The remarkable ceramic vessels crafted by Bernard Palissy (1510–1590) and the cast-from-life tableware of Wenzel Jamnitzer (1507/08–1585) testify to a fascination with nature’s creations and its generative processes among sixteenth-century artists (figs. 1.1, 1.2). Filled with animals, shells, and plants molded from actual specimens, these objects mimicked the diversity of nature. From Palissy’s writings it is clear that such objects were meant not just as a mimesis of the form of natural things, however, but also as an assertion of his ability, through imitation, to gain knowledge of nature.1 In ‘The art of the earth’, a section of his Discours admirables (1580), Palissy (1957, 188–203) asserts that knowledge of nature can only come by means of ‘art’, a direct engagement with the materials of nature involving great bodily labor and suffering. Because knowledge of nature only emerges from direct and repeated experience of the things of nature, all those who practise an art learn thereby the principles and causes of natural phenomena. Even a ‘laborer without knowledge of languages, except the one your mother taught you’ can be said, according to Palissy (1957, 113–114), to have a philosophy of nature. To explicate and prove his knowledge about how natural substances come into being and are transformed, Palissy’s writings on natural subjects explored the formation and generation of natural phenomena based on direct observation. Moreover, he put objects on display in a museum in Paris to accompany the lectures he said he provided to the curious there.2 Palissy’s actions make clear that his mimesis of natural things, in its direct engagement with the materials of nature, had an epistemic aim of extracting natural knowledge from his making procedures.
Bernard Palissy, dish with rustic ‘figulines’, second half of the sixteenth century. Lead-glazed clay, 76.1 cm × 45.4 cm. Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyon
© Lyon MBA. Photo: Courtesy of Musée des Bea ux-Arts, Lyon
Wenzel Jamnitzer, tablepiece, 1549. Silver, 99.8 cm × 46.0 cm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Rijksmuseum. Public domain
A remarkable anonymous manuscript contemporaneous with Palissy and Jamnitzer, which contains the most detailed extant instructions for casting from life, sheds further light on the practice of imitating nature in an artisanal workshop. It reveals that the making of quotidian objects in itself formed a fundamental investigation into nature and natural materials, even when it was not accompanied by the kind of written claims that Palissy makes. The author of the manuscript Ms. Fr. 640, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, experimented with the imitation of nature on multiple levels, from detailed techniques for life casting to methods for fabricating gemstones. The manuscript comprises 170 folios of closely-written observations, notes, and recipe-like instructions set down in late sixteenth-century France by an anonymous person whom we refer to as the author-practitioner. This individual does not appear to have had ambitions to make explicit epistemic claims to knowledge of nature; however, his efforts to make objects that mimicked natural things – his quotidian testing and trying of materials – demonstrate the ways in which the workshop’s everyday mode of working and producing could constitute investigating and philosophising about nature. This is especially evident in Ms. Fr. 640’s entries that aim to produce imitations of natural substances, ranging from fabricated gemstones to animals cast from life. The endeavor to create such man-made equivalents prompts the artisan to examine closely the peculiarities of raw materials and to seek practicable techniques that can match (without supplanting) nature’s generative forces. In his attention to the colour and surface effects of the natural substances to be reproduced, the author-practitioner describes precisely the phenomenon that Marjolijn Bol (n.d.) calls material mimesis, in which one material imitates the visual properties of another. This material mimesis is thus based on firsthand experiment with, and hypothesizing about, raw substances and their properties.
Our essay closely reads and reconstructs the manuscript’s recipe for Jaspe contrefaict (counterfeit jasper) in order to understand the author-practitioner’s interest in and practice of imitation. Although physical likeness was seemingly the primary objective, our reconstructions suggest that the process of imitating or reproducing a raw material might also have helped the author-practitioner understand both the material and the forces behind its generation in nature.3 We find connections between the author-practitioner’s modes of inquiry into the physical properties of materials and important sixteenth-century epistemic projects, including the Kunstkammer and contemporaneous natural philosophical writings on the genesis of stones. As we explore what constituted a convincing imitation of naturalia prized by early modern collectors, thinkers, and artisans, we consider the status and epistemic aims of these products within collections of the time.4
1 Making and Knowing
Our investigation of imitation jasper was carried out in the framework of the Making and Knowing Project (www.makingandknowing.org), a collaborative project dedicated to exploring artisanal and experiential knowledge, which has produced a digital critical edition and translation of Ms. Fr. 640. This manuscript comprises an extraordinarily detailed first-hand account of practical techniques for making objects typically found in an early modern Kunstkammer collection. It contains recipes for a huge variety of techniques, with almost half of the over 900 entries devoted to casting and metalworking methods, and includes in-depth entries on arms and armor, and observations on a multitude of other processes and practices from painting to plant cultivation. The Project’s digital edition of this manuscript, Secrets of craft and nature (published 2020), contains a full transcription, English translation, and critical commentary on many of the entries. This commentary was created by students in a ‘laboratory seminar’ at Columbia University, in which hands-on reconstructions of techniques and objects in the manuscript are carried out.
