Sometime between 1565 and 1570, architects Pirro Ligorio (c.1500–1583) and Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola (1507–1573) devised the so-called ‘Leaning House’ (figure 11.1) for the Sacro Bosco of Duke Vicino Orsini (1513–1584) at Bomarzo.1 Ligorio and Vignola designed the structure to tilt a disconcerting 9.5 degrees off the vertical axis, such that one imagines it succumbing to unstable terrain. And in fact, Bomarzo was built with boulders seismic activity loosed from a nearby mountainside.2 In evoking volatile ground, the Leaning House alludes to the structures, matter, processes, and history of the earth and its rocks, or what is now called geology. The house’s tilting disposition also contrasts the ignorance of geological conditions that might lead an architect to devise a seismically susceptible tower with the geological ingenuity of Ligorio and Vignola, whose leaning structure has endured for over 450 years. The Leaning House figures the symbiosis between early modern architectural culture, by which I mean the totality of media, practices, and discourses related to architecture, and geological inquiry, or the principled investigation of geological phenomena and discourses concerning such investigations.
Pirro Ligorio and Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, Leaning House, 1565–1570, Bomarzo
PHOTO: ELIZABETH J. PETCU
Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, architectural culture in Europe and the territories it colonized developed a rapport with geological inquiry mediated across books, drawings, prints, and buildings. Architects required geological knowledge for pragmatic reasons. Geological conditions set parameters for design and construction, determining the availability of lithic building materials as well as the disposition of sites. Geological knowledge also supported figurative aspects of architectural design, as in the Leaning House’s allusions to seismic activity. By the same turn, individuals one might now call ‘geologists’ mined architectural sources for insights on the earth and
Before continuing, I want to acknowledge the rich research upon which this paper builds, and pinpoint my intervention. Topics subsumed under what
Numerous questions arise when one examines at a synoptic scale the intellectual history of exchanges between Renaissance architectural culture and geological inquiry in Europe the lands it colonized – so numerous, in fact, that they exceed the parameters of a brief paper. One could investigate the evolving exchanges of physical practices between architectural culture and geological inquiry; activities such as surveying, digging, and stone-cutting. One could also ask how the traversal of such procedures between architectural culture and geological inquiry shaped the figuration of geological phenomena, including in architectural design. By the same turn, one could scrutinize architectural design and construction as platforms of geological inquiry, sometimes wielded in the service of [colonial] resource extraction. But what greased the wheels of such relationships? If a response (perhaps under more capacious circumstances) to the foregoing questions concerning the evolving rapport between
The present investigation centers printed materials produced in Europe that synthesized practices of architectural and geological research.8 Since printed materials circulated more widely than buildings, queries that probe intersecting inquisitive practices in architectural and geological publications yield superior insight into the formation of research norms in both fields. For instance, how did architectural research techniques align with the investigative tactics of those who composed geological literature, and vice versa? What textual and visual traditions undergirded the dialogues between the two fields? How did such exchanges develop over time? Far from crystallizing knowledge in the realm of abstract theory, the geological and architectural publications of the Renaissance behaved like sandboxes, inviting audiences to engage operatively and generatively.9 Indeed, as I will establish toward the conclusion, they constituted a main vehicle of interactions between geological inquiry and building.
What follows, then, is a survey of the intellectual conditions and norms of engagement between architectural culture and geological inquiry in printed literature produced in Renaissance Europe. I contend that the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century renascence of an ancient rapport between architectural culture and geological inquiry revived a research mode I call ‘Vitruvian learned empiricism’.10 This investigative paradigm combined the study of ancient and modern texts with empiricism, or the then-controversial position that knowledge derives from sensory experience, in the context of architectural culture and under the auspices of the Vitruvian tradition and interdisciplinary ethos. As Renaissance thinkers revived Vitruvian culture, they resurrected an ancient, synagonistic rapport between geological and architectural research, enriching the age-old synagonism between nature and art.
