Demonstrating Ingenuity: The Display and Concealment of Knowledge in Renaissance Artists' Workshops

Abstract

The early modern era witnessed an explosion in the dissemination of technical knowledge, much of which previously had been kept secret. Concurrently, as recent scholarship in the fields of art history and the history of science has demonstrated, much knowledge production in the early modern European world was a collective enterprise. Artists’ workshops were often the sites where this distribution of knowledge occurred (although, as Marta Cacho Casal argues in her essay for this volume, artists often worked—and communicated knowledge—outside the bottega too). What do we know about the sort of information that was communicated in artists’ workshops and about how, why, and to whom it was conveyed? This essay will explore how artists both revealed and concealed technical knowledge and propose how these strategies shaped the physical space of the bottega.

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Publication Date

Spring 4-1-2016

Publication Title

I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance

Department

Art

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.1086/685884

Language

English

Format

text

Link to Full Text

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