Fifteen Eighty Four

What modes of scientific knowledge can images of architecture embody? An etching that Strasbourg artist Wendel Dietterlin the Elder released in the second, 1594 instalment of his serially published Architectura treatise [Fig. 1] suggests some answers to this question. The etching portrays what at first appears to be a fantastic portal, formed from wood with carved rustication, a motif typically reserved for stone. Beset with flora on one side and birds on the other, the doorway leads to an interior with a dramatically foreshortened, supine carpenter as well as a ladder and roofbeams rendered in a scheme of linear perspective that would be impossible to translate into three dimensions.

Figure 1: Wendel Dietterlin, Allegory of the Architectural Image, etched illustration in Dietterlin’s ARCHITECTVR von Portalen vnnd Thürgerichten mancherley arten. Das Annder Būch (Straßburg: Bernhard Jobin’s heirs, 1594), Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg, R.10.002,2, pl. 14. Source: Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg

As much as the scene initially seems to project pure fantasy, closer study reveals that it in fact arises from knowledge derived through scientific, or, in period terms, “natural philosophical,” investigation. Dietterlin’s portrayal of wood finished in a rusticated fashion typically reserved for lithic building evokes a natural philosophical interest in the characteristics of matter and form. The doorway’s botanical and zoological motifs register, through their rich details and correspondence to known plant and animal species, Dietterlin and his sixteenth-century peers’ fascination with images made after life. The etching’s perspectival conceits meanwhile betray the artist’s ability to use geometry and principles of optics to create the appearance of three-dimensional space and even perspectival illusions in the two dimensions of the picture plane. Finally, the print’s very lineaments suggest Dietterlin’s understanding of the chemical reactions between mordant and metal whereby the artist etched the plate. Dietterlin subsumes all these modes of scientific knowledge into architectural forms, whose mix of regular and irregular structures and surfaces epitomized for the artist’s early modern publics the many intersections between imagination and empirical observation.

The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation examines the advent of architectural images like this etching as vehicles of natural philosophical thought through the lens of Dietterlin’s Architectura. By investigating the treatise’s conceptual and material origins across the 164 known Architectura drawings and the treatise’s 198 distinct etchings, as well as the book’s impact from Europe to Viceregal Peru, I show how architectural and scientific modes of pictorial investigation came to converge between the eras of Albrecht Dürer and Peter Paul Rubens. The formation and reception of Dietterlin’s Architectura demonstrates how architectural images went from appropriating scientific modes of investigation to driving natural philosophical inquiry. I argue that the emergence of architectural images as platforms for scientific thought contributed to the rise of empiricism, or the idea that knowledge derives from sensory experience.

Dietterlin has long been one of early modern Europe’s most eccentric and misunderstood artists. He initially gained fame as a painter of facades and architectural interiors in Strasbourg and the surrounding region, only to turn, late in life, to etching his Architectura’s scores of architectural prints and composing its less than twenty pages of text. Dietterlin defies modern expectations about architectural expertise because there is no concrete evidence that he ever devised or realized a building. At the same time, many of the most prominent sixteenth-century producers of books on architecture, including Dürer and Rubens, first worked as painters. Dietterlin’s deep experience in pictorial representation-particularly the rendering of architectural forms-allowed him to compose a treatise with richly figural etchings of architectural ornament that embodied and propelled natural philosophical concepts from fields as diverse as anatomy, alchemy, and natural history. Thus, while scholars have historically dismissed Dietterlin as a serious theorist of architecture or interlocutor of early science, his Architectura tells a different story.

Architectural ornament was, for Dietterlin, an ideal vehicle for exploring natural philosophical concepts such as order, hierarchies, norms, and the complex structures of nature. The artist’s Architectura etchings drew not only upon sixteenth-century Europe’s substantial body of architectural prints but also the rich traditions of scientific illustration, print, and book production in the German-speaking lands and particularly his home city of Strasbourg. Dietterlin used his Architectura’s etched architectural ornaments to depict the forms of Renaissance botany and zoology, the corporeal configurations of sixteenth-century anatomical literature, and the chemical transformations of contemporary alchemy. The exquisite figuration of his treatise made an implicit but resounding argument for the primacy of vision, touch, and other modes of sensory experience as conduits of knowledge. In this way, Dietterlin’s Architectura consolidated a case for empiricism long underway in Renaissance architectural literature derived from first-hand studies of classical ruins as well as sixteenth-century scientific publications based on direct observations of nature.