Before alighting on Vitruvius (fl. late 1st century BCE), I would note that the word ‘geology’ did not acquire anything like its current usage until the 1603 testament of Bolognese natural historian Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), and was not widely employed until the later seventeenth century.11 Nor did authors in Europe treat the topics entailed in what we today consider the discipline of geology as parts of a unified subject. Gregor Reisch’s (c.1467–1525) 1503 summation of human knowledge, Margarita philosophica, considered the exhalations of the earth and earthquakes eighteen chapters apart from minerals and the transformation of metals.12 In 1548, the index to the universal bibliography (Biblioteca universalis, 1545–1549) of Zürich polymath and geology expert Conrad Gessner (1516–1565), Pandectarum, sive partitionem universalum […], framed the elements and phenomena of earth, earthquakes, stones and gems, and metals and minerals as disparate areas of literature.13 Gessner’s list also attests that premodern geological writing occurred across texts on medicine, meteorology, agriculture, and other subjects.
The heterogenous character of premodern geological inquiry resembled the diverse facets of premodern architectural knowledge. An early formulation of architecture’s heterodox knowledge profile occurred in Vitruvius’s De architectura libri decem, the only ancient treatise dedicated primarily to architecture that would survive to the Renaissance. According to Vitruvius, ‘Architecti est scientia pluribus disciplinis et variis eruditionibus ornata, cuius iudicio probantur omnia quae ab ceteris artibus perficiuntur opera’ ; ‘The architect should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of
Indeed, the rapport between architectural culture and geological inquiry in Europe began no later than Vitruvius’s De architectura. Much learned discourse about the formation, degradation, and causes of terrestrial phenomena descended from the foundational accounts established in Plato’s (c.429 or 242/3–c.348/7 BCE) Timaeus and expanded in Aristotle’s (384–322 BCE) Meteorologica, a tradition that prevailed into the eighteenth century.16 But an account of the earth and theories of sublunary chemistry also appeared in Book 2 of De architectura, where instead of Plato or Aristotle, Vitruvius cited Thales (c.636–c.546 BCE), Heraclitus (c.536–c.470 BCE), Democritus (c.460–c.370 BCE), Epicurus (c.341–c.270 BCE), and the Pythagoreans.17 The passage, emblematic of Vitruvius’s and his Roman contemporaries’ wider engagement with the learning of the Greek world, constitutes a performance of natural philosophical and antiquarian erudition.18
Vitruvius’s learned engagement with the sublunary chemistry of mostly pre-Socratic philosophers prefaces his explanations, made on the basis of his own observations and practical experience, of the uses of clay, lime, sand, and
Opus icertū; opus reticulatum. Woodcut, c.1511. From: Vitruvius and Fra Giovanni Giocondo, M. VITRVVIVS PER IOCVNDVM SOLITO CASTIGATIOR FACTVS CVM FIGVRIS ET TABVLA VT IAM LEGI ET INTELLIGI POSSIT, ed. Fra Giocondo (Venice, Giovanni da Tridentino: 1511), Zurich, ETH- Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 6790, fol. 16v. https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-10519
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Cesare Cesariano[?], Searching for Groundwater. Woodcut, c.1521. From: Vitruvius and Cesare Cesariano, DI Lucio Vutruuio Pollione de Architectura Libri Dece traducti de latino in Vulgare affigurati […], trans. and ed. Cesare Cesariano (Como, Gottardo da Ponte: 1521), Einsiedeln, Stiftung Bibliothek Werner Oechslin, A05c; app. 2917, fol. CXXVv. https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-19393
