Reviewed by:

• The Italian Renaissance of Machines by Paolo Galluzzi
• Michael Kucher (bio)

The Italian Renaissance of Machines By Paolo Galluzzi, translated by Jonathan Mandelbaum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 296.

With this book, Galluzzi's new research on the notebooks of Mariano di Iacopo, called Il Taccola (1381–ca.1453); Francesco di Giorgio (1439–1501); and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is brought to readers unable to access Galluzzi's work in Italian. Galluzzi, director of the Museo Galileo since 1982, is eminently qualified to synthesize this vast body of work. Bert Hall celebrated his 1987 catalog, Leonardo da Vinci: Engineer and Architect, in this journal, for its "rampantly revisionist tone" toward the received image of Leonardo. Because of Galluzzi's uncommon access to the original texts, his observations display a freshness, immediacy, and acuity.

Unifying themes include the rising status of engineers; the relationship between text and image; the evolution of visual conventions for portraying machines; the efforts to reconstruct the machines described in Vitruvius; the efforts to systematize an understanding of machines; and, within his study of Galileo, the search for applicable principles of mathematics.

The book is a collection of three interrelated essays based on lectures given at Villa I Tatti in 2014. The first essay, "The Sienese Machines," is particularly insightful. Taccola was an artist and civil servant who spent most of his career in his native Siena. Trained as a notary, Taccola bridged the worlds of the academy and the studio by carving sculptures, drawing machines, and holding various posts in local government and other institutions. With about two thousand pages of his manuscripts and drawings rediscovered in the nineteenth century, we see he is very much the prototype of the artist-engineer that blossomed in Francesco and Leonardo.

Galluzzi documents this transition of artist-engineers, from anonymous medieval technicians to celebrated public figures, using Siena as a case study. He argues that "the most original contribution of these new authors was the systematic recourse to images and the prominent role assigned to them" (ix). The chapter focuses on Taccola, whom he regards as, "the first effective promoter of a movement for the cultural and social recognition of technical knowledge and practice" (2). Taccola's visibility in scholarship can be credited to Galluzzi and his collaborators, who put [End Page 640] together the landmark "Prima di Leonardo" exhibitions in Siena and Milan in 1991, and the accompanying 496-page catalog.

Galluzzi's analysis uncovers new material lurking in plain sight. For example, Galluzzi points out the seashells in Taccola's illustration of a tide mill, arguing that Taccola included them to locate the mill on the shore. He goes on to argue that Taccola was almost unique "in depicting machines in natural settings" (pp. 55, 59). Likewise, Galluzzi gently corrects earlier scholars who, for instance, misidentified both fish (mullet, not mules) and draft animals (water buffalo, not oxen) in the De Ingeneis notebook.

In "Leonardo versus the Ancient Philosophers," Galluzzi emphasizes the way Leonardo developed new methods of constructing drawings, highlighting the parallels between Leonardo's anatomical and mechanical drawings: cut-away images of human tissue, complex gear assemblies, and shrouds on a ship. The title of the first section of the chapter, "Drawing, the instrument of the Mind's Eye," suggests the lasting influence of Eugene Ferguson's 1977 essay, "The Mind's Eye: Nonverbal Thought in Technology." Galluzzi's detailed analysis demonstrates the potential for historians to take Ferguson's approach even further. In his last essay, "Immaterial Machines," Galluzzi shows that artist-engineers consulted with philologists to decode the machines of Vitruvius, as only verbal descriptions survived (or only these reached European scholars).

The difficulty of accessing the notebooks of these artist-engineers suggests museums and their funders should make digitization of technical manuscripts and early printed work a high priority—not only from Western Europe but also from Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and other technological traditions. Galluzzi points to Dietrich Lohrmann's and Thomas Krefts's digitization of and commentaries on Leonardo's Codex Madrid I at RWTH Aachen...