Editors: Sven Dupré (University of Utrecht / Amsterdam) & Marieke Hendriksen (Dutch Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences)
Publisher: Brepols, 2023
What is technique in the arts? Now widely used to refer to the practical aspects of art making, ‘technique’ was a neologism in the vernacular, and started to appear in treatises on arts and sciences from around 1750. Rooted in the Greek technè, which was translated routinely as ‘art’ until the mid-eighteenth century, technique referred to processes of making or doing and their products. Described previously as ‘art’, ‘methods’, ‘manners’ or ‘mechanics’, techniques were recorded in text with the intention of documenting or transmitting practical skills and knowledge.
This book bridges the gap between the changing concept of technique and the practices currently described by it. It explores the linguistic, philosophical, and pedagogic history of technique in the arts, answering the question why the term ‘technique’ first emerged around 1750, and exploring how its meaning to artists, art theorists, and natural philosophers changed until the twentieth century.
Contents
1. Introduction – Sven Dupré & Marieke Hendriksen
2. The Body and Daily Life as Metaphor and Analogy in Technical Language in the Works of Leonardo da Vinci, Vannoccio Biringuccio and Benvenuto Cellini – Andrea Bernardoni
3. Neudörffer’s Notebook: Recipes and the Rendering of Calligraphic Technique between Manuscript and Print in Sixteenth-Century Germany – Hannah Murphy
4. Between arte and ingenio. Approaches to Technique in Early Modern Spanish painting – José Ramón Marcaida
5. ‘An old and calm woman, blind and mute’: Finding Words to Describe Technique in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Art Literature – Marije Osnabrugge
6. ‘Have a great care of the shadows’. Perspectives on Carefulness in Historical Recipes for the Restoration of Oil Paintings – Maartje Stols-Witlox
7. Architecture and Technical Virtuosity in Eighteenth Century France – Valérie Nègre
8. The Debate about Technique in the Kunstwissenschaft around 1900 – Maria Teresa Costa
9. Somatic Language in Artistic Work Practices. An Ethnographic Perspective on Bodies, Materials, Practical Knowledge and Technique in Contemporary Art – Christiane Schürkmann