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Just as Vitruvius probed geological topics, ancient and medieval geological writers drew from De architectura. The thirteenth-century mineralogist Albertus Magnus (c.1200–c.1280) used the terminology of Vitruvius and seems to paraphrase Vitruvius and Pliny the Elder’s (23–79 CE) descriptions of stones in his own De mineralibus.23 Book 36 of Pliny’s Naturalis historia (first circulated 77–79 BCE) had cited Vitruvius as an authority on stones.24 Discussions of mineralogy across Books 33–37 emphasize the uses of stone in building and drew broadly from De architectura.25 The sweeping and enduring sway of the Naturalis historia and Pliny’s use of geological themes from De architectura in natural historical inquiry cemented the geological authority of Vitruvius for posterity. In fact, until the eighteenth century, Europe harboured a Plinian view that architecture, like the topics now subsumed under geological inquiry,
Following the inaugural printing of De architectura in 1486, Latin editions and vernacular translations circulated Vitruvius’s remarks on geology on an unprecedented scale and scope. De architectura commentaries explained Vitruvius’s textual sources and geological observations while tracing his impact
Allegory of the Architect in his Study. Woodcut, c.1556. From: Vitruvius and Daniele Barbaro, I DIECI LIBRI DELL’ARCHITETTVRA DI M. VITRVVIO […], trans. and ed. Daniele Barbaro (Venice, Francesco Marcolini: 1556), Zurich, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 9902, frontispiece. https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-7582
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Geology experts also consulted Vitruvian texts. Gessner, in his 1548 Pandectarum, cites editions of De architectura by Fra Giocondo, Guillaume Philandrier (1505–1565), and Gaudenzio Merula (1500–1555).30 Meanwhile, the expansive study of mining practices Agricola debuted in 1556 as De re metallica paraphrased Vitruvius’s appeal for the liberal education of architects. Agricola insisted that the miner must learn many subjects, including architecture, so that he is able to build or direct the construction of mining machines such as ore crushers and underground structures such as mine shafts.31 The author’s insistence that architecture exists within a web of other arts and sciences that constitute the multidisciplinary knowledge of the miner echoes Vitruvius’s
In addition to De architectura, early modern architects engaged with a diversity of ancient and modern books devoted to geological topics. Gessner’s Pandectarum classified the geological writings of such ancient natural historians as
The revival of De architectura catalysed Vitruvian geological inquiries in Renaissance architectural writings. If Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (composed 1443–1452, published 1485) has often been regarded as a Vitruvian treatise, its comments on geological subject matter form an under-acknowledged facet of that relationship.36 Alberti dedicated part of the second chapter, on materials, to the qualities of stones used in building and how to leverage such characteristics in the construction of architectural projects, including grottoes.37 The illustrations of brickwork added to Cosimo Bartoli’s (1503–1572) 1550 De re aedificatoria translation (figure 11.5), published by Lorenzo Torrentino
Cosimo Bartoli (inventor), Opus reticulatum and opus quadratum. Woodcut, c.1550. From: Leon Battista Alberti, L’ARCHITETTVRA DI LEONBATISTA ALBERTI. Tradotta in lingua Fiorentino da Cosimo Bartoli Gentil’huomo & Accademico Fiorentino. Con la aggiunta de Disegni., trans. Cosimo Bartoli (Florence, Lorenzo Torrentino: 1550), Zurich, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 9906, 77. https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-770
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Between the 1550 edition and the revised, expanded edition of 1568, the discussion of stones within the Vite’s technical preamble moved from a tone of Plinian antiquarianism to one of technical pragmatism, perhaps indicating Vasari’s enhanced involvement in the revised version.41 Whatever the case, the collaboration between the erudite Bartoli and Vasari the expert technician embodies Vitruvian learned empiricism’s particular synthesis of ancient natural-philosophical knowledge and observations derived from first-hand experience. Through such relationships, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century architectural writing composed in the shadow of De architectura and its progeny advanced the learned empiricism of Vitruvius’s geological excurses for modernity.
