Chapter 7 looks at the question of the spherical world picture and the lack of evidence for such an image of the heavens or of the world as a whole in cuneiform sources.

The material of central interest to this book belongs to the ancient historical world of the Middle East, specifically to what I have previously and continue to classify as science in Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform texts. Cuneiform texts were my point of departure, but they led me down an unexpected path for the historiography of premodern science in the direction of the anthropology of science. As a consequence, in contrast to previous emphases on historical epistemologies reflected in historical bodies of knowledge, my interest shifts here to historical ontologies reflected in the worlds of the scribal compilers and practitioners of those bodies of knowledge. The shift in emphasis toward ontology, I will argue, can be theorized in terms of worldmaking, best approached by means of an anthropology of premodern science.

Chapter 5 is framed by issues of cultural, epistemological, and ontological likeness, difference, and pluralism at the heart of anthropology. It brings these ideas to bear on cuneiform intellectuals’ vehicles of worldmaking through their classification of things and their particular form of astronomical model-making.

If Dietterlin’s Architectura epitomized the empirical turn in architectural image-making, the preparatory drawings for the treatise’s etchings show how such firsthand research in art, architecture, and science coalesced in drawing as a context for managing visual research. The 164 surviving Architectura drawings constitute an ideal case study for this phenomenon, for they stand as one of the largest corpora of sixteenth-century architectural drawings made north of the Alps. Dietterlin’s Architectura drawings are compared with drawings from Bramante and Raphael’s St. Peter’s workshop as well as botanical and geological drawings by natural historians Conrad Gessner, Ulisse Aldrovandi, and other natural philosophers. The comparison reveals that, during the sixteenth century, tactics for making images and managing information – such as cutting, collaging, annotation, folding and counterproofing – came to inform both architectural and scientific drawing. Indeed, artists, architects, printers, and natural philosophers began to trade tactics of drawing as a means for managing visual information, thereby codeveloping empirical artistic techniques for producing knowledge. Through its drawings, Dietterlin’s Architectura promoted the new, empirical methodology of architectural image-making.

As architectural images became vehicles for natural philosophical thinking and practices, they also challenged certain conventions of architectural design. Dietterlin’s Architectura upended enduring principles of architectural naturalism and stability promoted in Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria by developing a genre of amorphous ornaments that resembled the internal forms of the human body while effacing the conventional distinctions between architectural structure and surface, interior and exterior. Dietterlin derived these corporeal ornaments from empirically oriented images such as anatomical flap prints and the woodcuts of Vesalius’s De corporis fabrica. As architects and artists in northern Europe adopted the Architectura’s anatomical ornaments, they revealed the limits of architectural naturalism. Paradoxically, the waxing role of architectural images as tools for studying and embodying nature destabilized architecture’s long-standing traditions of naturalistic design.