The more the Project has learned about Ms. Fr. 640 through these reconstructions, the clearer it has become that the anonymous author-practitioner was preoccupied with imitating nature in a diversity of forms. His instructions for life casting are by far the most detailed written accounts of this technique, and include, for example, casting the multiple petals of a rose, and clever ‘secrets’ for a method to produce an exact imitation in concave of a portrait relief medal in convex – called ‘incuse reverse casting’ today. He was also interested in sleight-of-hand tricks, a type of deceptive trickery that forms the other side of the coin of perfect imitation, encapsulated in terms such as ‘crafty’, ‘cunning’, or ‘artifice’ (and today’s ‘artificial’), which ultimately refer to the power – for both good and evil – of the work of the human hand. As is well known, the German term Kunst, meaning art, derives from können, or ‘to be able to do’ – in other words, ‘skill’. Some of the very first written recipes for dyes and pigments contained in the so-called Leiden and Stockholm papyri (c. 2nd century CE) include just such ambiguous processes of imitation, for colouring and dyeing are natural stages of material transformation, but are also capable of deceiving through their perfect imitation of more precious substances, such as gold or gemstones. As this essay will show, however, imitation in the making of art is much more than representation – or deception – of form, and this more significant, indeed epistemic, mode of imitation pervades Ms. Fr. 640’s recipes.
2 Imitating and Counterfeiting
Ms. Fr. 640 contains a rich array of terms used by the author-practitioner for imitative practices. A search of the manuscript for words or roots potentially associated with mimesis yields natur-, contref- (from contrefaire, or ‘to counterfeit’), imit-, selon, vray, aproch-, artific-, and effect. Several noteworthy points emerged: first, the author-practitioner employs the term le naturel – appearing thirty-seven times – to refer to the natural state of a thing. This term – literally, ‘the natural’ – suggests a concept in which the natural properties of a material or creature exist as a kind of independent component within it. By contrast, the use of nature with a possessive – ‘its nature’ – occurs infrequently. For example, in fol. 105v, the author-practitioner describes methods for catching nightingales and emphasises that ‘you must observe their nature’ [naturel], attributing le naturel, or ‘the natural’, to the creatures themselves.5 In other words, the behaviours of physical beings or materials are not described by reference to natural tendencies but rather by an acknowledgement of the natural that resides within them. In sixteenth-century France, this notion of the innate character of a thing or person was used to translate the Latin term ingenium, making native traits central to the early modern understanding of ‘ingenuity’.6 The author-practitioner’s interest in observing how le naturel manifests itself is made clear by his pairing of the term with selon (‘according to’) or, relatedly, comme (‘as’).7 When describing the casting of a rose on fol. 155v, the author-practitioner insists on the importance of painting it selon le naturel, imparting to ‘the natural’ an individual authority from which the maker takes his cue to produce his artifice.
Consistently, le naturel appears in recipes that deal with tips for either visual representation or physical manipulation; some indicate what to expect when handling a particular substance or how it behaves as it undergoes an unfamiliar process. The fifty-nine occurrences of terms related to the word ‘nature’ attest to the author-practitioner’s preoccupation with understanding the raw materials with which he claims to work. Notably, the author-practitioner does not have an equivalent for our modern term ‘naturalistic’. Rather, his terms related to nature predominantly address the physical properties of things and emphasise the value of the object as the starting point for faithful representation. The author-practitioner also uses the term le naturel to refer to the natural object itself, often to insist on it as the unmatched source of visual information that guides the artisan’s work. His marginal note on fol. 141v about painting moulded crayfishes to augment their lifelikeness recommends: ‘As in this & all other things, have always the natural one in front of you to imitate it’.8
The most suggestive insight into his conception of mimesis emerges from a comparison of his use of imiter (‘imitate’) and contrefaire (‘counterfeit’). Imiter and its variants appear twelve times in the manuscript, in the context of both two- and three-dimensional representations. Contrefaire, on the other hand, appears seven times, exclusively in recipes that deal with producing doubles for raw materials. Given how apparently intentional his use of these terms is, contrefaire may specifically denote material mimesis in the manuscript. This becomes particularly clear in the recipe on fol. 10r for Jaspe contrefaict. He uses contrefaire as an adjective modifying jasper in the recipe title, and then again as a verb in the long marginal note, ‘To better counterfeit mottled jasper’.9 This is in contrast to the meaning of imiter within the same recipe, which he uses in an inventive aside about imitating a rose with the scrapings produced in thinning the horn with a plane for the jasper.10 ‘You can imitate roses’ delights in the possibility of visually representing a rose by arranging the horn scrapings according to their natural curl (fig. 1.3).11 This, too, is material mimesis, which is perhaps why the author-practitioner goes on, in another recipe on 10r entitled ‘Roses’, to say that these are ‘counterfeited’ by dyeing the scrapings of horn or parchment. The contrast between contrefaire for jasper and imiter for roses in a single recipe, however, alerts us to a distinction that the author-practitioner appears to make between a visual effect of verisimilitude and a feasible visual substitution for the raw material. If we are to take him at his word, jaspe contrefaict is so materially close to the original stone that it could stand in for it, rather than merely appearing like it.