Thus, in addition to textual sources, Renaissance architects and geology researchers adopted shared inquisitive methods, for instance experimenting with sixteenth-century Europe’s deepening affinity for empirical investigation.42 Agricola’s De natura fossilium, which he published in a 1546 compendium of geological writings and substantially revised in 1558, compiled modern translations of ancient geological terms and built on empirical texts by such authors as Paracelsus (1493/4–1541) to foreground close observations of geological specimens and their specific qualities or accidents.43 In so doing, Agricola leveraged humanistic understandings of ancient and modern geological texts to lay foundations for empirical minerology.44 De re metallica further drew upon Agricola’s first-hand knowledge of mining operations to catalogue extractive architectures through hundreds of woodcuts. One figure portrays a network of constructions for sorting and washing yields, positioning architecture as a vehicle of geological resources, discernment, and practical, empirical knowledge (figure 11.6). Pamela Smith has argued that while the vernacular theories of Agricola and other mining experts relied on ancient lore, they also formed ‘practical knowledge systems’ that nurtured the emergence
Georgius Agricola (inventor?), Blasius Weffring, Hans Rudolf Manuel Deutsch, or unknown artist (draftsman), and Zacharias Specklin or unknown artist (woodblock cutter), Sorting and Cleaning of Ores. Woodcut, c.1556. From: Georgius Agricola, GEORGII AGRICOLAE DE RE METALLICA LIBRI XII. […] (Basel, Hieronymus Froben: 1556), Basel, Universitätsbibliothek Basel, hv I 22, p. 227. https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-52830
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The nascent empiricism of sixteenth-century geological inquiry dovetailed with research practices in Renaissance architecture, especially archaeological studies.46 Though most obviously evidenced in a mutual interest in the stratigraphic autopsy of terrestrial environments, the relationship between geological inquiry and the archaeological studies of architecture experts ran deeper, to shared strategies of measurement and classification. Decades before sixteenth-century geology experts promoted empirical investigation in writing, architects from Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520) to Philibert De L’Orme (c.1510– 1570) drew ancient Roman ruins and buildings such as the Colosseum and Pantheon, sometimes with detailed measurements taken first-hand or copied from other such drawings.47 A sheet from the Goldschmidt Scrapbook authored by an anonymous French draftsman during the first half of the sixteenth century depicts, for instance, the measurements and other minutiae of a Corinthian column from the Pantheon in Rome (figure 11.7). Through such graphic archaeology, architectural researchers revived models of first-hand, empirical investigation promoted in the geological discussions of De architectura.
Anonymous French draftsman, Pantheon, portico, Corinthian column capital, projection, plan, and details; column shaft, profile; beam architrave, elevation (recto), Goldschmidt Scrapbook, early to mid-sixteenth century. Dark brown ink, black chalk, and incised lines, sheet, 43 × 32 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Rogers Fund, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Mark J. Millard Gift, 1968, 68.769.4
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Sixteenth-century geology experts and architects both came to apply a form of Vitruvian learned empiricism to their mutual commitment to classifying forms by mathematical means. In 1565/6, the collection of works Gessner released as De omni rerum fossilium genere, including his own De rerum fossilium, lapidu et gemmarum maxime, figuris & similitudinibus liber integrated discussions of disparate geological phenomena and examined their causes.48 De rerum fossilium used the visible geometries of mineral bodies as a basis for defining various classes of rocks.49 The book substantiated its geometrical argument through some of the earliest naturalistic illustrations of minerals in print, such as this woodcut depicting the regular and indeed architectonic geometries of basalt columns (figure 11.8).50 Here the draftsperson and Formschneider leverage woodcut’s linear clarity to advantage Gessner’s geometrical argument. The hand-colouring, a feature Gessner exhorted the publisher to add to some volumes – perhaps to underscore differences between specimens within his typology – imparts the subject with the appearance of a first-hand observation.51
Basalt Columns. Hand-coloured woodcut, c.1565. From: Conrad Gessner, DE RERVM FOSSILIVM, LAPIDVM ET GEMMARVM […] (Zurich, Jacobus Gesnerus: 1565), Zurich, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, FF 1264, fol. Dd4r. https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-4176
