Inventions

An hour-glass is a simple device that functions to measure out a specific period of time from the moment when the sand begins to fall from the upper bulb until it runs out. It thus only requires gravity to work. Grain by grain it reflects the discontinuous nature of time as proposed by various modern-day theories of the universe. Symbolically, the hour-glass represents the passing of time and death. In many works of art a skeleton wearing a black tunic holds an hour-glass in its hand, while in others it has a sickle or scythe. Although today hour-glasses are only decorative items, we often see them represented, for example on computer screens where they are used to indicate that a particular operation or command is being carried out.

Characterised by an anthropocentric vision of the world, the Italian Renaissance was the period that saw the birth of the portrait while depictions of God and Christ became increasingly humanised. This new Renaissance man, the centre of the universe, had the potential to become an invincible hero or super-man through his weapons, which evolved as a result of new technologies for casting metals.

The sword appeared at an early date in civilisation, in the 4th millennium beforethe Christian era. Swords have one or two sharp edges depending on whether they are for slicing or stabbing. The earliest swords were made of copper, which is a very soft material. Subsequently bronze was used, then iron and finally tempered steel. Suits of armour, which were complete suits made of metal or other resistant materials such as leather, functioned to protect the combatant’s body. Exclusively worn by nobles and monarchs, they were extremely expensive, were made to measure and were often given as highly prized diplomatic gifts, implying a value beyond the merely functional (many were displayed but not used). Armourers were nothing less than engineer-artists who focused on the functional aspect of the armour, as these suits had to allow for movement, protect the wearer and of course weigh as little as possible, while also taking pains with the aesthetic aspect. Among the most celebrated armourers was Helmschmid, a member of a famous family of this craft who worked for the Emperor Maximilian, for Charles V and for the Duke of Mantua. Helmschmid made the famous Mühlberg suit of armour now on display in the Royal Palace in Madrid.

However, as an artist what would have interested him most was the concept of printing images using the technique of engraving and woodcutting since Dürer was in fact as great a printmaker as he was painter. Dürer’s interest in the new printing techniques is reflected in a letter that he wrote to his friend Pirckheimer from Venice, where he painted this panel. Dürer comments on the laborious nature of executing panel paintings in comparison to making prints, in which less effort produces multiple images, thus facilitating their dissemination across Europe.

Christ among the Doctors makes use of the contrast between the spoken word, referring to the word of Christ and the New Testament, and the written word, referring to the doctors or learned men and the Old Testament. We know that Dürer’s religious ideas tended towards a moderate Catholicism although here he places considerable emphasis on the Christ Child, indicating his superiority to the old dispensation. Furthermore, Dürer was a friend of the reformers Luther and Calvin at a time when Germany was riven by theological dissent.

The sitter is depicted in the foreground, filling the entire pictorial space. A striking element is the elaborate distaff that she is using, as is her plain clothing, depicted in a limited range of colours. The distaff is an ancient object that was used for spinning. While this can simply be done with the fingers, faster and more accurate results are achieved with a spindle. The thread is tied to the spindle and twists as the spindle moves round. Weavers made thread in this manner until the mechanical spinner was invented, which saved an enormous amount of time and allowed a single worker to operate eight or more bobbins at once. This was the first important technical breakthrough in the textile industry and paved the way for the Industrial Revolution.

Here the wheel is a religious symbol but one that allows us to focus on one of man’s great inventions. It was invented in Mesopotamia in the 5th millennium before Christ. Wheels were probably first used for making pottery while they were also fundamental for the construction of transportation vehicles and as elements in a wide variety of machines. The earliest wheels were simple wooden disks with a central hole through which the axle was inserted. The subsequent invention of spokes allowed for the construction of lighter, faster vehicles.

They were highly prized by Grand Tour travellers and art lovers. The lengthy Grand Tour, which encompassed France as well as Italy, was an obligatory phase in the education of 18th century English aristocrats, who considered these vedute ideal souvenirs of their youthful adventures.