Imitation rose, made from shavings of painted bovine horn, from first trial of imitation jasper, following instructions in Ms. Fr. 640
Photo: Ana Estrades & Wenrui Zhao, The Making and Knowing Project
3 Portrait and Counterfeit
In the early modern period, the term contrafactum and its vernacular cognates emerged as a powerful way to convey authenticity and ‘fact’ by means of the visual. As the art historian Peter Parshall (1993, 555–556) has shown, this term served as a label ‘most often employed within the emerging genres of portraiture and topography, for images reporting specific events, and for portrayals of both natural and preternatural phenomena’. To characterise an image as a counterfeit possessed almost the opposite sense of its meaning today, describing not a mode of deception, but rather an attempt to communicate firsthand or eyewitness evidence. That it was most often applied to portraits reveals that the term could convey both the image-maker’s personal contact with the ‘original’ and also the effectiveness of the representation itself. An imago contrafacta stood in for the real person, event, or object it described, but not in order to deceive. The term contrafactum could support ‘subjects that for one reason or another seemed to ask for a special order of legitimacy’ (Parshall 1993, 564) precisely because they inspired wonder and disbelief. The media revolution of widely circulating prints helped disseminate and bolster the use of the term. The increasingly active ‘rhetoric of verifiability and actuality’ in the early modern period ‘granted images so described a certain truth value, one not always in sync with the reality effect of the image itself’ (Swan 2005, 10). The author-practitioner’s use of contrefaire in the manuscript appears to be congruent with this usage. Using this term to describe a representation of a natural material, he appears to claim that legitimate knowledge of the original derived from material imitation can be independent from the persuasiveness of the representation. In other words, imitating can lead to knowing, even when the imitation produced is not fully convincing.
Several of the author-practitioner’s contemporaries use the term contrefaire similarly. Giovanni Villani’s Segreti (c.1300) uses the adjective contrafatti in recipes devoted to imitating valuable raw materials, namely amber, ivory, coral, and pearls.12 The pseudonymous Alessio Piemontese’s popular book of secrets (De Secreti, 1555), like Ms. Fr. 640, provides recipes for artistic techniques and experiments with material mimesis, and uses contrafatto in a recipe for making ebony ‘so beautiful as to cause shame to the natural’.13 Making objects that resembled raw materials seems to have been understood as a process of taking direct cues from nature to approximate the materials’ natural state, with the implication that the finished products were visually close enough to the original materials that they could function in their place. The ‘counterfeit’ could be a visual substitute for the thing itself, much like a portrait – the ultimate imago contrafacta – could be valued as a stand-in without being confused for the actual person.14 If the author-practitioner understood his manufactured jasper to be more contrafactum than mere imitation, we may further consider how his jaspe contrefaict might function as a representation charged with conveying knowledge of jasper’s ‘nature’ or essence.
4 Jasper
Reconstruction of the fol. 10r recipe for counterfeiting jasper, over the course of three trials, allowed us to investigate the feasibility of the author-practitioner’s proposed material mimesis. The initial reconstruction, ‘Jasper imitation on horn’, by Ana Estrades and Wenrui Zhao, tested the author-practitioner’s suggestion of gathering and painting bovine horn shavings to imitate the appearance and texture of rose petals.15 The 2016 and 2018 reconstructions of the fol. 10r recipe worked with the same type of water buffalo horn (‘horn from which one makes lanterns, quite thin’),16 planed and sanded until it was thin enough to be translucent (between about 5 and 3 mm), and cut into rectangular pieces about 5 cm long, using a jeweler’s saw.17 To paint the horn in the 2016 reconstruction, Isabella Lores-Chavez and Charles Kang used the green pigment verdigris and red madder lake pigment, each ground with spike lavender varnish (‘The colors for this jasper want to have a base with clear turpentine or spike lavender varnish’) and, for a more translucent paint, linseed oil (‘colors matte in body are not so appropriate here’).18 The reconstruction set out to test the recommendation made in a marginal note that a better ‘counterfeit’ marbled jasper can be made using ‘wool with thick hairs dyed in diverse colors’.19 This passage is not explicit about how the wool ought to be coloured, nor does it indicate how to adhere it to the painted horn. For the 2016 trial, we dyed two samples of yarn made of 100% sheep’s wool in the lab. Because the author-practitioner does not specify any adhesive, we first tried pressing the yarn into the paint to see if it would naturally stick. When the yarn proved too fibrous and bulky for the paint to act as a glue, we tried dipping the yarn in paint and using it to spread paint across the surface of the horn. This resulted in only a slightly marbled, less uniform look to the surface. Finally, we attempted to adhere yarn to the horn by dipping a strand in spike lavender varnish before applying it to the horn. This strand certainly stuck more effectively, but it still did not achieve a marbled effect as suggested by the author-practitioner (fig. 1.4).
