74 Riva, Pratolino: il sogno alchemico di Francesco I de' Medici.
75 Gerd Neumann, “Alchemical Speculations in Pratolino: Rediscovery of a Rediscovery,” Daidalos 34 (1989): 22-29. 76 Centro Mostre di Firenze, ed., Il Giardino d'Europa: Pratolino come modello nella cultura europea (Firenze: Mazzota,
1986).
77 Sarah Higley, The Legend of the Learned Man's Android in Retelling Tales: Essays in Honor of Russel Peck, eds.
Thomas Hahn and Alan Lupack (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell & Brewer, 1997), 142.
78 DeSolla Price, “Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy,” 15. 79 Higley, The Legend of the Learned Man's Android, 133.
automata in Europe speak around Pratolino, never quite mentioning the name of the site. John Cohen cites a description by Michel de Montaigne of one of Pratolino's hydraulic displays without giving its proper provenance,80 and Silvio ψedini cites the same writings of Montaigne as “an
account of the best sixteenth-century examples” of automata, also without naming Francesco I's villa; instead, Bedini's study mentions automata of the Villa d'Este, the Archducal Villa Scarperio, and the “casino of the Archduke of Florence” as locations where devices such as “mills motivated by water and air power to operate small church clocks, animals, soldiers, and countless other automata could be found.”81 A wider circle is made by Bedini around the subject of the Villa
Pratolino; his study examines the hydraulic and mechanical works created at Hellbrunn outside of Salzburg in detail, but he does not mention that Hellbrunn was dubbed the “Pratolino of the North” for its duplication of works which originated at the Florentine villa. Similarly, he recognizes the works of the Francini brother Tommaso and Alessandro at the gardens of Saint-Germain-en-Laye as the “highest peak of development” for Renaissance automata and waterworks82 while neglecting to
mention that these engineers were sent to France from Florence, where they first worked on the earlier devices of Pratolino. The skill-set that enabled the brothers Francini to create virtuosic fountains and water-works at Versailles from a limited water-source was honed first in the large- scale engineering required by the site of Francesco I de' Medici's Villa Pratolino,83 but this and
indeed any mention of Pratolino by name is lacking in Bedini's work. Searching for mention of the Pratolino automata in wider studies of the phenomenon of Mannerism in art is futile,84 although this
is the movement and context to which they inextricably belong.
A recent study has pinpointed the merging of art history with mechanics, or properly technology, to a late eighteenth-century German work,85 but that appears to have yet to occur for the
80 John Cohen, Human Robots in Myth and Science (South Brunswick and New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1966),
82.
81 Bedini, “The Role of Technology in the History of Technology,” 26. Such devices certainly were present at Pratolino
and have been located by other scholars even to the precise grottoes on the site to which they belonged, but rarely does that information appear in any but the most specialized studies of the late-Renaissance Medici villa and its wonders.
82 Idem, 27. 83 Idem, 28.
84 See John Shearman, Mannerism (Style and Civilization) (New York: Penguin Books, 1991); Arnold Hauser,
Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986); Stephen J. Campbell, “Counter Reformation Polemic and Mannerist counter-aesthetics,” Res 46 (2004): 100.
85 See Johann Beckmann, Anleitun zur Technologie, öder zur Kenntniss der Handwerke, Fabriken und Manufacturen,
vornehmlich derer, die mit der Landwirtschaft, Polizey, und Cameralwissenschaft in nächster Verbindung stehn. Nebst Beiträgen zur Kunstgeschichte (Göttingen 1780), 18; Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Weiner Publishers, 1995), 84.