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Given the shared texts, methodologies and classificatory imperatives of Renaissance experts in geology and architecture, it is unsurprising that thinkers from Leonardo da Vinci (1542–1519) to Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) researched both architectural and geological topics. Occasionally, the empirical imperatives of architecture and geology coalesced in a single project. In 1560, Agricola’s Saxon colleague, Georg Fabricius (1516–1571), released the first published survey of the stones of antique monuments as Roma, Antiquitatum Libri Duo, a work that linked the first-hand study of ancient ruins with geological knowledge.55 Fabricius’s guide courted the substantial contingent of Italian architects who spoliated geological specimens with ancient provenances for their own constructions.56
Cornelius Schwindt or member of Aldrovandi workshop (inventor), Cristofo Coriolano (woodblock cutter), Alabastrites maculis fluuium imitans. Woodcut, before c.1648. From: Ulisse Aldrovandi, VLYSSIS ALDROVANDI PATRICII BONONIENSIS MVSAEVM METALLICVM IN LIBROS IIII DISTRIBVTVM […], ed. Marco Antonio Bernia and Bartolommeo Ambrosini (Bologna, Giovanni Battista Ferronii: 1648), Zurich, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 1027, 749. https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-13017
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3 The Book of the Earth
By emphasizing how practices of Vitruvian learned empiricism cut across architectural culture and geological inquiry, I do not mean to convey that either field lost the air of enchantment each had also possessed prior to the sixteenth century. Mythological, poetic, and vernacular understandings that had suffused geological and architectural writing since antiquity persisted in both realms. For instance, while the Leaning House (see figure 11.1) suggests an emergent understanding of topographies as products of seismic activity, it
Having foregrounded publications that hosted intersections of architectural culture and geological inquiry, I now turn briefly to one confluence of texts and building to scrutinize an alternative to Vitruvian learned empiricism in the transactions between the two fields. The limitations of Vitruvian learned empiricism as a paradigm of architectural and geological inquiry found an implicit critique in the works of sixteenth-century natural philosopher, ceramicist, and grotto architect Bernard Palissy (c.1510–1590), an artist who synthesized geological research with architectural practice. Throughout the later sixteenth century, Palissy engaged in multiple grotto commissions whilst writing on geological topics such as earthquakes, the formation and degradation of stones, and the genesis of what we now call ‘fossils’. Geological discussions in Palissy’s 1563 Architecture and Recepte véritable (True Recipe) as well as his Discours admirables of 1580 combine Aristotelian frameworks of sublunary chemistry and specific references to Pliny’s Naturalis historia with borrowings from such modern natural philosophers as Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576).61 The Discours admirables also shows Palissy’s awareness of such architectural writers as Francesco Colonna (1433–1527), Sebastiano Serlio (1475–c.1554), and Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau the Elder (c.1515-after 1584).62 Nevertheless, the artist denied reading ancient writings and posed sensory experience as the supreme source of knowledge, having the character ‘Practice’ boast in his Discours admirables that ‘Ie n’ay point eu d’autre liure q le ciel & la terre’ (‘I do not have any book besides the heavens and the earth’).63 Here Palissy promotes a staunch flavour of empiricism, one that does not wholly square with his own reading habits or his authorial activities.64 Contradictions aside, the artist’s professed preference for sensory experience as the ultimate source of
Palissy devised grottos and ceramic ornaments that visualized phenomena of stone-formation and degradation treated in his writings. Archaeologists have excavated fragments of Palissy’s abandoned Parisian grotto for Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589) (figure 11.10) in the ruins of the Tuileries.65 Remains such as this shard from the Louvre evidence the ceramicist’s experiments with re-creating the visible effects of geological phenomena such as marled jasper and shells, the latter of which Palissy regarded as the architecture of mollusks.66 Palissy learned about geological phenomena by executing grottoes and other ceramic projects, and such labours in turn shaped his geological thinking and writing.67 The Louvre fragment, for instance, registers Palissy’s knowledge of mollusks and stones working in tandem with his grasp of the behaviours of clays, of the metals and ground minerals comprising his glazes, as well as insight into the elemental forces that governed their transformations in the kiln. Like Practice and indeed the snails figured in the Tuileries shard, Palissy required no conventional books in order to manipulate terrestrial matter, whether as architect or proto-geologist.
