Reviewed by Mark A. Peterson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.1

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Reviewed by Mark A. Peterson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Hiding in Plain Sight: Artisans and the Making of Transatlantic Modernity

Mark A. Peterson, University of Iowa

Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 377 pages. $35.00 (cloth), $22.50. Neil Kamil, Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots' New World, 1517–1751. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 1084 pages. $75.00 (cloth).
Think of any iconic object or image that, to our retrospective eye, exemplifies the emergence of modernity. Gutenberg's Bible. Galileo's telescope. Columbus and his three ships bound for the Indies. The palaces—Versailles, El Escorial—of monarchs whose attempts to regulate and tax their subjects gave birth to the modern state. The portraits by Hans Holbein, Titian, Anthony Van Dyck of these same monarchs and the churchmen who served them. Or the luminous paintings of Albrecht Dürer or Jan Vermeer, with their realistic, humane, and intimate revelations of everyday experience. Behind all these objects and images stands the artisan.	1
The artisan is everywhere present because his (or sometimes her) hands built the printing presses, made the paper and ink, cut and sewed the pages, and bound the books. Artisans ground the lenses for the telescopes, designed and built the ships, laid the palace masonry, and decorated its thousand surfaces. Artisans wove and framed the canvases, mixed the colors for the portraits, and painted them as well. That we have material and visual remains of the early modern world is entirely owing to their work.	2
These artisans are in plain sight, though we do not often see them or stop to think about their role in making the modern world.¹ Nor have historians been much given to telling their stories as integral elements in the production of modernity as we do the stories of kings and parliaments, inventors and scientists, explorers and warriors, philosophers and reformers. The popular image of the artisan seems linked to ways of life that modernity has shed. Artisanal values and practices are thought to be timeless and unchanging, the province of unlettered men and women, trained to work and to think with their hands, following their crafts and trades in much the way their mothers and fathers did before them, doing their work as it had always been done.	3
In recent years, at least in the world of scholarship on early modern Europe, the once-obscure artisan has come into better focus. Scholars, especially in the history of science, have begun to look to the middle distance, past the Galileos, Keplers, Newtons, and other giants who have long dominated the foreground of our image of the scientific revolution. Art historians have taken a similar turn, looking past the virtuosos and their aristocratic patrons, the dominant subjects of traditional scholarship, to explore the complex working lives and experiences of the craftsmen from whose shops the paintings and sculptures, altar pieces, frescoes, and decorative arts of the Renaissance emerged.²	4
The two books under review expand on these trends and push them in new directions. Pamela H. Smith's The Body of the Artisan is a brilliant and beautiful book, an elegant addition to any scholar's shelf. It makes the necessary next move of bringing the recent scholarship on science and art together by examining the influence of artisans who sustained and promoted art and science. Smith makes a powerful case for the unity of art and science, now disparate fields, in their early modern incarnations because of their mutual and intertwined commitment to realistic representation of the natural world, a realism grounded in the intimate knowledge of nature developed in and through the bodies of artisans.	. . .

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