Canals existed in the ancient world and were constructed in both Mesopotamia and Egypt. They were used (and continue to be used) both for navigation and for agricultural irrigation. For centuries river transport was an important alternative to roads. Venice is the quintessential example of a city of canals, although Birmingham has more in terms of kilometres. The inexpensive transport of primary materials by canal was one of the factors that contributed to the Industrial Revolution in England. In Spain the Castile canal was a highly ambitious project that was undertaken too late as railway transport had already assumed the lead. Another famous canal and one of the most important engineering projects in 19th century Madrid is the Isabel II Canal, which has a length of 70 kilometres and was used to bring water from Lozoya to the capital.

Jongkind’s landscapes with windmills, a subject derived from earlier Dutch painting, are a recurring theme in his work. An earlier painting of 1840 depicts a mill near Overschie using a vertical composition similar to this one, although the vertical format was less common and the artist generally favoured a horizontal composition. It is not known where the first windmills appeared or who invented them. Some scholars believe that they originated with the famous Greek inventor Heron of Alexandria around the first century BC. Others suggest that they originated in Persia in the 7th century AD. The Arabs later began to use them and they were introduced into Europe with the Crusades, as a result of which they became widespread in the medieval period. In addition to their application in irrigation and grinding corn, windmills can be used to pump water in areas located below sea level. They were also used in sawmills, paper manufactories, for pressing seeds to produce oil and for crushing a wide range of materials.

Lissitzky’s works give the impression of instability and of unrealisable or utopian forms. He made simultaneous use of various vanishing points, creating the sensation that we are seeing various structures from different positions in space: from the air, as if flying over them, or from the ground, as if they were above our heads. Compositions of this type are related to a series of reversible axonometric drawings that can be seen in both directions at once, thus emphasising their geometrical nature. The world of inventions is not just limited to objects but also encompasses concepts and theories. The French mathematician Gaspar Monge, Count of Péluse (1746-1818), invented descriptive geometry, which could be defined as the geometrical procedures that allow for a representation of threedimensional space on a flat surface. This branch of mathematics is crucial for engineering and architecture.

At an early date he began to focus on art, experimenting with photograms and collage of a type influenced by Dadaism and Constructivism. On the invitation of Gropius he started to teach at the Bauhaus, working primarily in the metalworking studio and experimenting with new materials and forms. Moholy-Nagy moved to Berlin in 1920 where he worked as a typographic designer and photographer and was also involved in filmmaking and photography. This painting could equally well be a piece of avant-garde graphic design.

This approach aimed at absolute precision at a greater level than that possible with the human eye. While in the present day these telephone booths now seem positively prehistoric, they introduce the telephone into our survey, another key invention in the history of humanity. Marcel Proust described the strange sensation of speaking to his mother when he was nowhere near her and how he could grasp the inflections in a voice that was separated from the face and gestures of the person speaking. Having said this, internet and the mobile phone are undoubtedly the inventions that have most changed the lives of our generation.

Estes’ painting brings to an end this survey, which has aimed to offer an appreciation of the selected works of art from a different viewpoint and to encourage a reflection on the possible connections, influences and relationships between art and technology.

This river landscape by Ruysdael includes a swing bridge, which is a type of bridge that can be raised with the help of a mechanism: the part that is raised turns around a horizontal axis like a hinge. The technology is similar to that of drawbridges of castles and fortresses although this version has the added technical complication of not having a supporting wall. In the foreground is a red sledge pulled by a horse and several skaters. Sledges seem to have been used in Ancient Egypt (19th century BC) for transporting sand, while over the centuries they have also allowed for transport on snowy or frozen surfaces through the skis or blades underneath them. Along with skates, they were also used for leisure activities.

Grimmer can be considered the heir to Patinir in his use of a relatively high horizon line and a compositional structure of superimposed planes. His vision of the world focuses on everyday life and is a direct, uncomplicated one with little interest in the philosophical or moral issues implied in the works of contemporaries such as Bruegel.

This winter landscape includes a water mill on the river bank. Such mills could not be used in winter when the water was frozen over. This defect, and the fact that they had to be located beside a river, meant that their use increasingly declined.

The large number of figures in the scene is characteristic of this sub-genre of landscape painting. Some are skating, others are hunting with dogs and there is even a humorous detail of a woman who has slipped over and whose skirt has ridden up.