Workshop of Bernard Palissy, elongated brick fragment with marbled rocaille, 1550–1575, ceramic and glaze, 10.2 × 26 × 11.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Département des Objets d’art du Moyen Age, de la Renaissance et des temps modernes; on long-term loan to Musée national de la Renaissance – Château d’Ecouen, Ecouen, OA 2493
PHOTO: © RMN-GRAND PALAIS [MUSÉE DU LOUVRE] / JEAN-GILLES BERIZZI
But if this circuit of natural philosophical practice and reflection could presumably have operated without Palissy composing books, and if the artist rejected books as trustworthy sources of knowledge, why did he compose at least three dialogues concerning architecture and geological inquiry? Palissy’s Architecture, Recepte véritable, and Discours admirables collectively argue for the authority of first-hand experience in geological, ceramic, and architectural inquiry as no other network of contemporary texts. All three writings locate their own authority always beyond themselves, in the object evidence of the field. In describing a potent alternative to the Vitruvian learned empiricism of architectural and geological researchers who took textual knowledge as the essential framework and backdrop for first-hand investigations, Palissy laid groundwork for dissent against the ultimate authority of texts in both architecture and geological inquiry during the seventeenth century.
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H. Schickhardt, Heinrich. INVENTARIUVM, VNND. Verzaichnus Was Der Barmhetzig Gott Dūrch Seinen Wÿltreichen Segen, Mier Heinrich Schickhardt Vnnd Meiner lieben Haūsfraw zu ligenten gietlein, Vnnd fahrnūs Bescheret hatt, Darūm mit Ihme Von Hertzen Lob Ihr preiss Vnnd Danckh Sagen: Das gleichen Sollen aūch unsere Nachkomen thūon. 1630. 1630–1632, Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod.hist.fol.562, http://digital.wlb-stuttgart.de/purl/bsz306956896.
- Vitruvius & Cesariano 1521
Vitruvius and C. Cesariano, DI Lucio Vutruuio Pollione de Architectura Libri Dece traducti de latino in Vulgare affigurati: Cōmentati: & con mirando ordine Insigniti: per il quale facilmente potrai touare la multitudine de li abstruse & reconditi Vocabuli a li soi loci & in epsa tabula con summo studio expositi & enucleati ad Immensa ultilitate de ciascuno Studioso & beniuolo di epsa opera, trans. and ed. Cesare Cesariano, Como 1521, Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Main Library Special Collections, JY973.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 49th Basler Renaissancekolloquium, ‘Geologie der Renaissance’, at Universität Basel in 2021. I thank the participants for their helpful comments. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
On the chronology of the project, see Bredekamp 1991, 51.
See Margottini 2013.
See, for instance, Barry 2020.
Pertinent bibliography is cited in Brunon 2007.
A foundational analysis of rustication is Ackerman 1983.
See, for example, Asmussen & Long 2020, and the essays from the same issue.
Of period publications that host intersections of architectural culture and geological inquiry, those produced in Europe outnumber those printed beyond the continent. I foreground these European publications with the understanding that such books facilitated the extractive architectures of, for instance, colonial mining campaigns in what is now called ‘Latin America’, and thus cannot be disentangled from extra-European architectural and geological discourses.
On this practice-oriented paradigm of Renaissance reading, see the canonical study by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton: Jardine & Grafton 1990.
Here I adapt the term ‘learned empiricism’ as developed by Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi in Pomata & Siraisi 2005, 8. On empiricism in this period, see, for instance, Salter 2010.
Dean 1979, 35–36. Dean also notes one earlier English usage that did not prove etymologically fruitful.
The discussion of terrestrial exhalations and earthquakes occurs under Reisch 1503, fol. Diiiiv, section 9.6, ‘De distinctione mixtorum & mixtis prime & secundæ cōpositionis’; the comments on minerals occur in fols. Eiiiv–Eiiiir, section 9.24, ‘De mixtis tertiae compositionis: quæ sunt mineralia’, and a treatment of the transmutation of metals occurs under fols. Eiiiiv–Evr, section 9.25, ‘De metallorum transmutatione’. To locate these passages, I have made grateful use of Cunningham & Kusukawa 2010, 103–104, 128–130, and 131–132.
Gessner 1548. Gessner covers elements and phenomena of the earth under ‘TITVLVS III. DE ELEMENtis in genere primum: deinde singillatim de igne, aëre, aqua & terra’, fols. 186v–188r; earthquakes appear under ‘TITVLVS V. DE MEteoris’, fol. 191r; stones and gems are treated under ‘TITVLVS VI. QVI SCRIPSErint de naturis rerum omnium naturalium perfecte mixtarum, id est, de lapidibus, metallis, plantis, & animalibus communes historias: Mox priuatim de lapidibus ac gemmis primum’, fols. 192v–194v; and metals and minerals are addressed under ‘TITVLVS VII. DE METALlis, & mineralibus ut uocant, in genere primum, deinde singillatim’, fols. 194v–196r.
