chiasmus, the work of the screen is in effect to slice these competing cones one from another. Blank paper, razed tablet, or white linen (see also Exhibit 19): the screen stands or appears to stand between the object and the viewer, between, in the language of the device, the oculus of the camera and the eye of the beholder. But this slicing is also epistemological. Meeting on the screen of the camera obscura are pairs of principles, brought automatically into alignment. Crossing on this screen are things like object and idea, nature and design, the tangled aesthetic impulses of the arts under the empiricist regime. That is the side of nature, of the order of the things projected on the back of the page. If there is a design on that side of the sheet, it is the design of natural law, ordered by Creation. Nature is in this sense not what is visible on the screen; it is what is behind it—the design of things in the absence of design—and it is for this reason that nature, personified, is often represented as though it were behind a veil, curtain, or screen (see Exhibits 17–20). This is the side of the lens-like eye guiding the hand of the artist and author;41 this is the realm of design, which flows from ideas to a field of view. It is the special work of the screen continually to hold these concepts in tension and alignment. The camera obscura, remarked Samuel von Hoogstraten, offered a “truly natural painting.”42 When John Cuff in 1747 undertook to sell a new batch of camera obscuras, he hired a Grub Street poet to write copy; this poet pitched it as a special device for making visible the key terms in the exchange between objects and ideas. “Say, rare Machine,” the poet begins, “who taught thee to design? / And mimick Nature with such Skill divine?”43 Design and nature are continually crossed and confounded on the same screen that seems to keep them apart: in the world of the camera obscura, nature is crossed with art, object with idea.
This case puts design on display, which is another way of saying that it is interested in attempts to make visible the nature of things. “Design” makes its way into English through two routes. On the one hand, the word arrives through the Continental tradition of the visual and literary arts, in which the “design” is a rough sketch or disposition of parts. Design, in this sense, means a pattern. As a schematic, the engraving of Hooke’s camera obscura is just such a design. It is not interested in precisely what such a machine would be made of, how it would be built, or where it could be carried. It does not concern itself with particulars and it is incapable of failure.44 On the other, “design” arrives to eighteenth-century England with a borrowed French meaning of an intention. For instance, Hooke’s camera obscura was imagined with just such a design in mind; lurking behind the object is a desire to capture and collect accurate images of things. It is motivated by the general project of collecting and cataloguing. Taken in this mixed sense, rediscovered in the mixed sense of “plan,” “scheme,” and other closely allied concepts, “design” means the arrangement of things according to an idea. As Locke himself puts it, design means an arrangement of things “by reference to those adjacent things which best serve to their present purpose.”45 If we return to the engraving of Hooke’s instrument, which is clearly also a plan or blueprint, we may see this schematic impulse at work; presented here is the arrangement of components—a lens, a white sheet, an observer, a curved deal board, an eye, a hand, and so on—that isolates and makes possible the essential function of the device.46 It is the arrangement of things according to an intention. Like so much else in the age that produced it, this little anonymous engraving is a product of the philosophical device that it displays; it is the world as seen through a camera obscura.
Exhibit 5. Raphael’s The Judgment of Paris
According to the standard account, theories of “design” emerged in and among the trades, especially as new native crafts made their way into the market. Prior to the blossoming of consumer culture in the mid-eighteenth century, as this account has it, England had no established craft tradition of design. The patterns of things like textiles arrived from Paris or Italy, and were only subsequently applied in domestic production.47 But when the history of design is broadened to include “wider cultural concerns with the related concepts of ordering, planning and scheming,” a different tradition emerges.48 A glance at art historical manuals, like Jonathan Richardson’s Two Treatises, or the Earl of Shaftesbury’s remarks on the design for The Judgment of Hercules, reveals a rich tradition of design thinking.49 Richard Checketts goes so far as to argue that the development of design as such links Shaftesbury’s definition of the painting as what delivers “one single Intelligence, Meaning, or Design” with a manufacturing praxis elaborated by painters and engravers like William Hogarth.50 That is, the understanding of design that would turn up in the manufacturing trades over the last half of the eighteenth century focuses on design precisely because design all along articulated a tension between ideal patterns and messy particulars, between intention and realization.51 Even as early as Locke’s remarks, design all along represented the moment when the clean-handed thinker muddled into the mangle of practice, when the mind’s eye elaborated itself in complex negotiations with the material world—or, in other words, where the hand is reintroduced in the space of the camera obscura.
Like the British tradition of design in manufacturing, design in the arts arrived in England from a Continental tradition, brought back from France and Italy by travelers in the early years of the Restoration. Among these was John Evelyn.52 During his lifetime, Evelyn published three treatises on aesthetics—a study on engraving called Sculptura, and translations of Roland Fréart de Chambray’s Idea of the Perfection of Painting and his Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the Modern. Taken together, these three treatises constituted, in Evelyn’s words, a complete “design” of the “three Illustrious and magnificent Arts,” which, “like the three Graces,” were understood to lean upon one another.53 Sometimes linked also with gardening, poetry, and sculpture, these together constituted the so-called sister arts, each of which was understood differently to relay ideas—that is, “designs”—through arrangements of things in the world.
5. Marcantonio’s engraving of The Judgment of Paris, from the design of Raphael (1511–1513). H,2.24 © Trustees of the British Museum.
The first of these treatises, Evelyn’s Sculptura, does not mean sculpture in the modern sense of the word—though he suggests that there might be homologies between the forms. Rather, Evelyn reminds us that “sculptura” descends from the Latin for “cutting,” and then defines it as that “art, which takes away all that is superfluous of the subject matter, reducing it to that form or body which was designed in the idea of the artist.”54 The treatise was based largely on the collection of prints and illustrations Evelyn either saw or purchased while on the Continent. It ostensibly offers a history and description of the art of “cutting or graving of brass, copper, and other metals”—but in fact it is strangely bare of interest in the intricacies of engraving itself. His history does not take any interest in the particularities of medium, dispensing with them as the trappings of “matter.” It does not mention that engravings are made in wood or copper and transferred to paper, or that they are related to developments in the printing press, or that they are reproducible without the successive intervention of the artist. In fact, Evelyn seems loath to mention the material conditions of engraving at all. Instead, the tenor of his argument is that engraving—“sculptura”—is the reproduction of ideas reduced to their essence. It is a question of design, and this is why engraving is such a particularly valuable art. Engraving is the elimination, by cutting, of all that is superfluous, in order to reveal an idea lurking within a visual field.55 It is not just that engraving forgoes the clutter or distractions of texture and color—which, Evelyn insists, can anyways “be conceived” from the “splendor and beauty in the touches of the burin.”56 Rather, engraving strips away everything “superfluous” until it reveals the ideal origin of its design—that which was “designed in the idea” of the artist, the “prime conception of the workman.”57
Evelyn is less interested, therefore, in engraving as a medium