Imitation jasper from second trial made from bovine horn, red paint (madder and spike lavender varnish), dyed woollen yarn, and transfer gold leaf, oiled with spike lavender oil, following Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 10r
Photo: Isabella Lores-Chavez, The Making and Knowing Project
For all five samples of painted horn in the 2016 reconstruction, we used a sharp metal tool to scrape lines into the horn, following the recipe instructions: ‘After you have layered all the colors, scrape oblique lines on them, then layer gold & silver leaf’.20 Finally, to half of each painted horn sample we applied transfer gold leaf (thin gold foil adhesible by rubbing onto flat surfaces) and coated the unpainted side with spike lavender oil (‘One needs to oil the unpainted reverse with spike lavender oil’).21 These last three steps contributed significantly to the effect: the scratched lines created delicate patterns not unlike those found in real jasper, while the gold backing brightened the colour of the painted horn and highlighted the fine scratched lines further.
In the third trial, in 2018, we revisited the author-practitioner’s marginal recommendation to use ‘wool with thick hairs’ to achieve a more marbled surface effect (fig. 1.5). This time we used unspun wool applied to horn painted with coloured varnish, producing a sample of counterfeit jasper that most convincingly resembled the real stone. Oiling the unpainted side with spike lavender oil rendered the horn immediately more translucent, making the painted side more visible while helping the horn retain the fatty lustre that made it the author-practitioner’s material of choice (‘the horn presents a luster & fatty polish like jasper’.)22
Top: Native jasper, unpolished. Bottom: Imitation jasper from third trial
Photo: Pamela H. Smith, The Making and Knowing Project
5 Reconstruction Insights
Our reconstruction of Jaspe contrefaict gave compelling evidence for the author-practitioner’s possible sequence of experimentation. The layout of the text on fol. 10r includes a central block of text (the recipe), with a marginal note extending far down the left side of the folio that communicates variations on the process and possible uses of the product (fig. 1.6). This note contains the first piece of advice for making the imitation more convincing: the use of coloured wool. Its placement in the margin may indicate a second trial of the jasper counterfeit. Directly following this are instructions for scratching oblique lines and for backing with gold leaf, both of which significantly augmented the appearance of the horn as a patterned yet translucent object. The use of wool and the scratching followed by gilding seem to be techniques he employed in later trials, or ideas he wrote down for later testing.
Folio 10r, Ms. Fr. 640. The recipe for Jaspe contrefaict begins at the top of the page and continues with a long marginal note at left. ‘Recueil de recettes et secrets concernant l’art du mouleur, de l’artificier et du peintre’,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, manuscripts Français 640. With permission
In contrast, the final step of oiling the unpainted side, which undoubtedly contributed to the product’s verisimilitude, appears urgently squeezed in at the end of the main block of the recipe, on either side of the heading for the following recipe (fig. 1.7). Further modifications were recorded in marginal notes: while the main body of the recipe recommends not using glass, a stray line of text beneath the title states the effectiveness of thin glass, perhaps another indication that the author-practitioner returned to the recipe with alternate steps or materials. Based on our reconstruction, it seems likely that the author-practitioner attempted this recipe multiple times, and in our own trials, multiple iterations produced better counterfeits.
Detail of folio 10r, Ms. Fr. 640, showing the text at the end of the main recipe squeezed into the little space available above and around the title for the following recipe
Both the analysis of the author-practitioner’s language and our reconstructions make a case for his awareness of the value of his own artifice. He even anticipated a use for his counterfeited stone: the long marginal note squeezed onto fol. 10r begins by stating that the imitation jasper can be used to inlay bed frames (fig. 1.8).23 This use could potentially augment its verisimilitude: when not the sole focus of the viewer’s attention, even modest jasper-like visual qualities could be sufficiently effective.
Imitation jasper from the third trial inlaid into imitation wood frame
Photo: Tianna Uchacz, The Making and Knowing Project
6 The Place and Purpose of Jasper
The purpose of making counterfeit jasper thus was not to deceive: it may have been to convey the ‘essence’ of the material, and perhaps even to understand how the real stone came to have that essence and appearance. The creation of a material mimesis could serve not just to stand in place of the real, but also to ‘explain the physical problem of the genesis of nature’s materials’, a process comparable to the belief proclaimed by the thirteenth-century philosopher-theologian Albertus Magnus (c.1200–1280) ‘that nature could be understood from the direct analogy to its artisanal counterparts’ (Bol 2014, 129). To examine whether this applies to the author-practitioner’s process of making jasper, we must consider both the function of jasper in the early modern period and the epistemic context for his recipe.