Vitruvius, De architectura libri decem, 1.1.1. As transcribed in Vitruvius 1912, 2. Translation from Vitruvius 1914, 5.
See Vitruvius, De architectura, 1.1.4–11. On Vitruvius’s concept of architecture as a nexus of various arts and sciences, see Brown 1963.
See, for instance, Plato, Timaeus, 60c-61c; Aristotle, Meteorologica, 2.365b-369b, 3.378a 14–378b 6; 4.378b 10–26; 4.379b 10–26; 4.383a 15–383b 18. On the lingering influence of Aristotelianism in geology, see for instance, Oldroyd 1996, 17.
See Vitruvius, De architectura, 2.2.1–2, here 2.2.1: ‘Thales primum aquam putavit omnium rerum esse principium; Heraclitus Ephesius, qui propter obscuritatem scriptorum a Graecis σκοτεινòς est appellatus, ignem; Democritus quique est eum secutus Epicurus atomos, quas nostri insecabilia corpora, nonnulli individua vocitaverunt; Pynthagoreorum vero disciplina adiecit ad aquam et ignem aera et terrenum’. / ‘First of all Thales thought that water was the primordial substance of all things. Heraclitus of Ephesus, surnamed by the Greeks σκοτεινòς on account of the obscurity of his writings, thought that it was fire. Democritus and his follower Epicurus thought that it was the atoms, termed by our writers “bodies that cannot be cut up,” or, by some, “indivisibles.” The school of the Pythagoreans added air and the earthy to the water and fire’. As transcribed in Vitruvius 1912, 33. Translation from Vitruvius 1914, 42.
On Vitruvius’s appropriations of Greek knowledge, see Nichols 2017, 23–41.
See Vitruvius, De architectura, 2.3.1–2.8.10. On Vitruvius’s empirical study of geological phenomena, see Jackson, Kosso, Marra, & Hay 2006.
Vitruvius & Giocondo 1511.
See Vitruvius, De architectura, 8.pref.1–4 and 8.1.1–7, respectively.
Vitruvius & Cesariano 1521.
Wyckoff 1967, 44; and 46, which refers to Vitruvius alone.
Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis, I, under ‘Libro XXXVI […] Ex auctoribus:’: ‘Vitruvio’. As transcribed in Pliny 1949, 160.
See Fane-Saunders 2016, 2.
On the confluence of the artificial and the natural in premodern natural history, see Bredekamp 1993.
References to Pliny occur in Vitruvius & Barbaro 1556, for instance on p. 48; verses from “Meteore” occur on p. 44.
Daniele Barbaro in Vitruvius & Barbaro 1567, 78 and 83 respectively. I have been assisted in my reading by the translation Barbaro & Williams 2019.
On the ethos of learned empiricism in the frontispiece, see Payne 1999, 221.
Gessner 1548, 1, under ‘TITVLUS II., DE ARCHItectura […]’, fol. 168r: ‘De architectura M. Vitruuij libri 10. Vide Tomo I. Iacob.Iocundus Vitruuiū collatis exēplaribus repurgauit. In Vitruuij Architecturā Gulielmi Philandri annotationes. In Vitruuium Gaudentius Merula.’ / ‘M. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture. See tome I. Fra Giocondo edited the collated copies. Guillaume Philandrier’s annotations in Vitruvius’s [Ten Books on] Architecture. Gaudenzio Merula’s [edition of] Vitruvius’. The listings are identified in Davis 2007, 6–7.
Agricola 1556, 1: ‘architecturæ, ut diuersas machinas substructionesque ipse fabricari, uel magis fabricandi rationem aliis explicare queat’. In studying De re metallica, I have referred to the English translation: Agricola 1912.
