Renaissance Fun: The Machines behind the Scenes by Philip Steadman (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Renaissance Fun: The Machines behind the Scenes by Philip Steadman
• Dale Shuger

Philip Steadman. Renaissance Fun: The Machines behind the Scenes. UCL PRESS, 2021. 409 PP.

IF YOU HAVE EVER READ A COMEDIA that features angels descending from on high or magically opening mountains and wondered "how exactly did that work?", then Philip Steadman's book is for you. The book is an engineer's-eye view of the Renaissance, but instead of focusing on the period's great innovations in weaponry, urban design, or agriculture, Steadman, an architect by training, takes us on a tour of the early modern machines designed principally for entertainment. His focus is almost exclusively on Italy—Spain is scarcely mentioned, and Steadman does not cite any Hispanic secondary scholarship—but the relevance to scholars of Iberian theater is obvious, given the outsized role that Italian designers played in Iberian architecture and engineering.

Renaissance Fun is encyclopedic in the number and variety of machines discussed (and beautifully illustrated), but it is very narrowly focused on the machines and their mechanics. The book is roughly split between two theaters: the theater stricto sensu and the gardens of the Italian nobility. Each of the two parts is subdivided into three chapters that focus on a different type of machinery, and between each chapter Steadman includes an "intermezzo" that showcases a more specific technological device in detail. Given the focus of this journal, I will emphasize the theater portion. Chapter 1 focuses on devices for moving or changing scenery, such as the periaktos (triangular prisms that could be rotated to change a stage set) and artificial stage lighting devices. Chapter 2 reviews the use of ropes, pulleys, and moving platforms (akin to the Spanish tramoya) that allowed for scenes of flying angels or ships at sea. The intermezzo chapters explain a remarkable early modern camera obscura and weather effects, respectively. The term intermezzo also echoes the theatrical form in which the majority of the theatrical effects were employed. Like Spanish entremeses, these were performed between the acts of a comedia, but unlike the Spanish counterpart, generally directed toward the vulgo, these intermezzi were "extraordinarily lavish productions put on in princely courts for weddings and other great occasions of state" (13). After the first two parts of the book, narrowly focused on how specific types of machines worked, the final part takes a step back and gives a more narrative [End Page 463] description of one specific garden (that of Franceso I at Pratolino) and one specific intermezzo production (Mercurio e Marte, performed for a royal wedding in Parma in 1628). The combination of accessible prose and, above all, the images—which feature technical sketches by Renaissance inventor-engineers themselves, contemporary recreations or models, photographs of surviving examples, and artistic renderings—are designed for a reader who is not an engineer, although how much fun the reader derives from extensive discussions of pipe fittings or the Bernoulli effect may track directly with their skill at assembling Ikea furniture.

The "Renaissance" in the title does not just refer to a historical period; Steadman is interested in the classical influence on Renaissance engineers and in particular in that of Hero of Alexandria (10 CE–70 CE), author of the relatively well-known Pneumatics and the much less-known On Automata-Making, subject of chapter 3. The argument is compelling enough: Hero's sketches do resemble many of the devices that Renaissance designers such as Giovanni Battista Aleòtti (1546–1636), Bernardo Buontalenti (1531–1608), and Salomon de Caus (1575–1626) sketched or created for Renaissance clients, although one imagines that principles of manipulating water and air might have emerged simultaneously or via numerous indirect means of transmission. The most compelling and provocative aspect of this argument is the observation that Hero's "automaton theatres" (small self-contained worlds in which a repetitive action was performed) "bear uncanny similarities to theatres of the kind that were being built in Italy at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth century" (120). These features include the proscenium frame, "the rotation of scenic elements by means of ropes below stage" or the introduction of stage scenery lowered from above, and certain automated incendiary...