This admirable book deals with a topic of fundamental importance in Western thought. The editors are justified in describing this volume as ‘the first collective effort’ (p. 3) by historians of science, art and philosophy to focus specifically on the distinction between the artificial and the natural from antiquity to the present day. In a dazzling display of scholarly virtuosity, the contributors grapple with the ambiguities, cultural values and moral issues that inevitably accompany the concepts of art and nature. The essays show that practical and philosophical considerations over mimicking, perfecting and outdoing nature's productive powers may be found throughout history and continue to have ontological, epistemological and moral consequences. In addition to the contributions discussed below, we have chapters on ‘The three pleasures of mimesis according to Aristotle's Poetics’ (Francis Wolff), ‘Art and nature in ancient mechanics’ (Mark J. Schiefsky), ‘Forms of art in Jesuit Aristotelianism (with a coda on Descartes)’ (Dennis Des Chene), ‘The artificial and the natural: Arcimboldo and the origins of still life’ (Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann), ‘Leibniz's theatre of nature and art and the idea of a universal picture atlas’ (Horst Bredekamp), ‘Eighteenth-century wetware’ (Jessica Riskin) and ‘Overtaking nature? The changing scope of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century’ (John Hedley Brooke). Each essay is rigorously argued and offers a thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion of an aspect of the complex relationship between art and nature.

The book opens with Heinrich von Staden's masterful chapter on ‘Physis and technē in Greek medicine’. Von Staden argues that the Hippocratic belief in inviolable natural regularities underpinned medical practice. He discusses the semantic range of physis (normally translated ‘nature’), technē (often translated ‘art’) and dynamis (rendered by ‘faculty’, ‘quality’ or ‘property’). According to von Staden, important new meanings of these words developed in Greek writings beginning in the fifth century BCE. The Hippocratic work On the Technē describes how medical technē discovers ‘forcible constraints’ which compel nature to reveal signs of otherwise invisible processes (p. 29). Diagnosis depends upon interpretation of these signs but this difficult process (akin to foreign translation) takes time, leaving less time for medical intervention. There are striking parallels between Hippocratic characterizations of the relation between technē and nature and those of early modern experimentalists. The editors quite rightly point out the ‘seemingly Baconian fashion’ in which natural processes are altered through forcible constraint (p. 10).

William R. Newman's chapter, ‘Art, nature, alchemy, and demons: the case of the Malleus maleficarum and its medieval sources’, shows us that even in the unsuspected context of demonology, the key issue is the extent to which art can alter nature. Newman's contribution focuses on the interjection of alchemy into scholastic debates concerning the limits of demonic power, illustrated in the well-known manual on witch-hunting, the Malleus maleficarum of 1487. Alchemy, he argues, provided a ‘test case’ because it was the only art which promised to transmute species by inducing new substantial forms in matter (p. 109). Anthony Grafton's contribution, ‘Renaissance histories of art and nature’, focuses on Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. He suggests that both were inspired by the assemblage of spectacular artefacts in sixteenth-century Kunst- und Wunderkammern. Grafton points out that, notwithstanding the anachronism, Bacon's and Campanella's utopian enterprises came to be regarded by later generations as blueprints for ‘modern laboratories and scientific states’ (p. 187). Both men, he observes, look forward to Descartes and other later figures, ‘who would make the possibility of material improvement in the human condition one of the most powerful slogans of the New Philosophy’ (p. 188). Here again, we encounter the theme of art progressing beyond nature. Salomon's House in the New Atlantis produces entirely new species of plants and animals. Similarly, the ‘fusion of magical and technological traditions’, found in Henry Cornelius Agrippa's De occulta philosophia and taken up by later writers, emphasized the idea that art could transform nature ‘in radical ways’ (p. 201).

The fascinating case of Spinoza is the subject of Alan Gabbey's chapter, ‘Spinoza on the natural and the artificial’. From the perspective of Spinozan metaphysics, Gabbey explains, there can be no distinction between art and nature. Spinoza's single principle, Nature or God, determines all effects. All bodies (including the human composite) are produced deterministically in accordance with the laws of nature. What, then, is the status of human artifice? Gabbey argues that Spinoza (himself a lens grinder) does not prohibit the use of ‘everyday language’ when talking about artefacts (p. 226). He concludes that Spinoza resolved the tensions found in Descartes's letter to Constantin Huygens of March 1638. Descartes writes, ‘you have to explain what the laws of nature are, and how she acts in the ordinary way, before you can show properly how she can be applied to effects to which she is not accustomed’ (p. 232). In this regard, it is interesting to recall that Bacon believed that knowledge of a fixed natura naturans was essential if bodies (natura naturata) were to be radically transformed. For Descartes and Spinoza, too, knowledge of natura naturans – the fixed laws of nature – is vital for material and spiritual well-being. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent's chapter, ‘Reconfiguring nature through syntheses: from plastics to biomimetics’, reviews various twentieth-century biochemical ventures – polymer chemistry, combinatorial chemistry and biomimetic chemistry. She makes the important point that the concepts of art and nature are ‘mutually constructed’ (p. 293). The promoters of synthetic polymers, for instance, viewed nature as ‘a finite collection of products rather than as a continuous process of generation. No natura naturans, it was a natura naturata’ (p. 297). Plastics, by contrast, have infinite metamorphic potential.

With the recent burgeoning of interest in artisanal skills, experiment and the science–technology relationship, this excellent volume will undoubtedly be of interest to readers of this journal. In the turn to practice, the art/nature dichotomy has not received the attention it deserves. The distinction between the artificial and the natural, the essays show, is a major theme throughout the cultural and intellectual history of the West.