automata of late-sixteenth-century Florence. Pratolino's grottoes are judiciously included in Naomi Miller's study of the artificial grotto- after all, their author, Bernardo Buontalenti, is recognized by Miller as “the foremost inventor of grottoes in Italy;” the automata are mentioned but receive only brief and selected descriptions.86 An equivalent class of treatment is given by Jessica Riskin to
Pratolino and its automata in an otherwise splendidly detailed treatment of mechanical history.87 She
excerpts Montaigne's description of one splendid grotto in which he encounters dancing automata set to music, mechanical animals that seem to drink from the pools of water ubiquitously through the grotto as a type, and she juxtaposes these tranquil features with the jarring experience of being soaked with water from one's seat or the stairs under fleeing feet. Then Riskin's description takes a turn for the inaccurate; she implies that the same grotto full of tricks and mechanical animals and instruments described by Montaigne also is in possession of the well-known “Samaritan” automaton of a young girl who fetches water in a lifelike and fetching way from a stream while another automaton, this one of a shepherd, looks on longingly. This arrangement is not supported by any familiarity with the arrangement of the grottoes on the villa's ground floor and what documentary sources reveal about their contents. Montaigne's quoted description can be identified with what was called the “Grotto of the Deluge” (la Grotta del Diluvio), and the Samaritan tableau became so well known that the grotto it was housed the name “Grotto of the Samaritan” (la Grotta della Samaritana) gradually substituted its former distinction as the “Grotto of Food” (la Grotta del Cibo) in the historical documents following its installation. Finally, the last observation which Riskin makes on the topic of Francesco I de' Medici's Pratolino is confusing; she writes that another Grand Ducal residence boasted a hydraulic grotto bustling with hydraulically driven “water mills and windmills, little church bells, soldiers of the guard, animals, hunts, and a thousand such things.”88
Pratolino too possessed such things; the Grotto of the Deluge possessed a pair of machines which substituted for human labor, albeit in miniature. A tiny, “graceful” oil press as well as a grind-stone featuring a small man with a ball on his shoulder that turned behind an ox. Later, the separate Grotto of the Samaritan acquired a miniature forge and a mill (which have been contextualized within a tableau based on the Ages of Man from the poetry of Torquato Tasso).89 The church bells, soldiers,
86 Naomi Miller, Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto (New York: George Braziller, 1982), 47-49.
87 Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 29.
88 Ibid.; quoted from Montaigne, Journal de voyage, 125.
89 For a collection of documentary evidence for Pratolino's grottoes, see Zangheri, Pratolino: Il Giardino delle meraviglie,
hunters, animals, and potentially even the thousand other things recall a vivid tableau of a siege upon a castle installed after Francesco I's death by his successor and brother Ferdinando de' Medici. Does the quote, taken from Montaigne, indicate that these figures existed before, or some earlier, similar version did, at another Medici villa of the time? Which one? Riskin's brief commentary on Pratolino left more questions than it approached furnishing a comprehensive overview of this important chapter in the history of automata development. Elsewhere, Pratolino's grottoes and their water-works (automata included) appear frequently, if similarly briefly, in works dedicated to the Italian garden.90
1.2.c. The “Magical” Italian Renaissance Villa
At Pratolino as we have highlighted above, Hermetic, Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, and alchemical keys have been advanced by authors such as Costanza Riva, Clare Brown, Joscelyn Godwin, and Mila Mastrorocco. Clare Brown's thesis proposes a reading of Pratolino's features which conform to a symbolism of alchemy and natural philosophy with consideration for how Francesco I may have understood it.91 However, Brown sets the stage with many elements of the
Hermetic and Neoplatonic school rightly attributed by many scholars to the patronage of the Francesco I: the microcosm-macrocosm, the importance of alchemy as a “grandiose system of philosophy embodying a field of human beliefs and ideas vast in range and extending in time over a period of more than a thousand years,”92 the intimate connection between heavenly and earthly
phenomena, and the unity of man and the world around him. She connects the ritualized colors of the Philosopher's stone's transformation (black through to white to red) as well as the poetic and esoteric language of alchemical texts93 to rainbows which were designed to appear throughout the
park, the statues of the Fontana dell'Ammannati, the whiteness of the Grotto of the Sponges under
Giovanni Guerra, Gli automi del mulino, dell’arrotino, della fucina del fabbro e del frantoio, Drawing, GSA; Heinrich Schickhardt, L’automa del frantoio, Drawing, LBS.
90 For example, Judith Chatfield, A Tour of Italian Gardens (London: Wardlock, 1988), 92-95.
91Versus the earlier alchemical interpretation of Gerd Neumann which, Brown observes, is moreso a psychological
interpretation by the modern author of little help to the serious historian. See Brown, Pratolino and the Transforming Influence of Natural Philosophy, 29.
