Local heroes – memory in action in the late renaissance garden

Hero of Alexandria was a prolific inventor who lived in the 1st century CE and whose writings enjoyed a marked resurgence of popularity in Renaissance Europe. The Greek original of Hero’s most influential text, the Mechanics, was lost early, and was only transmitted to the West in Arabic. The Greek text of his less important – and possibly unfinished – work on Pneumatics, however, found its way to Europe after the fall of Constantinople, where it had been preserved in what Will Noel calls ‘the Ark for ancient literature’. Texts often precede performance, but are equally often the consequence of a tradi- tion of ‘situated’ or maker’s knowledge. This paper looks at the ways in which knowledge became ‘resituated’ in the practice of Renaissance engineers, artists and garden architects through the rediscovery and diffusion of Hero’s Pneumatics. It explores why Hero’s Pneumatics enjoyed such new-found popularity in the 15th and 16th centuries, how Hero’s texts were transmitted and interpreted, and to whom. The paper will argue that this revival in interest was due in part to the near-contemporary recovery of other classical texts, such as those by Archimedes, Vitruvius and Hermes Trismegistus. Finally, the paper will argue that the Renaissance memory of Hero’s Pneumatics is best understood through built works rather than texts, and that these works played an important cultural and ideological role in the revival of neo-Platonism and neo-Pythagorean thought in post-Reformation Europe, losing their potency only with the end of the Thirty Years War.