AUTOREN · Automata and Power in the Culture of Machines of Renaissance Florence, Milan and Venice (1400-1600)
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-01-15 → 2025-01-14
- EU contribution
- €269,003
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Automata and Power in the Culture of Machines of Renaissance Florence, Milan and Venice (1400-1600)
Introduction: Renaissance automata emerge as perhaps the most abstract compositions of occidental civilization, as observed by pioneering art historian Eugenio Battisti. As the dawn of cybernetics, robotics, and artificial intelligence unfolds, historians of technology reevaluate the role of European automata. The intricate nature of these symbolic machines, blending aesthetics and mechanics, beckons an interdisciplinary study approach – a call answered by AUTOREN. The Challenge: Despite thriving scholarship, a comprehensive history of automata in Renaissance Italy remains elusive. AUTOREN steps into this void, embarking on an innovative interdisciplinary project to unravel the mysteries of automata and bridge gaps in the historiography. Significance for Society: Automata, beyond being mere mechanical marvels, carry a profound intellectual message, challenging traditional notions of utility. Understanding the social, cultural, and material history of these symbolic machines becomes crucial to unveiling overlooked contributions to technological innovation, a quintessetial element of European identity. Objectives: Among the objectives of this research is the writing of the first history of Italian Renaissance automata between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. This narrative aims to capture epistemological continuities and shifts at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution. AUTOREN will utilize the regions of Milan, Venice, and Florence as privileged standpoints to identify European and Mediterranean cultural processes that shaped and financed the most innovative makers of Renaissance symbolic machines. Among these, one can find the most complex devices ever built up to that time: the planetary or cosmomorphic automata illustrating all celestial movements. AUTOREN will explain their genealogy and their applications in the fields of astrology, cosmology, meteorology, medicine, and warfare. AUTOREN will also identify and highlight key Italian figures in the crafting of innovative automata that influenced other European regions. Furthermore, AUTOREN involves a meticulous interdisciplinary analysis of an understudied corpus of Renaissance Italian anthropomorphic automata.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
This interdisciplinary project aims to innovatively fill a gap in the fast-growing historiography on automata, focussing on the social, cultural and material history of these types of machines in Renaissance Italy. For the first time, AUTOREN will investigate the history of automata in the areas of Milan, Venice and Florence between 1400 and 1600. These three Northern Italian engineering traditions are among the most thriving early modern cultures of machines, and they have been researched for their seminal influences on the development of European useful machines: these are traditionally related to warfare, construction, hydraulic and industrial technologies and timekeeping. Surprisingly, the most elaborate mechanical achievements of Renaissance Italy did not belong to such a positivist idea of utility, but to those functions directed at animating a symbolic organism that conveyed a multi-layered intellectual message often undecipherable to our contemporary eye. AUTOREN will examine these other layers of the concept of mechanical utility in relation to philosophy, representation of power, knowledge-seeking activities, piety and marvel. Among these symbolic machines, for the first time, AUTOREN will comparatively explore state-funded mechanical projects such as cosmomorphic automata (planetary contrivances demonstrating the movements of all the heavenly bodies) and a surprisingly understudied group of still extant anthropomorphic automata (especially self-propelled spring-driven automata). Crafting a toolbox at the crossroads of archaeometry and the historiographies of philosophy, art, science and technology AUTOREN will be able to highlight overlooked Northern Italian contributions to technological innovation and trends in mechanical projects to European early modern culture of machines at the dawn of that long epistemological shift known as the Scientific Revolution.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA · VeneziaCoordinatorItaly
- CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGYCORP · PasadenaUnited States
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union