The fourth work in the series includes a mechanical clock on the wall. Measuring time was one of the earliest signs of human evolution: by measuring it, man gained the sense of being able to control it and in fact many inventions aimed to traverse distance in time and space. Arguing that the clock can be considered the archetypal model of the industrial era, some historians consider that the Industrial Revolution had its origins in the Middle Ages. All medieval cities had a church and bell tower that chimed at regular intervals, allowing for the synchronisation required between man and machine. It is thought that mechanical clocks were systematically introduced into Europe in the early 14th century. Many of them were complex objects that included astronomical data. One of the pioneers of the mechanical clock was Giovanni Dondi, who built one in Padua around 1340. He also wrote a manual so that it could be repaired and rebuilt although this text is difficult to understand.

There are modern replicas of his clock in several museums. Clocks have two basic elements that make them work: an element that provides the force to make the mechanism move and a second element known as the escapement that makes these elements move at a specific rhythm. Until the invention of electricity the elements of the first type were weights and springs. The most widely used early escapement was the verge and foliot type, which was extremely basic and imprecise. The invention of the pendulum was crucial for improving precision. Galileo formulated the pendulum theory around 1580 but it was the Dutchman Christian Huygens who constructed the first pendulum clock in 1656. 

Combined with the escapement (which was invented at around the same time), they facilitated the evolution of clocks. The subsequent invention of spiral springs to make the mechanism move resulted in the appearance of reliable pocket watches and the rise of famous clockmakers who worked with artists specialising in wood and porcelain to construct wall clocks, table clocks and vertical pendulum clocks. Successive modifications and inventions perfected this technology, making it more precise and reliable, with the result that inaccuracy was reduced from almost an hour a day to 15 seconds.

Although obviously far more technically sophisticated and better designed, they are based on the same principles. Another contemporary example is the wind turbine that transforms wind power into electricity.

This painting is by far the largest within a series on the subject of watermills that Van Gogh executed in 1884. All the mills were located close to his parents’ house in Nuenen near Eindhoven. The mill seen in this canvas, with its two vertical wheels, is the one in Gennep, which worked directly over the river Dommel. At that period it was normal to have two wheels, each corresponding to a mill, in order to take maximum advantage of the season when the force of the river was at its height.

From the time of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century the principal European cities had large numbers of factories that started to make use of the new technology of steam engines. Suitably adapted, these engines could be used in the manufacture and production of certain objects and products or for the industrial transformation of energy sources. It is interesting to note how the Impressionist and Post-impressionist painters were fascinated by motifs such as factories, railways, stations and bridges, which for them represented modern life, production and communication. Luce also depicted foundries, steelworks, blast furnaces and chimneys but ceased to focus on these themes after 1900.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the invention of the steam engine and the discovery of electricity resulted in a complete change in our way of life. With a steam engine the pressure of the steam produced in a boiler (just like the pressure cookers we have at home) is transformed into a backwards and forwards, horizontal movement of a piston.

Through an element known as a connecting rod, the horizontal movement is transformed into a circular one and once this has taken place it can be applied to machines. The steam engine was invented by the Scot James Watt, who patented it around 1769. The first engines were made in 1776, resulting in a fierce battle for patents and Watt died a rich man. The horizontal steam engine was patented around 1825. This invention and subsequent improvements to it over the years paved the way for the appearance of the three great inventions that have been fundamental to modern culture: steam ships, the railways and electricity/electric light generators.

The colour, however, is not naturalistic and Matisse’s works of this period are generally described as “proto-Fauve” as they seem to look forward to the intense and subjective chromatism that would become the principal feature of that movement, which appeared five or six years later.

The Midi canal was a major engineering project that made it possible to cross France from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. It was built between 1666 and 1681 under the supervision of the engineer Pierre-Paul Riquet and earned him the title of Baron de Bonrepos. It was previously known as the Royal Languedoc Canal but was renamed in 1789 during the French Revolution.

After two hundred years of use for the transportation of merchandise the canal began to be the victim of train transport and later of the roads. In the late 19th century the French State took over its management and unsuccessfully invested in it in order to try and revive it as a means of transport for goods. This policy came to an end in the 1970s and since then it has only been used for tourism.

The canal has a large number of locks, which are old mechanisms still in use today. Locks are designed to raise and lower vessels in a safe way where there are different water levels. They work on the principal of creating a type of artificial tank on which the boat can rest. For the boat to be lowered this tank is filled up, the boat enters and the water is emptied out. To raise the boat the tank is emptied, the boat enters and it is filled again.