DDRIG: Reassembling Art, Science, and Technology: Goldsmithing, and the Making of Objects during the Renaissance and its Impact on Modern Science and Technology

This Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant supports a project that focuses on some of the ubiquitous, essential, but overlooked pieces of everyday technologies and objects developed by goldsmiths during the Renaissance. The focus is on how everyday technologies such as screws and other fastening technologies essential for metalworking were developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In doing so, this project aims to better understand everyday technologies in relation to the emergence of modern science, the industrial revolution, and technological advancements. This research hereby illustrates the key role everyday technologies for the advancement of science and technology, and for the development of modern society.

Through a combination of the hands-on and close study of museum objects and tools with an in-depth historical analysis of books, paintings, and other images, this project examines the role of goldsmiths in developing and using novel fastening technologies and techniques, and it will explore how such technological developments shed light on larger historical developments, including the rise of precision metalworking, scientific instrument-making, and industrial engineering; these developments were all crucial to the rise of modern science and the industrial revolution. The results of this project will be communicated through conference presentations, open-access publications, exhibitions, and undergraduate teaching.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.