In the sixteenth century, jasper was among several precious stones commonly collected in princely Kunstkammern and even in modest collections of artificialia and naturalia. Already in the medieval period, a taste for jasper existed at the imperial courts of Prague, where precious vessels were carved from locally mined stone.24 Generations later, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) continued to display goods made of Bohemian jasper in the capacious theatrum mundi he had famously amassed. Additionally, he commissioned large tabletops in the commesso di pietre dure technique from the stone carver Cosimo Castrucci and his workshop in Prague. Around 1597, the Medici workshops in Prague were making a round table (now lost) of jasper and porphyry for him. These compositions, like their counterparts produced in the grand-ducal workshops in Florence, combine different kinds of stones, including jasper, whose individual characteristics here matter less than the surface effects the stone contributes to the whole (fig. 1.9). The work of the artist embellishes the stone’s natural preciousness; its value derives from a combination of the raw material and the artist’s artifice.25
Galleria dei Lavori, Barberini cabinet, c.1606–23. Oak and poplar veneered with various exotic hardwoods, with ebony moldings and plaques of marble and slate; pietre dure work consisting of colored marbles, rock crystal, and various hardstones, 59.1 cm × 96.8 cm × 35.9 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Wrightsman Fund , 1988, 1988.19
At Schloß Ambras, in the extensive Kunstkammer of Archduke Ferdinand II (1529–1595), the son of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, jasper was among the gemstones and minerals in the archduke’s collection of naturalia in their raw form, evidently sometimes displayed alongside artistically worked versions of the same materials (Scheicher 1985, 32). In the early modern Kunstkammer, jasper was thus appreciated both as a marvellous stone and as a workable raw material. Moreover, jasper could also be admired for receiving representational impressions from nature itself. In Le parfaict joaillier (a 1644 translation of the 1609 work Gemmarum et lapida historia), Anselm de Boodt (1550–1632), a Flemish mineralogist and humanist, discusses the specific hardness of jasper and the ways sculptors worked it. Comparing heliotrope to jasper, he remarks that it has ‘a greater authority than jasper, unless it is the case that nature has imprinted upon this jasper images and effigies’.26 De Boodt indicates how figuration naturally occurring in jasper could increase its value, drawing an analogy between the work of nature and the sculptor’s carving of images into the stone.
The author-practitioner undoubtedly had opportunities to see jasper, given its availability from European mines. He may also have been familiar with the writings of Bernard Palissy, who made ceramic casts from life using techniques comparable to the author-practitioner’s life castings in metal. In 1580, Palissy published his Paris lessons on natural history in Discours admirables. Among the many descriptions Palissy provides for the formation and properties of natural materials, there is a long section devoted to stones, which includes detailed explanations for the physical appearance of stones like jasper. He is particularly preoccupied with these stones’ colouring:
As for the colors of figured marbles, jaspers, porphyries, serpentines, and other such kinds, their colors are caused by various drips of water that fall from the surface of the earth to the place where these rocks are formed: the waters coming from many and various places in the earth, in descending bring with them these various colors which are in these stones […] Other drops will carry other various colors that will cause many patterns on the rocks.27
Palissy pictured multiple stages in the formation of rocks deep within the earth, positing that the final colours and textures of jasper were generated by the movement of water.28 Pairing theory with practice, Palissy also created glazes for his ceramic grottoes in his attempt to ‘decipher the causes of colour transformation in nature’, using ‘human craft to elucidate natural process’ (Shell 2004, 22, 27). The author-practitioner’s recipe for jaspe contrefaict indicates an inquisitiveness about the colouring and patterning of the stone comparable to observations that spurred Palissy’s theories about the origins of such stones. The author-practitioner experiments with techniques for materially imitating the appearance of jasper as well as for ‘generating’ it. He specifically considers how colours ought to be laid down but also disrupted and moved around (with wool or by scraping). The admonition not to use opaque colours also suggests a practical knowledge of the relative translucence of some pigments compared to others, as well as a concept of colours first suspended in water and then made solid and visible by their union with a substrate.29 The author-practitioner’s encounter with the real stone could have prompted questions about how nature produces such astonishing effects and informed his practical efforts to mimic them (fig. 1.10).
