The biography of a technical picture: Biringuccio's boring machine woodcut

The object of this article is the first image of a horizontal boring machine that was presented in a woodcut found in Vannoccio Biringuccio's De la pirotechnia. Studying this picture with a biographical approach enables us to consider it as a material object that has many relationships with its production and diffusion contexts. First of all, to point out the woodcut realisation context and to outline the dimension of its influence and circulation, we consider the relationship between image and the book that it is a part of. Secondly, through the studies of medieval technological iconography and the context of artillery production for the first part of the XVI century, we will try to reconstruct the picture's genealogy in order to elucidate the context of its genesis. Lasdy, we point out the relationship between Biringuccio's woodcut and the evolution of its kinematics idea in a series of boring machine pictures until the last part of the XVIII century.