Sven Dupré im Deutschen Museum

Einladung zum Montagskolloquium im Deutschen Museum am kommenden Montag, den 30.4. um 16.30 Uhr im Alten Seminarraum

Sven Dupré/ Universität Utrecht

Failure and the Imperfections of Artisanal Knowledge in the Early Modern Period  

Hier eine kurze Zusammenfassung des Vortrags (wird in englischer Sprache gehalten):

In the early modern period it was a topos that the apprentice could only learn a craft by making mistakes. “Even if I used a thousand reams of paper to write down all the accidents that have happened to me in learning this art,” the French potter Bernard Palissy famously wrote, “you must be assured that, however good a brain you may have, you will still make a thousand mistakes, which cannot be learned from writings, and even if you had them in writing you wouldn’t believe them until practice has given you a thousand afflictions.” This paper explores artisanal textual practices as strategies to deal with the uncertainty of artisanal processes and the whims of materials. Confronted with the precarious nature of artisanal knowledge, variation had always been the most important strategy of error management. However, following the dissatisfaction with ways of writing down knowledge hiding the imperfection of the process of knowledge production expressed in the work of Francis Bacon and Johannes Kepler, the codification of error emerged as a new strategy. This new conception of the epistemic value of failure and error is reflected in artisanal texts.

Sven Dupré is Professor of History of Art, Science and Technology at Utrecht University (History & Art History), and Professor of History of Art, Science and Technology at the University of Amsterdam (Conservation & Restoration). He is the Director of the ARTECHNE project ‘Technique in the Arts: Concepts, Practices, Expertise, 1500-1950’, supported by a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant.  Since 2018 he also heads the NWO Smart Culture project on the history of glass focusing on the archives of the artist Sybren Valkema (1916-1996), in collaboration with the Stichting Vrij Glas, the RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History, the Corning Museum of Glass and the Glasmuseum Hentrich, Düsseldorf.
Previously he was Professor of History of Knowledge at the Freie Universität and Director of the Research Group ‘Art and Knowledge in Premodern Europe’ at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. In Spring 2015 he was Robert H. Smith Scholar in Residence for Renaissance Sculpture in Context at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He is actively involved in research in technical art.