Bernard Palissy, spoon handle in the shape of a woman, c.1556–90. Glaze and terracotta, 14.8 cm × 4.2 cm, Musée national de la Renaissance, Ecouen, France. Palissy used colored glaze to imitate jasper
© RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY / Photo: Mathieu Rabeau
Both in Ms. Fr. 640 and in the Kunstkammern of early modern Europe, jasper coexisted with several other materials sought after in their raw form. Coral and multi-coloured woods were essential components of a stock of naturalia. Although each of these, too, was incorporated into larger vessels and artificialia, their natural appearance was itself a source of fascination for collectors and artisans alike. Ms. Fr. 640 contains numerous recipes for making coloured wood, among them the general ‘Recipe for colouring all wood’ (fol. 75v–76r), as well as instructions for colouring it green, red, and purple (fol. 76r). Wood of diverse colours was produced in Europe and imported from overseas, essential in techniques like intarsia, as used in the studiolo of the Duke of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro (1422–1482), designed by Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1501) between 1478 and 1482 (Wilmering 1999). The author-practitioner’s inclusion of methods for dyeing wood accords with his general interest in the manuscript in decorative practices involving painted and dyed materials, including horn. Judging from his comments about the potential uses of the jaspe contrefaict, it is likely that he had in mind multiple uses of coloured wood – itself a possible material mimesis of finer woods or rarer substances like ebony – when he included these recipes in the manuscript, attentive to the natural aesthetic qualities as well as decorative applications of both the raw material and its imitation.
As with jasper, the author-practitioner provides instructions for making coral on fol. 3r, using the designation coral contrefaict. This recipe suggests a material mimesis so successful that it could substitute for the precious original; even the marginal note reiterates the verb contrefaire rather than using imiter.30 Coral was a favorite collector’s item in early modern Kunstkammern for its visual appeal, its restorative medical properties, and its suitability for carving. Ferdinand II included it in his Schloß Ambras collection, both in its native form and as a decorative addition to mounts for exotica such as ostrich eggs. The author-practitioner’s recipe produces a version close to natural coral; the reconstruction made by the Making and Knowing team with Dr. Elisabeth Berry Drago attests to the convincing appearance of the imitation. For some collectors, coral’s visual appeal coincided with a pursuit of the knowledge that close inspection could yield. Ferrante Imperato (c.1525–c.1615), the Neapolitan apothecary, relied on direct observation of ‘the materials in his collections to describe anew the contours of the natural world’ while preparing his 1599 Dell’historia naturale (Findlen 1994, 32, 42). Here he discusses the physical properties of coral, and explains how he believes it is formed in nature, based on his firsthand examination of actual specimens. He stated that coral grew over branches, encasing them completely, giving as proof that, when broken open, coral specimens exposed wood cores (fig. 1.11).31 Unbeknownst to Imperato, he was probably looking at a piece of imitation coral made according to the technique described in Ms. Fr. 640.
Imitation coral, reconstructed following Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 3r
Photo: Pamela H. Smith, The Making and Knowing Project
The 1565 treatise of Samuel Quiccheberg (1529–1567), Inscriptiones tituli theatri amplissimi, sheds light on the conceptual frameworks that informed the diversity of jasper, wood, and coral in early modern collections. These raw materials belong to what Quiccheberg (2013, 81) calls ‘the universal class […] compri[sing] natural things and the entirety of natural matter’. In Quiccheberg’s system for organising objects in a collection, naturalia belonged to the third of five classes, within which there were eleven ‘inscriptions’ or subcategories. Remarkably, several inscriptions in the third class encourage the possession of materials taken directly from nature or ‘imitated by artifice’. Within the same inscription, Quiccheberg includes ‘herbs, flowers, small branches, boughs, pieces of bark, wood, roots, and the like’, as well as versions of these ‘either cast from metal of some kind, woven from silk, or depicted by some new art’. Furthermore, the ‘earthen materials and liquids’ in the eleventh inscription can be ‘both naturally produced and manufactured’. In Quiccheberg’s conception of a collection of naturalia, the imitation appears to be the material equivalent of the raw substance: it is a counterfeit that can stand in for its naturel.32 By including human-made objects created by techniques unknown to him within the same inscription as natural specimens, Quiccheberg’s treatise demonstrates that imitations were not considered degraded products but ingenious counterfeits of raw materials, able to stand in for the real thing. In the Kunstkammer, in the workshop, and in the theoretical texts that sometimes linked them, a ‘counterfeit’ manifested a response to a natural wonder, without the modern connotations of deceptiveness and superficiality.
Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones seems to make room, in a complete theatrum mundi, for precisely the kind of imitative techniques contained in Ms. Fr. 640. The enthusiasm on the part of intellectuals like Quiccheberg for nature ‘depicted by some new art’ surely spurred artisanal practices of imitation. ‘Reproduction was an achievement in itself’, presented as a welcome opportunity to compare natural artifice to human artistry (Pilaski Kaliardos 2013, 149). The intermingling of naturalia with artificialia posing as naturalia serves as a reminder that, in imitating the artifice of nature, artisans had the paradoxical task of effacing traces of their creative processes, without making the imitation so convincing as to completely conceal the ingenuity of its maker. Ultimately, these inventive artisanal techniques could have epistemic reaches, constituting a valuable mode of creating knowledge about nature. The resemblance between the raw material and the imago contrefacta (whether an image or an object) could promote an understanding of the organic processes that engendered such visually impressive substances in the first place. These projects in material mimesis were artful endeavors and investigations of nature. Possessing both the imitation and the natural material, a collector might have considered ‘that art could, by virtue of the knowledge about natural processes on the part of the artist, produce things that were “virtually” natural’ (Pilaski Kaliardos 2013, 163). The artisan, meanwhile, moved from a close examination of the raw material to its re-creation in the workshop, using familiar tools and techniques to make objects that could rival nature’s impressive artifice (Pilaski Kaliardos 2013, 149).
