0084 Mechanical Disegno

Abstract

The article argues that the debate around Italian Renaissance disegnohas tended to overemphasize the rhetoric promoting a separation between design and execution, mind and body, and asserting a hierarchy of the arts constructed on the friction between intellectual andcorporeal engagement in the making of artefacts. Building on written sources such as so-called "technical treatises" and on objects taken as evidence of the design process, it is suggested that we should consider instead a more integrated, organic, technologically engaged and "mechanical" notion of disegno, in which design might be seen to grow within a physical environment from the interconnection of human action and materials. Using Renaissance pottery as a case study, and exploring its understanding within different linguistic, literary and material contexts, the article proposes an epistemology allowing for greater fluidity, overlap and communality between supposedly distinct arts.