March of the Pigments: Color History, Science and Impact

Abstract

tant practical knowledge was to rulers and statecraft as part of a princely collection or Kunstkammer. In the fourth and final part, the book moves most explicitly beyond The Body of the Artisan as it reflects Smith’s experience of collaborative research in laboratory reconstruction of instructions fromMs. Fr. 640, a Frenchmanuscript of art and craft practices that forms the core of Smith’s Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University. Here she distills the core insight that the anonymous author-practitioner of this sixteenth-century collection was primarily interested in the categorisation of materials by manipulating, hypothesising, and testing them – a working method that goes well beyond the trial and error typically identified as the artisanalmodus operandi. This may also be the part of the book that speaks most to the interests of the readers of this journal, as it reveals an epistemically productive fascination with material transformation that was the core business of alchemy in the early modern period. This part concludes with a search for alternative formulations to Kunst to describe this cognitive activity, culminating in the final sentence of the book where it is called “material imaginary,” “fundamental structuring categories,” “artisanal epistemology,” and a “mode of work,” among other things. Confronted with the same limitations of language that vexed early modern artisans, Smith is on a similar quest for creative descriptions and translations. Indeed, at its most basic level, the book tries to grasp and make explicit in words what practical knowledge is; and herein lies the most significant difference with Smith’s previous monograph. As the subtitle of The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution suggests, it situated artisanal epistemology in relation to science. Traces of this approach remain, but From Lived Experience to the Written Word primarily defines practical knowledge on its own terms. Characteristically, the book ends with an epilogue on “Global Routes of Practical Knowledge” in which Smith starts to undo the Eurocentric assumptions of the concept of the Scientific Revolution. There are books which close the discussion by offering the final word, and others which open fields by drastically altering the terms of discussion. From Lived Experience to the Written Word is a perfectly crafted book belonging to the latter category.