842 Book Reviews

The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Princeton Essays on the Arts, xix + 340 pp., n.p.g.

This is a book about integration, especially the integration of art, science, and humanism in the late Renaissance with a focus on the Habsburg court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II at Prague. Seven independent essays make up the volume, but a consistent thematic thread holds them tightly together. Whether discussing how convincing illusions of nature should have become the goal of the visual arts, how traditions of astronomy and optics came to be incorporated in writings concerned with the perspective of shadows, or how the imperial or princely Kunstkummer might function as a centre of scientific research, Kaufmann is insightful in discussing what he calls the ‘interdisciplinary cross-pollination’ (p. 150) of science, art, and humanism with an eye to ‘the mastery of nature’.

Among various figures discussed in the essays, three stand out predominately: Georg Hoefnagel, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Paulus Fabritius. Hoefnagel’s choice of natural subjects and trompe I’oeil devices (e.g. cast shadows and stems of plants apparently piercing through a page) connect, on Kaufmann’s account, to a Flemish tradition of manuscript illumination and to the imitation of specific objects, including objects of nature, that were at one time actually pinned or sewn to the pages of devotional books. In Hoefnagel’s naturalistic depictions, however, this tradition is ‘desanctified’ as it intersects with a community of humanist associates and Hoefnagel’s own interests in the natural world. Especially in a poem written by Hoefnagel in praise of Albrecht Diirer, Kaufmann finds good evidence of intersecting humanist and naturalistic elements. Ethical, rhetorical, political, and religious considerations work together in the poem to influence the representation of nature.

The cross-fertilization of art, humanism and science also underlies an interesting interpretation of the fascinating portraits created by the imperial painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Kaufmann characterises Arcimboldo as ‘an assiduous painter of nature’ (p. 100). His well-known composite heads are neither jokes nor fantasies, but serious symbolic inventions of Habsburg imperial themes. Especially Arcimboldo’s portrait of the Emperor Rudolf II as Vertumnus joins together a classical-humanist foundation with naturalistic painting in pursuit of a powerful political message. The portrait itself, Kaufmann argues, is based mostly on Perpetius’s Vertumnus elegy and not, as is usually assumed, upon Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Exploring the relationship between Arcimboldo and Baron Ferdinand Hoffmann, one of the key figures in arranging for the patronage of Johannes Kepler at Prague, leads, in another essay, to a further association of technological innovations and naturalistic compositions within the scientific world of Rudolfine Prague.

Perhaps the most interesting example of artistic, technical, and scientific synthesis follows from Kaufmann’s study of the triumphal arches designed by the professor of medicine and polymath, Paulus Fabritius, for the entry of Rudolf II into Vienna in 1577. Besides personifications of virtues, scenes from ancient history, and representations of the gods, Fabritius added personifications of Austria and Europe which were mechanically made to bow and genuflect to the Emperor. Most notable, however, were two large stone globes, one a celestial, the other a terrestrial sphere. Both turned as the Emperor passed, the terrestrial sphere displaying an inscription linking its rotation in part to the astronomical thoughts of Nicolas Copernicus. Incorporated also in the arch was a mathematical device that indicated times for those places found on the same geographical parallel as Vienna and a mechanical clock that indicated the hour. The public presentation of the one aspect of the Copernican theory is a wonderful illustration of technical and astronomical thinking interwoven within an artistic context. It also tells us something

Book Reviews 843

important about the relationship between poetry and humanism at the Prague court. The arche’s many allusions, its mechanical constructions, and its public references to astronomical theory all indicate, in Kaufmann’s view, an application of poetic thinking and visual imagery within a technical and scientific milieu.

A final essay addresses the debate about the purpose of princely collecting and the political symbolism of the princely Kunstkammer. After briefly surveying various points of view about the significance of princely collections. Kaufmann centres in on the observations of Francis Bacon to support the notion of the Kunstkammer as microcosm of the world and universal museum. Constructing the Kunstkammer was no passive occupation, but one connected to a ‘specifically Hermetic, magical view of collecting’ (p. 185). Reading the Kunstkammer through the Baconian lens, the prince who supported projects of natural philosophy by establishing collections of art and naturalia became a new Hermes Trismegistos. The procedures of natural magic thus take an interesting turn in the princely Kunstkammer and end up being carried in a new, utilitarian, direction.

This is a fascinating collection of essays, written with much erudition and related to a common aim: an investigation of how artistic themes like imitation and invention encountered and interacted with technical and scientific interests at court. Humanist, artistic, technical, and scientific interests at many German courts in the late Renaissance, and at the Rudolfine court in particular, were cut from the same cloth. Kaufmann weaves here fascinating patterns which ought to be considered by intellectual historians, art historians, and historians of science alike.

University of Nevada. NV Bruce T. Moran

Hegel: Three Studies, Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 1993), xi + 160 pp., $22.50 cloth.

This book consists of three essays written in the late 1950s and early 1960s and now ably translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen who has also, with Jeremy J. Shapiro, provided an illuminating introduction. Adorn0 tells us that the work as a whole was ‘intended as a preparation for a revised conception of the dialectic* (p. xxxvi). Thus, its place in his development is as a preliminary study for the major late achievement of Negative Dialectics. The text is thematically rich and filled with observations demonstrating Adorno’s distinctive kind of acuteness and sensibility. In a short review it will be possible to pursue only a single strand in this richness. It is, however, one that should take us towards the heart of the extraordinarily elusive and ambiguous figure that is Adorno’s Hegel and offer also a perspective on the elusiveness and ambiguity of Adorn0 himself. This is the theme of Hegel’s relationship to Kant.

In its simplest form it is the question of the extent to which Hegel solved the fundamental problem bequeathed by Kant to German Idealism, the problem, in Adorno’s formulation, of the ‘irreconcilable separation of subjectivity and being-in-itself with its corollary of the ‘unknowability of the thing in itself (pp. 36,64). Adorn0 is at times, in his ‘Hegel as Kant come into his own’ mood, entirely sanguine about this (p. 6). Yet his arguments bearing on the point are not impressive, scarcely better than Hegel’s own. Thus, there is heavy reliance on the idea that to grasp a limit set to subjectivity is already to