Bernhard Siegert
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823263752
- eISBN:
- 9780823268962
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263752.003.0008
- Subject:
- Information Science, Communications
In order to conceptualize designing as a cultural technique, one has to wrestle the concept of disegno from the anthropocentric origin it acquired in the Florentine discourse on art, and to ...
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In order to conceptualize designing as a cultural technique, one has to wrestle the concept of disegno from the anthropocentric origin it acquired in the Florentine discourse on art, and to re-attribute it to those techniques and practices that operationalized “the open” and “the provisional” in early Renaissance. Design, then, did not originate in an ingenious uomo universale, but in the convergence of two cultural techniques that flourished in fourteenth-century Florence: the cartographic grid of latitude and longitudes and the grid-based techniques of scaling, proportion, and transfer employed by Renaissance artists’ workshops. Historically, the meaning that disegno acquired much later on can be traced back to the amalgamation of the differing concepts of the “open,” which in conjunction with the two cultural techniques found their way into drawings. Emerging from a field of tension between artisanal and cartographic projection techniques, the artistic design merges the open as the spatially unknown (as made addressable by the Ptolemaic grid) on the one hand and the open as provisional (as enabled by the veil) on the other.Less
In order to conceptualize designing as a cultural technique, one has to wrestle the concept of disegno from the anthropocentric origin it acquired in the Florentine discourse on art, and to re-attribute it to those techniques and practices that operationalized “the open” and “the provisional” in early Renaissance. Design, then, did not originate in an ingenious uomo universale, but in the convergence of two cultural techniques that flourished in fourteenth-century Florence: the cartographic grid of latitude and longitudes and the grid-based techniques of scaling, proportion, and transfer employed by Renaissance artists’ workshops. Historically, the meaning that disegno acquired much later on can be traced back to the amalgamation of the differing concepts of the “open,” which in conjunction with the two cultural techniques found their way into drawings. Emerging from a field of tension between artisanal and cartographic projection techniques, the artistic design merges the open as the spatially unknown (as made addressable by the Ptolemaic grid) on the one hand and the open as provisional (as enabled by the veil) on the other.
