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Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History Bernard Langera a School of Theoretical and Applied Science, Ramapo College, Mahwah, NJ, USA

First published on: 06 January 2011

To cite this Article Langer, Bernard(2011) 'Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History', Annals of Science,, First published on: 06 January 2011 (iFirst) To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00033790.2010.510942 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2010.510942

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Book Review

Social Aspects of Science

SIMON WERRETT, Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Maps/viii359 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-89377-8.

Simon Werrett adopts a novel subject and presents it in dramatic relief in the landscape of European culture and society from the fourteenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Fireworks during this period, he urges, provide continuing points of convergence for understanding class, politics, the crafts, the rise of science, and the relation of knowledge to place. The virtues of this study abound in its ingenuity and multiply further upon a second reading and consideration of its aspirations as a scholarly work. Some questions are occasioned by a few sweeping conclusions about the pivotal role of pyrotechnics and its literature in the development of natural philosophy and the experimental sciences during this period, but most others are well supported. The book’s most engaging virtue is Werrett’s construction of a historical ‘spectacle’ from a careful and comprehensive examination of texts, manuscripts, art and historical records in much the same way that the ‘artificers’ of old fashioned the pyrotechnic performance from chemicals, architectural structures, and the devices of craft adepts. The organizing thesis of Werrett’s historical narrative is this: fireworks were more than artistic recreations for public celebrations. They became the cultural instru- ments of political, social and intellectual expression throughout Europe made distinctive by the conditions of the ‘place’ of their exhibition. What began in the Renaissance as the work of lowly gunners to bring the pyrotechnics of the battlefield together with the celebratory spectacles of the church and royal courts emerged later into highly developed forms of expression and the focus of the public mind and will Downloaded By: [informa internal users] At: 17:01 18 January 2011 (pp. 17, 23). This thesis is well illustrated by Werrett’s detailed study of the lives of fireworks in England, Russia and France. In post-Restoration England (p. 77ff), for instance, fireworks were associated with ‘popish incendiarism’ and the spectacles of the Catholic Church and thus were discouraged in the forms traditionally and openly displayed, despite a renewal of celebratory court fireworks in London. The Royal Society sought in its own ‘cold’ experimental designs ‘to distance its labors from controversial incendiarism in years of intense religious and political strife’ (p. 91), because ‘experimenters linked fiery dispositions with failed knowledge’ (p. 79). Whether Sprat and others who wrote accounts about the experimental work of the Royal Society used fire metaphorically or in response to a public mind is not made altogether clear. Fireworks were directed toward a different purpose in Russia, because, according to Werrett, ‘science was irrelevant’ (p. 111) to Russian nobility. The imported (principally German) academicians at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1725) sought to promote both interest and patronage in the sciences by creating ‘allegorical

Annals of Science ISSN 0003-3790 print/ISSN 1464-505X online # 2011 The Author http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/00033790.2010.510942 2 Book Review

