The Haptic Interface: Artisanal Ecologies of Pietre Dure Tables in Early Modern Italy

Wenyi Qian

This thesis examines the ways in which the crafting of hardstone inlaid tables in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy acted as an interface between material techniques of diverse artistic media, between disparate epistemic cultures, between aesthetic experiences of material surfaces ranging from painting, textile, gem facets to the architectonic, and between far-flung geographies and dissimilar social strata of artisanal labor. By focusing on the haptic dimension, my thesis foregrounds the experiential, epistemological, and political aspects of making as both distinct from and entangled with the elite forms of knowledge-making condensed into statecraft, environmental management, and natural philosophy. By designating this genre of early modern artefact as an interface, I highlight the particular spatial agency of these objects as a circumambulatory and kinaesthetic suture between multiple subjectivities and corporealities. Each chapter singles out one technical and material trait of the craft technique—from emery-aided abrasion, drawing, and design transfer, to lithic translucency and refraction and haptic assemblage—to demonstrate how these objects emerge out of the confluence of craft skills, labor administration, environmental processes, and diverse natural philosophical doctrines. Adopting the dual foci of (i) a workshop ecology of materials and (ii) the larger environment in its manifold manifestations as epistemological substrate and material infrastructure for small-scale craftsmanship, the thesis advances a methodological experiment in thinking ecologically about early modern material culture.