Take, for instance, an image of a fountain niche featuring a female figure with a panoply of birds and a chameleon, as well as bellows, a bagpipe, and a globe inscribed with the signs of Libra and Sagittarius [Fig. 2]. These attributes-which sixteenth-century Europeans associated with the pneumatic-as well as the print’s position within a quartet of etchings otherwise dedicated to the elements of water, fire, and earth, identify the figure as a personification of air. While an elemental understanding of nature does not prevail in science today, it was dominant in the natural philosophy of sixteenth-century northern Europe. In fact, the image engages numerous branches of contemporary natural philosophy. The celestial globe and its star signs engage astrological and astronomical arts as well as disciplines like cartography, and the elemental imagery of the print aligns, for instance, with contemporary alchemy. This etching moreover articulates Dietterlin’s commitment to empiricism. The convincing way in which the artist rendered the water spouting from the mouths of the birds, bellows, and bagpipe suggests close study of moving liquid and an understanding that such streams can resemble, and otherwise stand in for, airflow-a phenomenon far harder for artists to observe and figure than moving water. The print’s various creatures meanwhile find solid representation in sixteenth-century printed, illustrated natural history texts based on first-hand observations or images that claimed to derive from such studies.

Figure 2: Wendel Dietterlin, Fountain with the Element of Air, etched illustration in Dietterlin’s ARCHITECTVRA von Außtheilung, Symmetria vnd Proportion der Fünff Seulen […] (Nuremberg: Hubrecht and Balthasar Caymox, 1598), Zurich, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Rx 12: c,2 | F, pl. 163. https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-8703 / Public Domain Mark

The mix of fantastic and empirically derived imagery in Dietterlin’s fountain etching registers the lingering influence of pre-Enlightenment natural philosophy as well as the emerging pull of empirical science. The print embodies both learned and direct forms of empiricism while asserting the authority of sensory experience as a source of knowledge and of architecture as a robust vehicle for conveying natural philosophical understanding. That architecture could provide a framework for combining various scientific disciplines and orientations of empirical research would have made sense to the Architectura’s earliest audiences, for the medium of architecture was understood in early modern Europe to involve virtually the full range of arts and sciences. Dietterlin’s innovation was to give that concept pictorial form and to compose an architecture book that could appeal just as much to those interested in natural philosophy as those fascinated by architecture and the other visual arts.

In composing The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science, I combined methods from art history, architectural history, the histories of science and knowledge, and postcolonial critique. I departed from more typical histories of architecture by foregrounding other artistic media, such as drawing, painting, print, and sculpture. Because the book emphasizes empirical knowledge and visual practices of research across art, architecture, and science, it was also important to me to assess not only images, but also the processes whereby such objects were formed, disseminated, and critiqued. I was greatly helped by the proliferation of digitized early modern drawings, prints, and illustrated books during the years leading up to my writing. This trend allowed me to trace imagery and lines of inquiry between Dietterlin and colleagues across Europe and beyond in ways that would have been impossible with analogue sources alone. In addition, I took seriously the coloniality of Dietterlin’s Architectura, a treatise used by artists and patrons implicated in the global proliferation of Latin American silver, and a book that experienced its most vigorous architectural reception in seventeenth-century Peru. By assessing how colonial Peruvian architectural sculptors critiqued the philosophies of material and form embodied in Dietterlin’s Architectura etchings, I complicated prevailing narratives of the interplay between architectural culture and seventeenth-century understandings of nature.

The story of how architectural images became platforms of early modern science and empiricism matters today because architectural media continue to act as the crucibles for our evolving understandings of nature. Images of architecture enhance, for instance, knowledge of the ecological impacts of building and urban development, and of the environmental factors that affect the architectural fabric. Architectural images have been used to model the behaviours of airborne pathogens such as Covid-19. And in the digital realm, they have served as environments for projecting the performance of countless materials and structural configurations in engineering contexts.

The distinctive mix of fantasy and empiricism in Dietterlin’s Architectura and the treatise’s unexpected connections to early modern scientific inquiry offer two particularly useful insights for using architectural images as platforms for scientific inquiry in the present day. First, they indicate the many ways in which scientific imagery can only arise through artistic decision-making and even license, affirming the subjective nature of any visualization of scientific fact. Second, they indicate that images that at first appear fantastical, such as renderings made via generative AI, can in fact enfold profound scientific knowledge. The case of Dietterlin’s Architectura indicates, in other words, the perils and possibilities of using architectural images as platforms for scientific inquiry.

The idea that scientific thinking can transpire in the most unexpected corners of artistic and architectural culture was what motivated me to pursue this research project for over a decade. I wanted to understand how the fantastic can disclose fact and how fact can encompass the fantastic. To do so, I had to grow from a scholar versed in early modern art and architectural history to someone also comfortable with the histories of early modern science and knowledge. Developing this expertise exposed me to new ways of working-for instance, regarding artistic making as a form of research and even science-that will remain with me for the rest of my career. Just as Dietterlin’s rusticated portal indicates how architectural images powered early modern natural philosophical inquiry, the evolving shapes of architectural media offer uncountable doorways to, and possibilities for, an architectural mode of scientific thought. What more can we uncover by accepting Dietterlin’s invitation to traverse this threshold, by pondering the enmeshment of the empirical and the fantastical in the architectural imagery of our own present?

The Architectural Image and
Early Modern Science by
Elizabeth J. Petcu