Gessner 1548, fol. 168r: ‘De lapidibus ad structuram, qui igni et tempestati resistunt, Plinius 36.22 … De cisternis, & calce, & harenæ generibus, & mixtura calcis & harenæ … Plinius 36.23. De medicinis calcis, & maltha et gypso, Plinius 36.24 … De succis arborum, & natura materiarium … Plinius 16.39 … Theophrastum’. / ‘On fire- and weather-resistant stones for building Pliny 36.22 … On wells, and lime, and types of sand, and mixtures of sand and lime … Pliny 36.23. On medicinal lime and cement, and gypsum … On the sap of trees and natural wood … Pliny 16.39 … Theophrastus’.
Cellauro 2001, here 230–232.
Schickhardt 1630–1632, fols. 122v–123r: ‘82. Kunstkammer darin man findet die Theophrastische geheimnuß … In Folio Berckwerck Büch … durch Georgium Agricolam …’. The De re metallica translation is likely Agricola 1580.
Agricola 1563. On Bernini’s library, see McPhee 2000, here 444.
See, for instance, Krautheimer 1963, which does not mention geological themes.
The qualities of stone used in building are addressed in Alberti 1485, fols. 28v–30v. The passages are translated in Alberti, Rykwert, Leach & Tavernor 1988, 47–50.
Frangenberg 2002, 255.
The passages in question are reprinted in Vasari, Bettarini & Barocchi 1973, 31–54; 72–74.
On the shift, see Morrogh 1985, 312.
Agricola 1546, 165–380.
On Agricola’s humanism, see, for example, Hannaway 1992; on Agricola’s empiricism, see, for instance, Fritscher 1994.
On the beginnings of early modern archaeology, see Barkan 1999.
See, for instance, Yerkes 2017, 15–22.
Gessner 1565, fol. Aa1r–fol. 169r.
See, most recently, Zorach 2020.
On the primacy of iconicity in Gessner’s visual argument, see Fischel 2010, 152–154.
Gessner 1565, fol. Aa 7v: ‘Quamobrem Typographum hortatus sum … exemplaribus aliquot colores addendos curet.’ / ‘Thus I have urged the printer … that in certain copies [of the book] he should take care to add some colors’. The strategy is discussed in Zorach 2020, 345.
On architecture and geometry, see, for instance, Gerbino 2014.
The proportions of the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian genera are summarized in Vitruvius, De architectura, 4.1.6–10; those of the Tuscan genus are covered in De architectura, 4.7.2.
The system of architectural orders was effectively a modern invention. See Thoenes & Günther 1985.
Fabricius 1560. On Agricola’s influence upon Fabricius’s project, see Hannaway 1992, 560.
On the re-use of stones from ancient constructions in Renaissance Rome, see Waters 2016.
Aldrovandi 1556. On Aldrovandi’s archaeological methodology as an entrée to his natural history methods, see Gallo 1992, 488.
Aldrovandi 1648. On Aldrovandi’s empirical methods in natural history studies, see, for instance, Olmi 2014. On Gessner and Aldrovandi as learned empiricists, see Kraemer & Zedelmaier 2014.
See Vai & Cavazza 2006.
See Morgan 2015.
Research on Palissy’s intellectual debts is summarized in Thompson 1954, 161–165; a list of books Palissy likely read is included in La Rocque 1957, 10–12.
Ibid., 11.
Palissy 1580, 199.
Several authors since at least the early twentieth century have evaluated Palissy’s empirical approach to artistic and geological research. One excellent source, which cites earlier research, is Smith 2004, 100–106.
Dufay, Kisch, Trombetta, Poulain, & Roumégoux 1987.
Palissy 1580, 106: ‘Ou bié que ne regardé t ils de quoy le poisson à formé ceste belle maison, & prendre des semblables matieres, pour faire quelque beau vaissaeu. Le poisson qui fait laditte coquille n’est si glorieux que l’homme, c’est vn animal qui à bien peu de forme, & toutesfois il sçait faire ce que l’homme ne sçauroit faire’.
On the reciprocity of artistic and geological research in Palissy’s oeuvre, see for example, Andrews 2014/2015. Cf. caveats to this position in Petcu 2021.