Technology and Culture

138 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE This is certainly a thorough piece of work, which pursues the history of this idea through all the subtler shifts of emphasis it underwent from Greek antiquity to the Scholastics of the 12th and 13th centuries and shows that they did not always make such a sharp distinction between knowledge and craft skills as has often been assumed. Old assumptions were gradually reworked and reconsid­ ered. Perhaps Whitney could have said more about biblical influ­ ences. Biblical accounts of temple and tabernacle certainly helped to shape sacred art and artifacts, and their makers are treated in the Bible with great respect. That too may have affected medieval Christian attitudes toward workmanship. Perhaps then, these scholars were less affected by “the social circum­ stances in which they found themselves” (p. 21). One could argue that this shift of emphasis in the classification of artisan skills has little to do with “the transition from feudalism to capitalism” (p. 149)—if there ever was such a transition! That is not to deny the usefulness of Whitney’s comprehensive survey of the concept of mechanical arts. Undoubtedly, her book will remain our guide to this literature. Alex Keller Dr. Keller teaches at the University of Leicester. Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture. By James S. Ackerman. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. Pp. xxvii + 561; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00. James S. Ackerman is one of only a handful of architectural his­ torians to have made a mark on the broader canvas of historical studies. Certainly, his books on the great 16th-century courtyards of the Villa Belvedere in the Vatican (Cortile del Belvedere [Vatican City, 1954]), on the architecture of Michelangelo Buonarroti (The Architec­ ture ofMichelangelo [London, 1961]), on the architect Andrea Palladio (Palladio [Harmondsworth, 1966]), and his recent work on the history of the villa as an architectural type (The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses [Princeton, N.J., 1990]) are primary materials for any student of Italian Renaissance architecture. For English readers they are among the best demonstrations of the practice of architectural history in our native language. Distance Points is a celebration of Ackerman’s career to date, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. As Richard Krautheimer, one of Ackerman’s teachers, and Kath­ leen Weil-Garris Brandt, one of his pupils, argue in their insightful introduction to this volume, Ackerman’s influence is wide-ranging. His career is marked by concerns for the development of the methodology of the field of art history that have preceded the present TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 139 struggle with literary criticism, deconstruction, and poststructuralism. And over the years he has trained a small cadre of students at Harvard University in the craft of history writing. But, as Brandt and Krautheimer point out, what marks the work of James Ackerman is not just the bon mot or the insight, but a concern for the moral position of the historian. This collection of essays, written and published over the past forty-five years, fully demonstrates these concerns for method and morality. Ackerman not only works his way into the problems of building analysis in a historical context but time and again also makes the effort to situate himself within his own field. Along with essays on specific problems of architectural history of the Italian Renaissance are essays on the definition of artistic “style,” on the social forces of architectural design, and on problems in art criticism. This book thus represents the sequence of Ackerman’s thoughts— not just what he has thought about, but how he considers his own thought processes. The volume is set up in the engaging way pioneered by Krautheimer himself in his own collection of essays published almost thirty years ago. There Krautheimer conducted a kind of second-thought postmortem on his own articles, pointing out his mistakes, and suggesting where further readings could be found. Ackerman’s own commentary on his historical and methodological articles thus provides us with new wisdom formulated many years after the original publication. Among the essays that may (or may not) have come to the attention of historians of technology, I would...