Wolfgang Lefèvre - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
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Papers by Wolfgang Lefèvre
The American Historical Review, 2007
Birkhäuser Basel eBooks, 2003
The images that are subject of this essay pertain to the realm of engineering in the fifteenth an... more The images that are subject of this essay pertain to the realm of engineering in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. That is the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer, the time of technical treatises like Georg Agricola’s De re metallica with its telling illustrations, and the time of the famous Theatri machinarum. These last works in particular, with their rich collections of splendid and suggestive images, tempt one to focus on their rhetorical resourcefulness and power. This essay, however, will neither inquire into this aspect of these images nor examine them as documents of the technology and techniques of that age. Rather it is concerned with the cognitive functions which these graphical representations may have had for engineers and technicians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Journal de la Renaissance, 2007
achine drawings as a subset of Renaissance engineering drawings are the subject of the freely acc... more achine drawings as a subset of Renaissance engineering drawings are the subject of the freely accessible « database machine drawings » available online since autumn. 2006. The database is part of the digital research library on the history of mecha nics « The Archimedes Project » at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. For the history of early modern mechanics, Renaissance machine drawings represent a decisive clue for especially studying practical technical knowledge : As a means of communicating, contrac ting, controlling, instructing, and illustrating, they reflect the social relations between engineers, patrons, and artisans as well as a subtle interplay between different experiences and types and levels of technical knowledge. So far, comparative studies of the wealth of Renaissance machine drawings has been difficult : Even if the more representational sources like the famous « theatres of machines » and also a number of late medieval engineering manuscripts have been edited in recent deca des, these editions often remain rare and are not easily accessible. This is all the more true for machine drawings preserved as loose sheets in a number of European archives. The aim of the « database machine drawings » is the provision of new ways of investigating all these different kinds of Renaissance machine drawings for historians of technology, historians of science and art, and more generally for scholars of Renaissance studies. The database provides convenient access to a representative selection of early modern machine drawings from the late Middle Ages up to 1650. Each drawing is presented in a frame of categories comprising bibliographical information and secondary literature, the technolo gical details of the machines depicted, and the drawing's pictorial language and social context. In most cases, the original texts accompanying these drawings are made accessible as well. All these categories can be analyzed by means of different kinds of searches : The large variety of contemporary types of machines, or the more than one hundred different machine elements
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 31, 2017
The American Historical Review, 2007
Birkhäuser Basel eBooks, 2003
The images that are subject of this essay pertain to the realm of engineering in the fifteenth an... more The images that are subject of this essay pertain to the realm of engineering in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. That is the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer, the time of technical treatises like Georg Agricola’s De re metallica with its telling illustrations, and the time of the famous Theatri machinarum. These last works in particular, with their rich collections of splendid and suggestive images, tempt one to focus on their rhetorical resourcefulness and power. This essay, however, will neither inquire into this aspect of these images nor examine them as documents of the technology and techniques of that age. Rather it is concerned with the cognitive functions which these graphical representations may have had for engineers and technicians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Journal de la Renaissance, 2007
achine drawings as a subset of Renaissance engineering drawings are the subject of the freely acc... more achine drawings as a subset of Renaissance engineering drawings are the subject of the freely accessible « database machine drawings » available online since autumn. 2006. The database is part of the digital research library on the history of mecha nics « The Archimedes Project » at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. For the history of early modern mechanics, Renaissance machine drawings represent a decisive clue for especially studying practical technical knowledge : As a means of communicating, contrac ting, controlling, instructing, and illustrating, they reflect the social relations between engineers, patrons, and artisans as well as a subtle interplay between different experiences and types and levels of technical knowledge. So far, comparative studies of the wealth of Renaissance machine drawings has been difficult : Even if the more representational sources like the famous « theatres of machines » and also a number of late medieval engineering manuscripts have been edited in recent deca des, these editions often remain rare and are not easily accessible. This is all the more true for machine drawings preserved as loose sheets in a number of European archives. The aim of the « database machine drawings » is the provision of new ways of investigating all these different kinds of Renaissance machine drawings for historians of technology, historians of science and art, and more generally for scholars of Renaissance studies. The database provides convenient access to a representative selection of early modern machine drawings from the late Middle Ages up to 1650. Each drawing is presented in a frame of categories comprising bibliographical information and secondary literature, the technolo gical details of the machines depicted, and the drawing's pictorial language and social context. In most cases, the original texts accompanying these drawings are made accessible as well. All these categories can be analyzed by means of different kinds of searches : The large variety of contemporary types of machines, or the more than one hundred different machine elements
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 31, 2017