designs, or inventions, for Russian court fireworks and illuminations’ (p. 105). Spectacles were intended to foster a new scientific culture in the imperial courts and new secular conventions among the Russian people (p. 109). What thus arose distinctively in Russia was an ‘academic pyrotechny’, fireworks invented and developed by academic practitioners at the Academy Á which ‘itself became the focus of spectacle’ (p. 119). The Academy even constructed (1749) its own ‘fireworks theater’ to help to promote its institutional and intellectual missions. The eighteenth-century travels of Italian artificers across Europe, particularly those of the Ruggieri family, ‘prompted a homogenization of pyrotechnic culture and a new transformation of Europe’s pyrotechnic geography’ (p. 169). The appearance of the Italians in Paris in the 1740s did provoke some hostility among the French artificers (p. 142) but that reaction was also accompanied by an increase in the number of French treatises on fireworks intended to serve a renewed public interest. The travels of these Italians artificers represented moments of the cultural infusion of taste, science, and art across local and regional political borders, and began the eventual homogenization of spectacles in all of Europe. This speaks to Werrett’s corollary thesis that art and science arise from and are distinguished by ‘place’, and that the performance of fireworks was a local publication of craft and science (p. 5) and an expression of geographical distinction (p. 235). That the methods and content of the sciences were tied to place has been well established in the history of science, particularly in physics and chemistry during this period. French chemistry and physics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were wholly distinguishable from those of the English and the Italians. Werrett leaves the reader curious as to how these distinctions were expressed in the scientific history of the pyrotechnic arts. The question which remains is, then, why was not the chemical craft of the pyrotechnists an explicit subject in this study. Understanding the regional differences of concepts of chemical composition and reaction in the creation of inventive ‘fires’ and ‘displays’ would have helped to place the pyrotechnic craft more firmly within Werrett’s thesis. Mention is first made of the role of chemistry in the artificer’s craft in the making of ‘green fire’ (p. 161) in the 1740s by the Russian Danilov. It was ‘Danilov’s choice to make a chemical, rather than a mechanical, innovation... But recent technical innovations in fireworks had all focused on machinery rather than compositions’ (p. 161). The creation of ‘colored fires’ and, particularly, ‘green fire’ Downloaded By: [informa internal users] At: 17:01 18 January 2011 was part of the chemical quest for innovation directly related to concepts of chemical composition and identity. Werrett points out that the Italian Ruggieri family ‘mobilized the new chemistry of Antoine Lavoisier’ in continuing to show fireworks in Paris in the 1770s (p. 202), and later invoked the French chemistry ‘to claim authority in pyrotechnics’ (p. 203) after it had generally been accepted in the 1790s. Lavoisier himself had written about chemical composition and its relation to the creation of ‘colored fires’ in 1766, but Werrett acknowledges that ‘whether the Ruggieri displayed colored fires of Lavoisier’s recipes is unknown’ (p. 221). The extent, then, to which ‘local’ sciences, in this case, chemistry, informed pyrotechnics and its inventions during this historical period is left unclear. It is similarly unclear how pyrotechnics specifically and directly informed and shaped the sciences and inspired philosophical reflection. The original practical arts of the gunners, Werrett says, ‘gradually transformed into philosophical experiments, prompting their users to the contemplation of nature’ (p. 57). Those practical arts, he Book Review 3

adds further, provided institutional models for emerging new sciences: ‘Gunners had fashioned new spaces for their art in the sixteenth and seventeen centuries, in urban sites where ingenious festivals, arsenals, and laboratories displayed their creator’s powers over nature. Natural philosophers equally sought to make space for new sciences and drew up plans for scientific organizations and academies accordingly’ (p. 65). While it is more than probable that the growing literature of fireworks offered a rich source of analogical and metaphorical language for use in the sciences, it would be more difficult to establish directly that fireworks played a dynamic and pivotal role in ‘efforts to create new sciences in the late sixteenth century and seventeenth’ (p. 71), even in those instances where it seems that nature imitated craft in accepted explanations of meteorological phenomena and meteors themselves (p. 63). Still, Werrett’s spectacle is well constructed. The book’s essential thesis and thematic organization are clear from the beginning, and are undergirded by thorough research in each of the chapters. Chapter One traces the rise of the culture of artificial fireworks, from the initial application of the arts of gunners to church spectacles in the fourteenth century to the emergence of a guild of professional fireworkers in the seventeenth and a growing pyrotechnic literature expounding the liberal and mechanical arts and their roles in artistic and social celebration and expression. Chapter Two treats the incorporation of this literature into the growing cultures of natural philosophy and science, with particular focus on the English expressions of pyrotechnics and the practices of the Royal Society of London in Chapter Three. Werrett shows in Chapter Four how ‘academic’ pyrotechnics in Russia was used to encourage patronage of the sciences in the eighteenth century. In Chapter Five, he chronicles the travels of the Italian artificers throughout Europe and their impact on homogenizing the culture of pyrotechnics. Chapter Six treats the place of pyrotechnics in the Encyclope´die and the philosophical framework fireworks provided for the rapid developing science of electricity. The concluding chapter is recapitulative and integrative. The book’s plate reproductions reify many of the creations described in the text. The occasional inferential excess aside, the book abounds in thoughtful perspective, information, and meticulous scholarship. Even a missed flare or two in the most creative of firework displays does not diminish the force of the performance and the skill of the artificer. Downloaded By: [informa internal users] At: 17:01 18 January 2011 BERNARD LANGER, School of Theoretical and Applied Science, Ramapo College, Mahwah, NJ 07430-1680, USA