Technology and Culture

technologyand culture Book Reviews 901 fourteen-volume Raccolta de documenti, all ofwhich were published in the last century. Donald H. Keith Dr. Keith is president of Ships of Discovery, a nautical research institution based in the Corpus Christi Museum ofScience and History. He has published extensively on the results of archaeological surveys, excavations, and conservation techniques used to analyze early Spanish shipwreck sites in the circum-Caribbean area, including the earliest European shipwreck discovered in the Americas and most of those cited in the book under review. Public and Private Art Education in France, 1648—1793. By Reed Benhamou . Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993. Pp. 183; tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography. £50.00 (paper). This work in the monograph series of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century has little that is of direct interest to most historians of technology. It is interesting, however, for those who acceptjohn U. Nef’s argument that modern industrialism has hitherto displaced the “quali­ tative” aspect that had predominated in earlier pre-Reformation times and economies with the “quantitative.” Nef argued that in Old Regime France a significant proportion of technical and economic activities were considered to be works of art, whether produced by the traditional guilds or many of the state manufactories such as the Gobelins tapestry workshops and the Sèvres porcelain works. The lexical confusion between “artisan” and “artist” was only resolved on the eve of the Revolution, which would prolong this confusion for a few more years in some contexts. Reed Benhamou’s chronological limits are the foundation and the abolition of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, one of the two royal learned academies (the other being the Academy ofArchitec­ ture) where teaching as well as discussion was cultivated. In addition to studying the activity of the academy, she looks at other schools set up by private and public enterprise in Paris and the provinces. For the historian of technology, the most interesting one is the Ecole royale gratuite de dessin, as its name implies, a drawing school that accepted students for free. Set up at the personal initiative of JeanJacques Bachelier, member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, and artistic director of the Sèvres porcelain factory, this institution depended on the contributions of private benefactors. After a number of transformations in the 19th century, it eventually (in 1877) became today’s École nationale des arts décoratifs. In this popular drawing school run with the discipline ofa factory, a number ofdaily shifts of 125 students were taught geometry and architectural drawing, drawing of figures and animals, and drawing of flowers. With its emphasis on drawing as an applied rather than a fine art, the Parisian school greatly influenced similar schools in the French provinces. A more detailed 902 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE history of this institution (unfortunately not translated into English) has been written by Arthur Birembaut (in René Taton, ed., Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au XVIII’ siècle), but the author presents a number ofinteresting general conclusions regarding the teaching ofart in such contexts. She argues that, unlike the academy, interested in stressing the “fine” in fine arts, the free schools of drawing, supported by the middle classes and businessmen, saw art as a practical and economically useful activity. Frederick B. Artz claimed that the importance of drawing in industry was exaggerated, and other authors have attributed the popularity of drawing in the 18th century to the influence of sensationalist philoso­ phy. But the author thinks that drawing was genuinely perceived as something like the computer literacy of our own time—a necessary base for most other technical and economic activities. Not only did it have economic value by improving the quality of work in a wide variety of trades and industries, as well as educating a more highly skilled workforce that would be better capable of earning more, but it also had a useful social function. Unemployed youths would not only be kept out of mischief temporarily by art education, but the kind of education they received—practical and concrete—would be utilitarian, limited, and socially benign, unlike the abstract reasoning acquired in colleges that could...