92 Idem, 41.
93 E.g. “Darkness will appear on the face of e Abyss; Night, Saturn and the Antimony of the Sages will appear; blackness,
and the raven's head of the alchemist, and all the colours of the world, will appear at the hour of conjunction; the rainbow also, and the peacock's tail. Finally, after the matter has passed from ashen-coloured to white and yellow, you will see the Philosopher's Stone.” From Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (Hamburg, 1595); idem, 33.
the villa, and the mingling of hot and cold waters in a red basin in the adjacent Grotto of the Stove.94
Themes of ablution or purification through water are intuited in the Basin of the Laundress, and the same operation through fire is read in the Basin of the Salamander at Pratolino.95 Early-modern
ideas about metals and gems growing organically in the womb of the Earth are related to the Appenine colossus and its grottoes, and the life-giving properties of water, its abundance at Pratolino, and its mastery by Francesco I are recognized as essential elements to the image of the Prince as well as inheritances from rediscovered classical treatises on architecture, automata, and hydraulics.96
Mila Mastrorocco also recognizes the importance which Renaissance culture attributed to what they thought was gleaned from the remotest antiquity of Egyptian civilization and how it manifested itself in the spectrum of culture from the literary to the concrete, and Pratolino specifically.97Another observation made is the veil of religion and ritual which Mastrorocco
recognizes as cast upon the taste of the era, “that found a way to confer nobility and depth to events and individuals which in reality contemporaneously obscured their sense of identity and validity.”98
Widening our net of research, numerous and extensive bibliographies have been generated in this vein for the canon of “magical” villas and gardens that has emerged: (in no particular order) the Villa Lante at Bagnaia, the Sacro of Bomarzo, the Villa Farnese at Caprarola, Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati- whose patrons all knew, corresponded, and likely exchanged ideas and artists between them-, and numerous lesser-known examples still relatively untouched by scholars, such as the Valsanzibio Gardens and Villa Barbarigo outside of Padova and the garden of the Villa Bracci of Rovezzano, the latter of which possessed a magical/alchemical program articulated by a series of statues by a student of Giambologna's (Pierre de Francheville/“Pietro Francavilla”, 1548-1615) through the last years of Francesco I's reign.99 In general, the identification of concealed esoteric
94 Brown, Pratolino and the Transforming Influence of Natural Philosophy, 33-35. 95 Idem, 36-38.
96 Idem, 39-41, 43.
97 I translate here Mastrorocco's most explicit articulations of Pratolino's identification with esoteric influences:
“Undoubtedly the most intimate significance of Pratolino is this (esotericism). Dedicated space to a religion in which merged the mystique of Neoplatonism, the magic value attributed to the science of the ancients, a pantheistic interpretation of nature, an intimistic research into the unconscious which searched for its confirmation in the configuration of the environment, and undoubtedly a place dedicated to “true love.” “Connecting the formulae of hermeticism to the speculation of astrology and to the study of phenomena of resonances and magic, if not to scientific investigation, one arrived to conceive this consistency of nature, this coherence of its order and its course which comprises a mathematical system and together a complete organism. Mastrorocco, Le Mutazioni di Proteo, 98-99, 108.
98 Idem, 129.
and heretical themes as a key to Renaissance garden design has been advanced by Nicola and Emanuela Kretzulesco. Contributing authors to the 1979 volume of essays edited by Marcello Fagiolo already use this key, such as Maria Luisa Madonna's analysis of the Villa d'Este and Cristina Acidini Luchinat's study of the grotto. Two volumes edited by John Dixon Hunt also highlight elusive themes associated with magical philosophy within a more general context of study. A word of caution however bears repeating in conjunction with this body of esoteric studies which have, until the recent past, languished at the margins of historical inquiry; as late as 1991, one scholars' relation of the light seen on the golden statue of Piero della Francesca's Flagellation to alchemy and early capitalism is deemed “too eccentric to be worth debating.”100 Esoteric studies are
“mined territory” to a certain extent, and historians who have tread upon this ground before me have eloquently defended their passage. The words of Martin Kemp have been hailed as the throwing down of the gauntlet to the trend within modern scholarship to favor interpretative constructs which reflect our present reality rather than the historical milieu:
I will be arguing that a complex fluidity, ambiguity, and diversity of meaning characterizes the viewing of such items even in a number of apparently similar contexts in Renaissance societies, and that such viewing undermines any propensity to characterize them neatly in terms of the kind of historical 'meta-realities'- such as power, colonialism, possesion, oppression, patriarchy, Eurocentrism, and otherness- which now tend to be taken as having a privileged explanatory power.101
1.2.e. Magical Automata throughout History
Here, a disclaimer should be made that the magical dimension of mechanical automata with which this study occupies itself in the Renaissance can be related to diverse areas of magical and mechanical works, including garden sculpture and fountains. Joscelyn Godwin in the above cited work concretized the link between Hermetic living cult statues of antiquity and the statues which populated Italian Renaissance gardens in language echoing the language of the sixteenth century,
100 Here the author David Carrier is criticizing Maurizio Calvesi's reading of the Flagellation; see Carrier, Principles of
Art History Writing University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 22.
