The knowledge related to rocks in the early modern period was not only made by scholars but also by artists and stonecutters. The artworks they produced are the entry points to investigate a certain geo-knowledge. Indeed, stone-cutters experienced the stone’s qualities; they knew their provenance, their uses in the past centuries and were able to identify them. They were not geologists but stone connoisseurs. So, by broadening our definition of what geological knowledge was in the early modern period, it is possible to let manufactured rocks become genuine knowledge deposits.
To evidence this stone-connoisseurship, the paper will, first, examine the productions of the Saxon gemcutter Johann Christian Neuber (1736–1808). His sweet- and snuffboxes, with the descriptive pocketbook, make evident this link between the ability to recognise different stones visually and to gain a local geographical knowledge. All the Saxon mineral resources fit in a pocket, the artwork becomes a (portable) stone collection which you can use to learn about the local resources.
The second part of this paper will show that artworks have already been used in this way in the sixteenth century. For instance top tables were used like a holotype, the first specimen of a species you go back to compare specimens. In his “Istoria delle pietre”, the Dominican friar Agostino del Riccio (1543–1598), who was not a ‘naturalist,’ encouraged his readers to go to churches, collections, and workshops to study stones and gain a visual ability to recognise them. He suggests using the tables in Gaddi’s Chapel in Santa Maria Novella Croce (Florence) to study the different types of alabaster. Samples in cabinets were perhaps less helpful in knowing the stones than crafted materials.
In short, this presentation aims to show how stone artworks contain a visual and material geo-knowledge that invites us to reshape the definition of knowledge itself.