Practice as Philosophy

Abstract The Florentine architect Bernardo Buontalenti’s only sustained commentary on his profession is found not in a treatise but in the margins of Domenico Mellini’s tract, Discorso contro il moto perpetuo (1587). While Mellini relied upon Aristotelian doctrine to disprove Buontalenti’s claimed invention of a perpetual motion machine, the architect corrected him by asserting the primacy of practical knowledge over theoretical reasoning. This paper examines incidents of late sixteenth-century Florentine architect-engineers writing against intellectual and institutional authorities, often in unexpected formats including marginalia, drawings, and self-published pamphlets. It explores their contributions in the context of a transitional moment in the history of architectural professionalization—the foundation of art academies. Challenging humanistic doubts on practical knowledge and an increasingly specialized definition of the architect as artist, late sixteenth-century architect-engineers increasingly upheld material and technical experimentation as modes of rational thought providing more direct and truthful knowledge of the natural world.