101 Kemp, Wrought by no Artist's Hand': The Natural, the Artificial, the Exotic, and the Scientific in Some Artifacts from
the Renaissance in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450-1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 179-80.
such as De' Vieri's description, which cultivated ambiguity over whether they were “men, gods, or statues.”102
Statues...are like the intelligence and consciousness of the garden. While the mineral and vegetable elements are offered passively to our contemplation, the statues stand for an active awareness, returning our glance and speaking to us. Ideally, they should be authentically ancient sculptures, envoys from an epoch when statues were worshipped and brought to life (if we believe the
Asclepius), because they incarnated the demonic influences that the pagans called gods... The
sophisticated garden-building cardinals of the sixteenth century had grown out of that, but the memory of pagan idols was still there, together with the ambiguous allure of the nude.103
The conflation of Renaissance automata with the sculptural form which they so frequently assumed in Italian Renaissance gardens however is not connected by Godwin at this junction; but the boundaries are eroded between statue, fountain, and automata with the presence, absence, or canalization of the water element, “(water) devices divert attention from the water to the statue, which becomes an actor, enlivened for as long as the water flows, after which it is just a statue again....automata that do not just move, but act, in the sense of playing out a drama.”104 Anatole
Tchikine dedicated an article to exploring the Renaissance topos of water as the living “soul” of the garden, in the works of two sixteenth-century Florentine horticultural writers Agostino del Riccio (1541-98) and Giovan Vettorio Soderini (1526-97) as well as the extensive hydraulic works, civic as well as private, undertaken by Francesco I's father Cosimo I.105 Pratolino is given special
recognition by Tchikine for its innovatively-designed, practical chains of fishponds which he proposes as a precursor to similarly-conceived Baroque cascades, and kinetic automata are included in his study for their perpetuation of ancient engineering devices and principles. While Pratolino's are not mentioned specifically, Tchikine highlights an installation of moving automata made of terracotta and lead in 1606 by Giovanni Antonio Nigrone (active 1585-1609) for the garden of Camillo Caracciolo, prince of Avellino, near Naples.106 Overall though, Tchikine's study is
102 De' Vieri, Delle Maravigliose Opere di Pratolino, 12. 103 Godwin, The Pagan Dream of the Italian Renaissance, 154. 104 Idem, 174.
105 Anatole Tchikine, 'L'anima del giardino': Water, gardens, and hydraulics in sixteenth-century Florence and Naples in
Technology and the Garden, eds. Michael G. Lee and Kenneth I. Helphand (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2014), 135-39.
rigorously oriented towards the physical mechanics of these works whose “soul” was flowing water, and now it is to the relevent literature on magical automata, with the understanding of the fluidity of boundaries between statue and fountain, water/wind and “soul,” which we now turn.
One further caveat in the treatment of magical vessels during this time period: the fluidity of potential forms which the astral image could take locates the question of an automaton invested wih some divine or celestial quality in a gray area of related Renaissance experiments. As will be examined below in the study at considerable length, there was uncertainty whether “invested” objects, statues and by extension automata included, were natural or demonic operations. Sarah Higley however presents an artificial dichotomy in the aims of the natural philosopher from those of the magician: the natural philosopher's highest aim was the creation of the golem, whereas the magus devoted himself to the conjuring and binding of demons. Both have been recognized as important links between hermetic lore and historical narratives of technology, power, creation, and gender politics, the last due to both pursuits' exclusive provenance of learned, male philosopher- magicians of the time period.107Yet, what of the new kind of Renaissance “magus,” the astrological
and natural philosopher, whose efforts to bring operations previously relegated to demonic and necromantic agencies into the light of natural philosophy? What of the efforts of the preternatual philosophers to articulate in their literature how astral images could be invested with their qualities naturally? While Renaissance pursuits in the manufacture of a golem or homonculus and the survival of demonic conjurings have received dedicated study (see William Newman and the volume of studies edited by Claire Fanger, respectively), automata and even statues more generally have resisted a similar analysis in this context.
Nevertheless, the idea of “magical” automata has certainly been explored, if not explicitly as invested astral-images in themselves. Above, I referred to a body of literature on the subject of the development of the automaton or the robot for its omission of the Pratolino automata