. Drawing on recent writings by Richard Sennett and Mike Rose on craftsmanship and the knowledge of labor, this talk will discuss the ways craftsmen used a full range of corporeal experience in their contribution to building.
“Experience and the Rule: Optical Correction in Renaissance Architectural Theory”
Keith Bresnahan, Ontario College of Art & Design
This paper considers discussions in Renaissance architectural treatises of optical correction, or the modification of a building’s form to correct for distortions in the observer’s perception, as a site around which cohered questions in this period about the role of the senses (and the observer) in the constitution of architectural meaning. Optical correction represented an aspect of the architect’s practice as early as Vitruvius’s De Architectura; having fallen into relative obscurity in the Middle Ages, it returned, with other aspects of the classical tradition, in Renaissance architectural treatises. As a practice in which Classical forms are adjusted for the visual limitations of an observer, optical correction constitutes a significant locus for Renaissance thinking about the observer and her sensory faculties (and the relation between these), and reveals tensions in Renaissance theory between architectural form and the sensing subject, between the ideality of the Classical ‘rule’ and the contingency of experience.
“Architecture and Sensory Perception in Renaissance Italy”
David Karmon, Holy Cross
In The Eyes of the Skin (1996) and The Thinking Hand (2009), Juhani Pallasmaa has argued that the way that architecture is now conceived and taught has also diminished our attention to the sensory and sensual qualities of the built environment. This critique may be leveled at the trajectory of Western architectural study since the Renaissance, beginning with Leon Battista Alberti’s scientific investigation of linear perspective, which helped to establish the hegemony of the eye in visual theory. But the notion that the experience of a building is an intensely physical phenomenon, demanding full sensory engagement, also represented an important dimension of Renaissance architectural thought. Renaissance thinkers including Alberti himself emphasized a complex and rich understanding of architecture that rested upon embodied, sensory experience. This paper interrogates such sources to examine the key role of sensory perception in the production of architectural knowledge in Renaissance Italy.
“Investigating Nature Firsthand: Claims of Tactile Experience and Authority in Italian Renaissance Anatomical Study”
Jennifer Bird, Bryn Mawr College
In 1521 the anatomist Berengario da Carpi wrote: “in this discipline nothing is to be believed that is acquired either through the spoken voice or through writing: what is required here is seeing and touching: Galen investigated the utility of this.” Renaissance anatomists, modelling themselves after Galen, took seriously his rhetoric of direct engagement and applied his rigorous methods of dissection to the study of the human body. In early sixteenth-century Italy, many physicians, surgeons, and artists shared the conviction that knowledge of anatomy could only be obtained from direct, manual contact with the object of investigation. Taking the statements of Renaissance artists and anatomists as a starting point, this paper will explore the epistemological value placed on the dissector’s sensory encounter with the cadaver, and particularly tactile experience. The role of images in conveying artists’ claims to authority on the subject of anatomy will also be considered.
“The Disenchanting Touch: Prints and the Senses at Little Gidding”
Michael Gaudio, University of Minnesota
The violent touch of the iconoclast insists upon the mere thingness of the image, on the fact that it is mere matter and not God. But at the same time, the iconoclast’s touch suggests that one arrives at disenchantment, not through cool rational distance, but through a direct tactile encounter with the object itself. Nowhere in seventeenth-century England was this reforming touch more productive than at the estate of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire. During the 1630s and ‘40s at Little Gidding, the nieces of Nicholas Ferrar produced about fifteen hand-made Bible “concordances” by cutting up and sometimes defacing Catholic religious prints and then pasting them in artful arrangements on the pages of large folio albums. This paper considers the sensory dynamics of Little Gidding’s experiential Protestant faith, which sought to re-member its unreformed past through a tactile engagement with a Catholic material culture.