ABSTRACT
Just like our own machines, Renaissance machines were useful devices with which people worked and laboured. Acting upon the world, their avowed purpose was to make human existence more tolerable. But fabricated as they were out of a synthesis of poetry, architecture, philosophy, antiquarianism, and theology, as well as craft, skill, and design, Renaissance machines were also freighted with myth, legend, and symbolism. As products of human activity concerned, according to Aristotle, with ‘bringing something into being’, machines were manifestations of artifi ce rather than nature.1 For, unlike natural objects, which Aristotle claimed ‘have their origin in themselves’, the Renaissance machine or engine belonged to that class of things lacking the power of replicability or reproduction.2
