science and medicine in early modern venice 707
an entirely new group of people, artisans and practitioners, whose work
had formerly been kept isolated from the natural- philosophical tradition
by an ideology of classicism which created a fundamental division between
nature and art. central to the artisanal epistemology, Smith argues, is the
idea that knowledge of nature is gained by a “bodily encounter” with mat-
ter in the act of making. Knowledge is to be gained not from books but
by manual labor.22
Venice provided ample opportunities for interactions among scholars,
merchants, and artisans. Walking along the Merceria, the busy commer-
cial street connecting Piazza San Marco with the rialto, Venetians would
pass shops of metalworkers, tailors, clockmakers, jewelers, hatters, and
perfumers and could watch them ply their trades and converse with them.
Venice’s craftsmen were renowned for their precision workmanship, and
the city’s arsenal, an immense shipbuilding factory, encompassed nearly
all the mechanical arts, from carpentry to metallurgy and from glassmak-
ing to cannonry.23
Galileo, who served as a state consultant to the arsenal, spent many
hours walking through the great shipyard observing its craftsmen at work.
Galileo’s theory of motion was rooted in the practical knowledge on bal-
listics accumulated by contemporary experts on artillery. The empirical
roots of the first of his two “new sciences,” dealing with the strength of
materials, drew directly from his observations of the practical challenges
of constructing large galleys faced by the foremen of the arsenal. at the
beginning of the Discourses on the Two New Sciences (1638), Galileo, speak-
ing through interlocutor Filippo Salviati, observed:
Frequent experience of your famous arsenal, my Venetian friends, seems
to me to open a large field to speculative minds for philosophizing, and
particularly in that area which is called mechanics, inasmuch as every sort
of instrument and machine is continually put in operation there. and among
its great number of artisans there must be some who, through observations
handed down by their predecessors as well as those which they attentively
and continually make for themselves, are truly expert and whose reasoning
is of the finest.2422 Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution
(chicago, 2006).
23 ennio concina, L’Arsenale della Repubblica di Venezia: Tecniche e istitutuzioni dal
medioevo all’età moderna (Milan, 1984).
24 Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences, trans. Stillman drake (Madison, 1974), p. 49.