Biography

Patricia Falguieres is a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She has published numerous essays on Renaissance philosophy and art, classifications, encyclopedias, indexes and the birth of the museum in modern Europe (Les Chambres des merveilles, Paris, Bayard, 2003), Mannerism and the status of ornamenta in Alberti's De re aedificatoria. She published the French edition of Ernst Kris, Le style rustique. L'emploi du moulage d'après nature chez Wenzel Jamnitzer et Bernard Palissy (Paris, Macula, 2005), and Julius von Schlosser's classic, Les cabinets d'art et de merveilles de la renaissance tardive (Macula, 2012). Her current research focuses on the regime of Technè in the Renaissance, the inclusion of artistic practices in the Aristotelian order of knowledge and manufacture, and the modalities of redactio in artem, the codification of artistic practices. She organized and co-directed the international colloquium “The Art Industry. Gottfried Semper, Architecture and Anthropology in 19th-century Europe”. She also regularly publishes articles and essays on contemporary art.

Project Summary

Aristotelianism has been the philosophy of the arts. It provided an ontology of finiteness and accident immediately perceptible to "those who know about production," it delivered the coordinates of the arts practices or technai. This philosophy of the arts presents itself as a Natural Philosophy. The sixteenth century is its "great century": it is then that a global knowledge flourishes, full of metaphysical challenges. It assigns to the arts their field: the world "under the Moon." They share corruptibility of material contingency -  accidents, fires, breakage, moulds, rust, wear and tear. The world "under the Moon" is a continuum of constantly effervescing substances whose modalities - generation, corruption, increase, decrease, alteration, transport - are identified by each art on its behalf and brought to perfection. Just as the knowledge of "metals" belongs as much to the doctor as to the sculptor or miner, the knowledge of distillations, temperaments and metal hardening, which belongs to the person who knows plants and "metals," is the responsibility of the one who doses the remedies as much as the one who manufactures metal tools: the doctor, the apothecary, the sculptor, the armorer, the engraver or the watchmaker are called upon here. What distinguishes the arts: an operating knowledge that knows how to enter into the spontaneous interplay of alterations, cooking and sublimation, which is sublunar nature. From this point of view, the knowledge of nature "under the moon" is always both a doing and a knowing, a knowing because a doing. Art practicing provides the key to natural operations "under the moon." In the perspective opened up by this research program, the readings and re-elaborations, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of the Meteorologica, particularly Book IV, and their confrontation with competing meteorological models (Stoic in particular), combine a whole series of strategic issues for this approach.