By Kyungtae Na
Is the basket a machine? You might wonder, laying eyes on the unassuming figure of a woman with a basket. The image comes from Jacob Leupold’s Theatrum Machinarum (Theater of Machines), published in Leipzig between 1724 and 1727. Leupold’s ambitious compendium of machines comprises nine amply illustrated folio volumes, with a running explanatory text and an appendix of engravings at the back of each volume. An encyclopedic mix of citations and inventions, the book is structured according to the conventions of “theater of machine” books: inventories of useful and fanciful machines drawn to scale. The book honors the greatest feats of engineering and offers updates on inefficient contraptions in need of improvement. The woman carrying a basket, however, seems to fit neither category. She belongs to the volume subtitled “Schau-Platz der Heb- Zeuge (“Theater of Lifting Instruments”), which teems with engravings of every known device used for moving goods and equipment, from a simple horse-and-cart to levers, pulleys, wheels, winches, and cranes.
In this world of heavy metal, the woman thus seems jarringly out of place, not least because of the pervasive impression that construction machines are far too rude for the fair sex. Not untypically, Leupold has hardly any woman work machinery. This conventional gender alignment had been codified in a contemporary legal treatise on artisans’ tools, written in 1691 by one of Leupold’s professors at the University of Jena, Adrian Beier. For Beier, certain instruments are strictly for home-use (domesticum) and operable by women, while others serve professional purposes and are best suited to men. The Latin legalese of the professor, who is given to a categorizing mania, reaches droll new heights in the rather pompous definition of a basket as “a domestic instrument made of wicker, a small vessel for the receiving and the carrying of some thing.” Simply put, the basket is classified as a women’s tool.
To be sure, from this pedantry to the world of the basket-bearing woman is a dizzying descent from the ivory tower. The basket-carrier’s sturdy arms, rough-hewn complexion and working clothes betray her belonging among the lower classes. Curiously, Leupold maintains such maids were unknown in his native Upper Saxony, noting with admiration the poise with which working women elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire support and balance large hampers on their heads. When Leupold compliments these women for the even, perpendicular gait, he does so because it is the most efficient way to transport a burden on foot. Carried this way, the burden does not “prevent the person from walking upright.” In order to be energy efficient, you must walk in a way that expertly maintains the “line of direction.”
Leupold’s high sensitivity to the merits of body discipline is no accident. Subtle yet provocative is the sequence of the first chapters: human figures carrying burden in various ways are followed by beasts of burden which are in turn followed by geometricized representations of machines. In the first plates, devoid of mathematical problems to chew on, the viewer is invited to roam pleasantly through the figures. Altogether, the series of images forms a group portrait of workers, organized into an uncanny continuum of man–animal– machine.
A student research post from the Fall 2024 graduate seminar The Mind of the Book (HSAR 620). More information and link to other research posts.