7 Making and Owning
If the products of experimentation with imitation could serve as substitutes for the original raw material, could deception in the sense of a modern forgery have been one motivation for making them?33 Given the commercial success of exotica and naturalia as sought-after objects for Kunstkammern, charlatans abounded, ‘not aspir[ing] to interpret nature, but to sell nature to those who created knowledge out of the raw ingredients of the marketplace’ (Findlen 2002, 302). Despite its rich use of imitation terms, the recipe on fol. 10r deals with the practical, not the commercial, aspects of the making and the product itself. The author-practitioner’s jaspe contrefaict was not destined to garner a high price and enter a princely Kunstkammer, but it could serve to ornament a bed frame in a more modest setting.
In his imitation recipes, the author-practitioner articulates a practice undertaken on a daily basis in the artisan’s workshop: through physical manipulation, certain materials could be pushed to undergo transformations to resemble another material. Subjected to a non-natural transformation, one material could take on the visual appearance – and even the physical properties – of another. The distinction the author-practitioner seems to make between imiter and contrefaire indicates his subtle understanding of how workshop versions of coveted raw materials could be the compelling, if not perfectly convincing, simulacra resulting from such processes. The endeavor to create a human-made equivalent for raw natural substances provided an opportunity to learn more about them and to seek practicable techniques that could match (without supplanting) nature’s creative forces.
Stones such as jasper sustained both visual and scientific appeal in the early modern period; they showed distinctive patterning, but no two specimens were ever quite the same. For the author-practitioner, examining this kind of object up close seems to have raised questions about its material peculiarities and about how nature generates them. Those irregularities guided inquiries, as much for the author-practitioner as for his naturalist contemporaries. In the catalogue of his own Kunstkammer, Ferrante Imperato, according to Paula Findlen (1994, 227), ‘argued that nature’s causes did not exceed the powers of ordinary observers’ and ‘underscored nature as a knowable entity, full of ordinary rather than magical wonder’. Discovering how ordinary materials can produce the verisimilitude of exceptional materials is central to the author-practitioner’s endeavors. His ingenious attempt to ‘turn’ bovine horn into jasper is a far cry from Bernard Palissy’s description of water slipping colour onto primordial clay before it congeals to form patterned stones like jasper.34 Yet, in a similar fashion, the recipe communicates a curiosity about the ways that nature creates and astonishes, engendering improbable transformations through which water can become colour and soft earth durable stone.
The author-practitioner’s own processes begin in readily accessible workshop materials, manipulated in pursuit of his fascination with transforming one material so that it resembles another (both mimetically and in some of its physical properties). We can see his trials as a result of curiosity about the workings of nature, but they are also simply a fundamental and everyday response to the challenges that arise in the working of natural materials, a part of the exploring, testing, and trying by which practitioners come to understand the constitution and behaviour of their materials. The author-practitioner’s efforts to overcome and transform horn, pigment, wool, and varnish into jaspe contrefaict were simultaneously an aesthetic quest and a probing of the relationship between nature and art. The author-practitioner’s iterative practice, borne out of the need to test working hypotheses about his materials, resulted in multiple versions of the ‘counterfeit’ as he adapted his techniques and materials to try to capture the state of the native stone. The iterative experimentation in creating the material mimesis reveals the artisan learning about the natural world in reproducing its hidden (‘secret’) processes of making. The imitation of jasper with horn, pigment, wool, and gold leaf presented an opportunity both for working and thinking through the properties of materials, and for investigating the processes by which precious and epistemic objects could be produced and reproduced.
Acknowledgements
We thank Charles Kang wholeheartedly for his creative input and invaluable help during the second reconstruction trial. Charles was indispensable to our investigation of the recipe in 2016. Research for this article has been supported by NSF Grants #1430843 and #1734596.
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Endnotes
Smith 2004. Casting or moulding from life constituted an imitation of nature on multiple levels: see Smith 2014. For more on lifecasting techniques, see Smith & Beentjes 2010.
Palissy 1957, 27: ‘As anyone can see and hear in less than two hours, providing he will take the trouble to come and see my cabinet, in which will be seen marvelous things which are placed there as witness and proof of my writings, arranged in order on shelves, with labels below them: in order that one may learn by himself’; Palissy 1957, 233: ‘Copy of the Labels: Placed under the marvelous things which the author of this book has prepared and arranged in order in his cabinet, to prove all things contained in this book’. See also Amico 1996, and Kemp 1999.
We use the term ‘raw material’ here to designate naturally occurring substances that have not undergone any kind of intervention or transformation by human hands or tools.
