The advancement of technology has long been associated with new forms of art and congruent shifting attitudes toward material ‘things’. Recently, Anthropologists, sociologists, art historians, and historians of science have all come to the realization that within the strategies of technological creativity, and within the ontological status of manufactured ‘things’, lies a characteristic which supplies the object with an enhanced operative value. The astrolabe, a sophisticated inclinometer used by scholars, navigators and astrologers, was such a technology. It was a fundamental scientific tool for the amassment of numerical and visual knowledge and for the mathematization of nature. The paper thus will show how the reception of the technology of the astrolabe and the discourse regarding the actual fabrication served as a protagonist in the debate regarding the nature of object and image in the Middle Ages and beyond.
