Abstract Summary
The idealized representation of geological strata is one of the most striking aspects of late fifteenth-century Italian pictorial landscapes. Yet medieval learned “meteorology”, which also included today’s geology and mineralogy, largely ignored this highly visible feature of the Earth’s surface. In this paper, I argue that the investigation of Earth strata (or “skins”, as they were called) was indeed an empirical skill, practiced by artisans involved with mining and civilian or hydraulic engineering. The knowledge of different “soils”, of their properties, and of their vertical differentiation was a practical tool, employed by water prospectors to locate water sources or by builders to design the foundations of edifices. The common understanding that the crust of the Earth was composed of “page-like skins”, made then its way into paintings whose authors belonged to the same cultural and social environment (and were sometimes the same person). Literary masterpieces of the Italian humanism, like Leon Battista Alberti’s On the Art of Building, attest that this knowledge did not remain confined to trade expertise and to oral and vernacular communication. Leonardo da Vinci’s discussion of Earth strata has often been touted as an example of unique genius ahead of his time. On the contrary, I suggest that the Tuscan artist built upon a decades-long tradition of artisanal knowledge and practices, which he framed within a theoretical template mostly derived from Aristotelian meteorology.