We limit our focus here to jasper (and similar stones), coral, and wood. On gemstones, also subject to imitation, in Ms. Fr. 640, see Kremnitzer et al., 2020.
Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 105v: ‘Il faut observer leur naturel’; Making and Knowing Project et al. 2020, online: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/105v/f/105v/tl.
We thank Richard Oosterhoff for his insights into naturel. For the Latin ingenium in sixteenth-century France, see Marr et al. 2018.
Of the thirty-seven times le naturel is used, it appears after selon or comme a total of twelve times.
Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 141v: ‘Et en cecy & toutes aultres choses ayes tousjours le naturel devant toy pour limiter’; Making and Knowing Project et al. 2020, online: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/141v/f/141v/tl.
Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 10r: ‘Pour mieulx contrefaire jaspe grumeleux’; Making and Knowing Project et al. 2020, online: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/10r/f/10r/tl.
Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 10r: ‘Les roses se peuvent imiter’. For this part of the recipe, see Estrades 2020.
Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 10r, Making and Knowing Project et al. 2020, online: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/10r/f/10r/tl.
Villani n.d. See recipes numbered 469, 470, 1058, 1059.
Piemontese 1555, 166: ‘A far ebeno contrafatto tanto bello che fa vergogna al naturale’. The recipe for imitation pearls in the later French edition is labeled ‘Pour contrefaire perles lesquelles seront forts belles comme naturelles’ (Piemontese 1627, 798).
In contrast, consider the author-practitioner’s use of the word faire for the imitation of emeralds and rubies on fol. 100v: ‘en ceste sort le vulgaire faict des esmerauldes’, ‘pour fayre rubis’; Making and Knowing Project et al. 2020, online: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/100v/f/100v/tl. Rather than using contrefaire, the author-practitioner suggests the possibility of virtually generating the thing itself, rather than its visually convincing substitute.
Estrades 2020 reviews the use of horn in early modern Europe, particularly the tradition of making lanterns with it.
Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 10r: ‘La corne dequoy on faict les lanternes bien deliée’, Making and Knowing Project et al. 2020, online: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/10r/f/10r/tl.
For a full account of the 2016 trial, see Lores-Chavez 2020. We thank Charles Kang for his essential input and insights during the reconstructions.
Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 10r: ‘Les couleurs pour ce jaspe veulent avoyr fonds avecq la tourmentine Claire ou vernis daspic’; ‘Et les couleurs mattes en corps ni sont pas si propres’; Making and Knowing Project et al. 2020, online: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/10r/f/10r/tl. Spike lavender varnish is a thick substance resembling turpentine varnish, made by heating spike lavender oil and stirring a powdered gum resin into it when it simmers, as described by the author-practitioner on fol. 4r.
Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 10r: ‘Laines à gros poils tainctes de diverses couleurs’; Making and Knowing Project et al. 2020, online: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/10r/f/10r/tl.
Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 10r: ‘Après que tu as couché toutes les couleurs, esgratigne sur icelles des lignes obliques, puys couche de l’or & argent en foeille’; Making and Knowing Project et al. 2020, online: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/10r/f/10r/tl.
Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 10r: ‘Il faut huiler d’huile d’aspic le revers non painct’; Making and Knowing Project et al. 2020, online: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/10r/f/10r/tl.
Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 10r: ‘La corne represente un lustre & polyment gras co[mm]e le jaspe’; Making and Knowing Project et al. 2020, online: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/10r/f/10r/tl.
Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 10r: ‘Tu en peulx incruster des licts’; Making and Knowing Project et al. 2020, online: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/10r/f/10r/tl. For more information on early modern use of jasper and imitation jasper – including for tarsia, pietre dure inlay, and marquetry – see Estrades 2020.
Cat. New York 2005, 167–168.
Marshall 2006, 77; Bukovinksá 2005, 222; Langedijk 1998, 358–382.
De Boodt 1644, 329: ‘une plus grande auctorité que le iaspe, si ce n’est qu’à ce iaspe la nature ayt imprimée des images & effigies’.
Palissy 1957, 174.
Palissy 1988, 116. Like Paracelsus and Agricola, Palissy developed innovative aqueous mineral theories based on direct observation of mines and mineral matter (Norris 2007, 69–86).
Samuel Quiccheberg (1529–1567) drew such analogies, for example between the creation of objects like life casts and the generation of natural materials like stones that originated in the ‘juices of the earth.’ See Smith 2014, 57–58.
Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 3r, Making and Knowing Project et al, 2020, online: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/folios/3r/f/3r/tl. For an investigation into the uses and understanding of coral in the early modern period, see Chessa 2020.
For Imperato’s encounter with coral, see Chessa 2020. For the process of making imitation coral from Ms. Fr. 640, see online: https://player.vimeo.com/video/129811219.
Quiccheberg 2013, 66–67; Felfe 2018.
For further discussion of deception and imitation, see Kremnitzer et al. 2020.
Palissy 1957, 174.